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I think we forget how expensive records used to be. I find myself wishing I had bought more when I had the chance as a teen, and started earlier. But I had no money.

The only time I got money to spend on what I wanted was at Christmas and birthdays when like many other children, I would receive Boots vouchers.

These could be redeemed for records, or shampoo, to the value of the token the card contained. This was OK until the price of records climbed above a pound for a single. It was with a token I bought Abba's Take a Chance on Me, from Boots. It came in a plain white sleeve, or the one I got did. At first I didn't think there was a copy, as it blended in with the racking. But there was at least one copy, so I came away with a copy.

Anyway, LPs were out of my price range.

In 1979, things began to change. In June of that year, we had an exchange student from Germany, and all them from Germany and my German class, went for a day in Norwich to our museums and stuff. And in our free time I went along with my friends to a little records shop overlooking the market next to the Sir Garnet pub. My friends all came away with UK Subs singles, on bright blue vinyl and in picture sleeves showing a bank note stuffed into a woman's bra.

I thought it most rude. But then my German exchange partner bough the Scorpion's Love Drive album. I'll let you google that cover.

Anyway, all my fiends had started buying records, so I thought I had better. Up to that point, I had two ELO cassettes, bought by Mum from a catalogue. But this meant getting into vinyl.

1979 was also the point when Thatcher won the election at the beginning of May, and she announced VAT was going up, so Dad went out and got a "music centre" to replace the teak radiogram we had used up to that point. The music centre was wonderful, but clearly, it was Dad's toy, so I would be discouraged from using it, which would lead by Christmas in me getting one of my own, but not a £600 Hitachi brushed silver thing.

Anyway.

Being 15, my Boots vouchers must have gone up as I was able to buy LPs; knowing little about them, and assuming they would be all filled with tracks as good as the hit singles, I bought Parallel Lines, which as it turned out did have every track as good as the hit singles. And I bought Live Killers. I liked Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love and assumed as the LP was in the charts, it would contain that song. It didn't. And was horrible. And even those songs I did know sounded nothing like I remembered.

I got myself a paper round soon after my birthday, and so had weekly disposable income of £1.85. Before I could buy records, I had to save up for my trip to Germany for the exchange. By then I was buying at least one of the weekly music papers, and was concerned I might miss out on some news in my time away so got the shop to save me the the two printings of Record Mirror I would miss when away.

For Christmas not only did I receive the usual Boots vouchers from the family, I got £30 in my tips for my Christmas box on the paper round. I had never felt so rich. I went out and bought Eat to the Beat and The Wall. Again Blondie held up well, and being just 15 I think I did not appreciate the rest of The Wall other than Another Brick in the Wall and Comfortably Numb. I have to admit either got played that much.

And so began my love/hate relationship with LPs. I would buy them, lots of them, mostly to play once, or sometimes just for the lead single, which is why i find it hard to do those top ten album lists that crop up from time to time on FB.

Anyway, from the start of 1980, my friends and I would go into town on a Saturday morning to trawl though the latest releases to decide what to buy. One time I had heard Last Sunday by The Small faces, and thought I found it on the Old Gold selection in John Menzies. As this would be my only purchase for several weeks, I was rather pleased to have found it. And then I got it home, put it on and found it to be Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks. I had no idea who had sung the track I wanted, just it was about an afternoon, might have been Sunny of Sunday.

Who knew?

But this wasn't the only thing my paper round money had to fund. As there was Tuesday Club.

Tuesday Club was a youth club held at the Oulton village community centre, and split into two halves. Before my teens, there was the Scout huts there, and there were table tennis tables, a kind of disco, but games and things. By the time I reached 14, the huts had been replaced with a functional but ugly hall, and those 13 and over could attend the club from, well, now I'm not too sure, was it seven to nine? I have no idea.

But two hours of music, flashing disco lights, gel lighting which was still a thing in Suffolk. And music.

Well, it cost 50p, I think to get in, which was a 6th of my paper round money. But it was the night out of the week, and we look forward to it, though it was fairly dreadful, or so we thought. Poor Mr Rogers who ran it, suffered greatly with our antics, and it got worse in 1980 when there was a pitched battle in a recreation of the Mods v Rockers on the dancefloor between the mods and everyone else. But it only happened once.

