Beat goes on after 30 years for vinyl-only record store
AFTER 30 years Steve Mathie is still in the groove.
The owner of Spin It Records runs what is thought to the country’s oldest vinyl-only record shop.
Steve, from Hatfield, who has a stall on Hull’s Trinity Market, discovered at school that vinyl could be a good business.
“I was 13 and I had a single, Kung Fu Fighting, and one of my class friends wanted it – he offered me three Elvis singles and two posters for the single. I thought there was a business to be had here.”
Steve has since survived vinyl dipping out of popularity, when people were only buying CDs, recessions and most recently Covid.
These days it is not just the middle-aged rediscovering their passion for vinyl and rebuilding scratched collections.
Younger fans have also caught the bug. Steve says they want “something tangible to hold and talk about”. They go for 1980s music – Duran Duran, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Spandau Ballet. He said: “Ten years ago the average age of the customers must have been 47 – now the average is 27.”
Last month Taylor Swift puts vinyl back in the UK’s shopping basket as her best-selling 1989 album propelled records into the group of goods used to measure inflation.
Steve has a stock of about 16,000 LPs and another 10,000 in a lockup and people are constantly in touch wanting to sell records, even though they are often not worth as much as the internet suggests.
“People think their stuff is worth more than it is 90 per cent of the time,” he says. “There’s only about 10 per cent that’s worth anything.”
So what would he most like to get his hands on? “It would be nice to get a copy of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen ontheA&Mlabel.”
All but a handful of the 25,000 singles were destroyed after the label ditched the rebellious punk rockers days after signing them.
Second in his Holy Grail of collectables would be The Beatles’ Please Please Me, the very first pressing on the gold stereo label.
To celebrate his 30th anniversary Steve will be having a sale later on this year “to give something back” to his loyal band of customers.
This month also sees the third release on his record label Spin It.
1994’s “biggest dancefloor smash of the year” Eighteen Strings by DJ/ producer Paul Dakeyne aka Tinman, who is from Hull, originally contained a sample of the riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.
But the sample could not be used following Kurt Cobain’s untimely death, as his estate would not give permission, and it had to be rerecorded. Three decades later the copyright has lapsed.
The original single is coming out on Record Store Day April 20.
Steve – who has four record players at home – has no intention of retiring any time soon – he loves the job too much.
“It’s the customers, the feedback, I find that appealing. It is a very sociable business,” he said.