Magical memories behind a room full of 45,000 Top 10 hits
SOME boys collect train numbers, others have stamp albums. But for Keith Sivyer, as with many teenagers of his generation – including, I confess, me – his hobby was records. As a schoolboy, I couldn’t afford many, but those that I did get became treasured objects, their sleeves ironed, their numbers memorised and copied into a blue notebook. I was, I suppose, a bit of a nerd.
Compared with Keith, however, my obsession amounts to nothing more than that of a dilettante.
He was the real thing. For more than 60 years, Keith bought a copy of every single that made it into the UK Top Thirty.
Putting most into hard-backed sleeves, with the name and date on them, he catalogued them in notebooks and later on his computer.
It must have taken thousands of hours. That’s devotion for you.
It all began for Keith in 1954 when, aged 15, he had just left school. His first pay packets were spent on records.
Soon, realising his passion had been a couple of years late as the first Top Ten charts had begun in 1952, he retrospectively bought every disc he had missed. After that, he just kept on buying.
Week in, week out, he would go to his local record shop armed with the latest copy of the New Musical Express and add a few more to his collection.
The result was that by the time he died alone of a sudden heart attack in February, aged 75, his tiny, terrace cottage in the south of England contained an estimated 45,000 discs. Now, the archive is to be auctioned off.
RECORDS are everywhere in his house, lining the walls of his sitting room and a back bedroom, while boxes of albums and CDs fill other rooms. As a private collection, it must surely be unique.
If you like music, Keith’s modest home is a stately pleasure dome of pop. Unfortunately, there isn’t any space left for furniture, and the floors had to be reinforced by his brother, Gerald, to stop them collapsing.
John Carroll, who owned a record shop and would look forward to his best customer’s weekly visits, reckoned Keith must have spent £150,000 on his collection, which makes the estimate of its value at £10,000 seem very conservative to me.
Keith’s brother would like to have kept the records, but he hasn’t the space in his house, much to the relief of his wife, Wendy.
Not that the financial worth of his records mattered to Keith. As long as he earned enough for his hobby from his job – towing planes in and out of the embarkation areas at Heathrow Airport – he was perfectly content.
Quite when his hobby turned into an obsession isn’t easy to tell. Was it following his divorce after his wife had an affair?
He never had another girlfriend and retreated into his world of music. Eventually, he sold his flat and moved back home to live with his mother.
Not surprisingly, she complained as the records began to take over the house, but she put up with it. Many wouldn’t have done.
For an enthusiast such as me, just to stand in the midst of so much 7 in, 45 rpm music is intoxicating. Pull out a record at random and a memory will spin forward.
For instance, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers’ Why Do Fools Fall In Love from 1956. I was 15 and on a camping trip with a lot of burly rugby players from my school when that record was riding high in the hit parade. I vividly remember swimming across a lake with that song playing in my head.
Then there’s Cathy’s Clown by The Everly Brothers, and I’m suddenly back at an open-air swimming pool in 1960 as beauty con- testants in white swimsuits and high heels parade around. Mention a favourite song and a girl will probably come to mind, though I can’t promise she will remember me.
Play the intro to Easier Said Than Done by the American group The Essex and instantly I recall sheltering from the rain in a woodshed by a lake in Vermont in 1963 with a girl called Audrey.
The song Somewhere from the West Side Story movie soundtrack brings me French Hilde at the pictures; while Del Shannon’s Runaway conjures up Christine Jones in a student hostel in London’s Bayswater – the only girl I ever went out with who got a first-class degree.
Could it be that clever girls don’t go for nerdy boys?
Most fans will have a few favourite Motown singles, but Keith had hundreds.
Here’s Little Stevie Wonder, aged 13, singing Fingertips (Part 2), and I’m taken back to the time I dossed on a friend’s floor in New York’s Lower East Side in 1963.
It was hot, and all day and night there was a cacophony of Motown
and Phil Spector records coming f rom every open window on the block – from The Crystals’ Da-DooRon-Ron to Martha & The Vandellas’ Heatwave.
Music is like a time machine and Keith Sivyer was Doctor Who, collecting and saving the songs that accompany all our memories.
Here’s The Kinks singing Waterloo Sunset as my wife Plum and I looked for our first London house in 1967, then Abba belting out Super Trouper on the hire car radio as we drove the children and their cousins around New Zealand in 1980. Play Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and immediately I’m hiding my eyes as a girl’s head appears to spin on her shoulders in the horror movie The Exorcist as the record plays on the film’s soundtrack.
Then it’s Oldfield’s other hit, Moonlight Shadow, and it’s 1983 and my children, approaching their early teens, are watching Top Of The Pops. Was it really about the death of John Lennon, they wanted to know. I had no idea.
While Keith’s hobby turned into his life, my luck was that I was able to turn mine into my job.
So hearing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody takes me on a trip to Brazil, with Freddie Mercury suggesting I get up on stage behind the group so I could see what they saw when the lights were turned on the multitude in the Sao Paulo football stadium in front of them. That was the first time I fully realised the buzz that musicians get on world tours. As rock became a part of my career and I accumulated an awful lot of singles, I let myself be talked into buying a huge, Fifties jukebox.
It was a beast of chrome and glass like the front of a Chevrolet, and an electric storm of flashing coloured lights, its mechanical devices whirring and growling as records were chosen and dropped on to its turntable. I loved it. I felt as though I was back on the dodgems at the fair. My wife, though, didn’t quite see the attraction. It didn’t fit in with the antique furniture she had inherited from her Auntie Mary. She was right. It didn’t fit in with anything. Perhaps she should sell the antique desk, I suggested. Or what about that ancient oak chest? She wasn’t amused. As I said, that’s women and records. No idea. The jukebox had to go.
KEITH didn’t have a jukebox. There would have been nowhere to put it in his little house. But he did have a twin-deck turntable, which, along with a box of records, he would load into his van to take out to functions on Saturday nights, where he would become a rock’n’roll DJ.
Obviously he wasn’t one of those noisy DJs who think they are more famous than the stars on the records.
No, Keith just played the discs and then went home to his cats, his pet tortoise and his records.
It sounds a lonely life, but Keith’s brother doesn’t think he was lonely. It seems he was just a solitary man, like the character in the Neil Diamond song.
He got on well with the man next door and with the postman, who would bring him the CDs he bought off the internet when all the record shops in his area closed down.
Naturally, as a music-loving man, Keith had his own funeral carefully planned and paid for in advance.
‘ He always liked Elvis, so he wanted him singing For The Good Times,’ says his brother Gerald.
His family found a copy of Billy Fury’s Halfway To Paradise in his collection, so they played that as well to send him on his way.
THE record collection will be auctioned on May 21 by Ewbank’s in Surrey.