大象传媒

Phil 'The Collector' Swern also has his grandparents to thank for starting him off on a collection that is now so large it has its own building. "My Grandfather had a wind-up gramophone, which I used to love playing with when I was about three, and he gave it to me, with a pile of 78s. My parents told me that I could always find any record they requested and put on the right side before I could read or write. So I got the bug for a love of records. As I grew up, every Saturday I was taken into a record shop as a treat, and my parents would buy me a record... as long as I'd behaved myself all week. So I was the best behaved child in the school! They were buying for me things like Dickie Valentine and David Whitfield, things like that. But as I progressed and started getting my own pocket money, I'd buy and . And that's when I got 'turn that racket off!'.

Pretty soon, Phil was collecting every record that had ever charted.

When 78s were replaced by 45s, Phil put the gramophone to one side. "I had a Dansette. In fact, my father knew the chief executive of Dansette. We used to go down to the factory in Stanmore and see all the latest Dansette equipment. We used to get it at trade so I had all the new Dansette stuff. In the street where I lived, just a few doors down, was a presenter called Steve Race. He did a show on the Light Programme once a week called Midday Spin. And he got sent all the records by all the record companies. I got chatting to him, got friendly with him at one of these shows, a panel game called Just A Minute. After many, many editions I finally plucked up courage to go up to him and said 'Hello, can I introduce myself? I live four doors away from you.' He gave me a lift home and we started chatting. He said 'I have all these records. I don't want them.' So he gave me all these promo copies, all the big hits and all these obscurities, things that later became really collectable - and that's what really got me started collecting."

Pretty soon, Phil was collecting every record that had ever charted. "I was going the record fairs, shops all over the country." The last one he needed to complete the set? "That one last missing link was by a lady called Diana Decker - Poppa Piccolino. I couldn't find it for love nor money. It's probably not the greatest record in his collection, but he'll never forget finding it at a jumble sale. "It was marked up for ten shillings - I offered him five and he took it."