From the age of 10 i have been a serious collector of music, starting at that age with records then moving on to cassettes and eventually i embraced the age of the CD.

I can remember saving up my pocket money and the wages from my morning paper round so that every Saturday i could go down to the Town Centre to buy the latest singles which had entered the charts that week. The first shop i remember going to for these was a shop called Dominos which was upstairs to a clothes shop. Once i had made my purchase i would run all the way home so i could listen to the songs again and again.

Once Dominos had closed down i became a regular visitor to Our Price records. This was were my love of music really developed. It was in there that i bought Soul to ‘Soul’s Back to Life’ on cassette single and the Charlatan’s ‘Weirdo’. These songs formed the soundtrack to my teenage years.

As i grew older and started to earn a bit more money i began to buy albums a lot more, but singles were what i really collected, looking at them now i have hundreds of them, all from various genres of music.

From the age of 16, Mondays were the days that i would most look forward to. I know most people hate Mondays, but to me this was the arrival day for all new singles. I would go into Our Price in my lunch break or after work and snap up 3 or 4 singles at a time.

Eventually Our Price shut down and HMV became the main place to buy music in town. I used to spend ages in there, patiently looking through rows and rows of the older CD’s before moving on to the charts. It was my dream to work in HMV but for some reason or other it has never happened. The Singles section grew larger and larger and would take up a reasonable part of the shop.

Since settling down with my partner and moving into our flat my obsession has waned a bit. In the last few years i have only been going in to buy an album every couple of months or so, or the odd single that may catch my  attention when i hear it on the radio. We do have a storage problem now with my music collection so i have to really want one before i buy it. Sometimes i think about maybe giving away some of the ones i never listen to, but its hard to let go. I keep getting told that if i suddenly decide after all these years that i want to listen to that particular song, then download it.