For the most part, we all sat around the edge of the hall, me and my friends waiting for the time when the DJ would play two, maybe three heavy records. Usually Whole Lotta Rosie, Paranoid and something else. We would go up, shake our heads while the mods stood around us and made fun. When their records came on, they had a fine old time, leaping and skanking about. They might have had the better deal. But they got maybe three or fours songs too. The rest was disco. Shimmering late 70s, early 80s classic disco. We hated it at the time, but it was wonderful, by the end of the decade I sued to go to a club that played the same songs and I used to thow myself about to.

Otherwise I was buying more and more records as my pay increased. Which was nice.

And at the end of 1980 I had persuaded my Dad to buy me a music centre. Not like his, but a cheap Pye thing, but had a turntable, tape deck and radio. But the turntable was too variable, and I tried really hard to get him to spend another £30 to buy me a Phillips, which sounded much better. And he did.

Truth is we read about music more than heard it. If it hadn't have been for John Peel we would have heard almost nothing of the great music being made. If a journalist we liked said a recored was good, we would try to order it. God knows what the person behind the counter made of: Bonk Bonk Bonk, Crispy Ambulance, Hagar the Womb, Shambeko say Wah!, We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use it, Echo and the Bunnymen, and so on and on and on.

I got most of what I wanted, although the heavy Reggae took some time to get from Brixton to Lowestoft up the A12.

By the time 1983 rolled round, I was on a YOP scheme, on £25 a week, of which I gave Mum a tenner, leaving me with £15 to spend on records. Lowestoft Electrical was the chart return shop, and they had twelve inch singles for £1.99, I could get a few of those a week!

We had a wide choice for our weekly virus fix, in Lowestoft starting from Station Square there was:

John Wells (mainly camera and Hi-fi, but had a large record department out back)

WH Smiths

John Menzies

Lowestoft Electrical (typical white goods retailers with a huge record department upstairs)

Morlings House of Music (early 80s, very poor, became chart return shop, spent half my wages here for five years)

Record and Tape Exchange

Trying to think if I missed any. But Lowestoft Electrical and Morlings had HUGE record departments. Lowestoft Electrical had a counter which were the racks for twelve inch records, three feet deep and twenty feet wide. Thinking about it, I wonder how the floor did not collapse due to the weight. It was all in the racks in random order, other than new stuff was put in the front of the racks.

Good luck, hunting.

And you could always try to order things, as long as you didn't mind waiting, of course.

For Christmas 1980, not only did I get a music centre, but I got the triple Rush retrospective, Archives, featuring their first three albums. Now, bearing in my mind I didn't have a long concentration span as far as LPs were concerned, a triple album wasn't really going to be played that much. I think I got it to"one-up" on my friends. As we always wanted to hear more music, but also have more than all our friends.

Saying that, we had one friend who said he had all the stuff we dreamed of, including Live at the Budokhan by Micheal Schenker Group, which was only available on import, he he said he had it, but he never let us borrow it or let us into his house. He might have been making it up. He was also a Kiss fan.

Kiss.

I mean, maybe if you lived in the mid-west they made sense, but not in England, not after Punk, I mean Kiss would only seem silly. Laughable, even.

But then we all have our odd obsessions, mine is Pat Benatar. Yeah. I wrote about that before. But it did lead to buying records on coloured vinyl, picture sleepves, picture discs, imports. All sorts. Mostly using mail order, and being paid for with postal orders.

I am 54 years old and I have no idea how this worked: but you would scour the lists at the back of the NME for the latest rare records, pick what you wanted. You would write a letter, I think, stating what you wanted, the return address, then go into town to the Post Office to get a postal order for the value of the recor(s), postage and packing for the amount, and they would attach stamps to the value on the order, which you would pop in the envelope with your letter, send to the shop, and if you were lucky, in a week or so the record would arrive.

This was normal. And how I got many of my Pat Benatar rarities. And other stuff too. I was still bying her stuff into the 1990s. Still have them too.