I am often asked about my collection so have written this short biography.

I started playing trumpet aged 11 at secondary school. Soon I joined the school brass band and moved on to Cornet. The first recording I bought was a cassette of Fairey Band, Polished Brass, it featured a solo by Brian Evans on Soprano and I always liked that sound. Soon I was buying the odd LP and also became interested in Hi-Fi. As a teenager I bought around 80 brass band LPs new from my local shops, including the Polished Brass LP.
As well as school I now played in my local village band West Wycombe, we won the 4th section national championships in London in 1974 with me on 3rd solo cornet.
With the advent of CDs in the early eighties I was constantly upgrading my Hi-Fi and bought one of the first CD players available in 1984 , a Yamaha CD2, I still have it tucked away in a cupboard and it still works ! This would be the end of my LP buying days..... or so I thought. In Summer 1997 I joined Hillingdon band conducted by Philip Sparke and began playing at a much higher level. Within 4 months i was playing 2nd man down on James Cook Circumnavigator at Aylesbury Contest. After christmas our Soprano player left and Phil suggested i might be a suitable replacement ( no one else available more like ! ). Seven months after joining i was playing Sop at the Watford Area in the Championship Section. Very daunting at the time and quite nerve racking. Hillingdon became Denham brass and then merged with Hendon to form Denham Hendon Brass. In 2011 the band relocated and became Chiltern Hills Brass . I've been playing Sop ever since and am a bit more laid back these days.
I joined ebay in 2001 and noticed some old brass band records would appear so I started buying the odd one. This rekindled my interest and I bought a second hand Linn LP12/Ekos/Klyde/Lingo 1 ( which has subequently been upgraded to LP12/Cirkus/Ekos/Krystal/Kore/Radilkal and if you don't understand that, you don't need to ). Now my LPs were sounding really good through my Naim System and I started collecting from there. I have bought some larger collections, one of over 1000 records including 78s. This meant I started getting duplicate records and that was when I started this website to "relocate" some of my unwanted LPs to new owners.

I even collect both the mono and stereo version of the same LP if it is available. I have two old Goldring GL78 decks, one set up for 78s with a Denon DL 102SD and the other set up for Mono with a Denon DL102. They play through Old Quad Amps 44/606 and Kef Reference 3 Speakers.
My Stereo LPs are played on my LP12 through a Naim System with B&W Nautilus Speakers.

Although I am a collector, I listen to my LPs almost every day.My favourites are C.W.S Manchester and G.U.S Bandstand series. My top favourite is a Cammel Laird LP on the Fontana label, it is from when the band was at its best and the Sop player is great. Thanks to Gordon Higginbottom and James Scott I have found out it was Ken Davies.

My current brass band collection stands at 955 LPs, 85 EPs, 120 78rpm ........ i do have a few hundred or so of other genres as well !