My Six By Four Universe

 Rubber Soul (Parlophone PMC1267 mono) Released in the UK - 3rd December 1965 Side One Matrix Number XEX579-1  Mother Stamper 4  Sub Stamper 27 Side Two Matrix Number XEX580-1  Mother Stamper 2  Sub Stamper 20  The last of Mum's original albums - but not. The cover is part of the family silver, but the disc isn't. Another one of my many youthful mistakes. I distinctly remember messing around with the record and cracking it over the top of my little brother's head. It snapped into two. Mum was there, and was not amused. Consequently, the cover was left empty for many years until, by happy accident, I picked up a cheap copy of the disc without a cover at a record fair in Chester. I added the inner sleeve as appropriate as well. I have another copy of this, the infamous XEX579-4 matrix, the supposed "loud" cut of this disc. When the vinyl was first cut at EMI, producer George Martin was unhappy with the sound, but thousands of discs had gone out for production...

 Help! (Parlophone PMC1255 mono) Released in the UK - 6th August 1965 Side One Matrix Number XEX549-2  Mother Stamper 1  Sub-stamper 237 Side Two Matrix Number XEX550-2  Mother Stamper 2  Sub-stamper 201 Yet another of Mum's collection, and from a personal point of view, the cover I'm most embarrassed about because I've absolutely ravaged it. Why I thought, aged 9 or whatever I was, it would be good fun to draw moustaches and beards on the band on the back cover of the album is lost in the midsts of time. Actually, I've drawn imaginary beards on the band on the front cover too, but thankfully, the felt-tip pen has pretty much faded over time. I suppose youth can excuse a lot? Or not? The disc itself isn't in great condition, Yet again, I had to get an era-appropriate EMI inner sleeve. I really dug this album when I was a kid, I guess it was my favourite. I borrowed a tape recorder with a condenser microphone on the side off a mate from school and recorded the al...

 Beatles For Sale (Parlophone PMC1240 mono) Released in the UK - 4th December 1964 Side One Matrix Number XEX503-4N  Mother Stamper 1  Sub-stamper 233 Side Two Matrix Number XEX504-4N  Mother Stamper 21  Sub-stamper 263 The first of the Beatles' original albums not from the family archive. I actually do have Mum's (or Dad's) original, but of all these discs, it's the one in the worst condition. It is contained in an EMI era-appropriate sleeve. The family original didn't have the cover either, which was also the case for some later 7" singles I have too, but that's another story. In a way, it's not that surprising that this record's sleeve is missing, of all the earlier discs it was the most elaborate, yet flimsiest and easiest to damage. The right hand side of this inner cover was an indicator to a later and much celebrated front cover of 1967???? I got this copy from a long-established record fair at the Liner Hotel in Liverpool, next to Lime Stree...

 A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (Parlophone PMC1230 mono) Released in the UK - 10th July 1964 Side One  - Matrix Number XEX481-3N  Mother Stamper 3  Sub-stamper 34 Side Two - Matrix Number XEX482-3N  Mother Stamper 4  Sub-stamper 252 Another one of Mum's. On the front cover you can see I have deftly vandalised the white border on the top of the cover. Ditto on the rear sleeve. But where I've scrawled my name and address, it covered over Mum's Southport details from the 60s. If I'd have had any brains when I was ten, I'd have left this well alone. Like most of these records, this disc didn't have an inner sleeve which I subsequently added. There were differences already to these inner sleeves. On the earlier albums, the paper used and the polythene inserts were much thicker and tougher. On this, and later releases, the paper inner sleeves were flimsier and the insert was more akin to tracing paper. Maybe it was a form of cost-cutting on EMI's part, but that's not...

WITH THE BEATLES (Parlophone PMC1206 mono) Released in the UK - 22nd November 1963 Side 1 Matrix Number - XEX447-1N  Mother Stamper 3  Sub-stamper 34 Side 2 Matrix Number - XEX448-1N  Mother Stamper 3  Sub-stamper 22 An album I can definitely say is Mum's. If you look on the top left hand corner of the above picture, you can see her name and address. This album was missing from our house for many years. Turns out my Uncle Les, my Dad's younger brother had it. Because of this, the album had a long journey back to us. It started off with Mum in Southport, she married and moved to Liverpool. Our house in Waterloo was not posh, but quite big, and we had lots of parties for the family in the early 1970s because we had the space. Probably through a fluke, it ended up with Les. My Uncle Les was with the Royal Signals and was posted to Germany for many years, he came back to the UK to Yorkshire, then Gloucestershire, finally settling in Norfolk, before he passed it back to M...

 I think I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. Let's go back to the record player that my Dad brought home from work one day in 1978. It was made by Fidelity and thanks to the power of the Internet, I found a picture of it that I show below...... It was very, very simple to operate, and as anyone of a certain age will attest to the likes of this type of record player provided a portable, yet slightly cumbersome, way of listening to your records in any part of the house there was a plug socket. The generation before me would routinely take these contraptions around to their friends houses, sometimes carrying them on public transport. The spindle in the centre of the turntable could hold a number of records on it, secured into place with the return arm. So after a record finished, the next one would drop down to play. It was an ingenious mechanism, and surely the forerunner of the shuffle-play facility we have on our modern digital phones. So I learned how to operate the record p...

PLEASE PLEASE ME (Parlophone PMC1202 mono)  Released in the UK  - 22nd March 1963 Side 1 Matrix Number XEX421-1N, Mother Stamper 2, Sub-Stamper 38 Side 2 Matrix Number XEX422-1N, Mother Stamper 1, Sub-Stamper 77 This is going to be a common theme I'm afraid. This record is wrecked, both sides of the vinyl. When I first discovered it, there was neither an inner sleeve to protect the record, nor a cardboard outer cover. I subsequently took these from another copy. I think this is Mum's record? I think most of the early stuff is my Mum's. Both my parents had more records than I found when the record player came home. They moved from a top-floor flat in Waterloo to our house using a coal lorry that my Grandad drove for a living. The records were on top of the open wagon, and a strong sun on the moving day unfortunately warped some of them, and they were chucked out. I often wonder what I missed? As you can see they've not aged well at all, but I think if you were a teenager...

This blog is a vehicle to show my Beatles vinyl collection.  I first encountered the Beatles in the late 1970s. I was very lucky in some respects. Both my parents were teenagers in the 1960s, and both of them had seen the band on various occasions around the Merseyside area. Consequently, they bought the Beatles' records, and I was about eight years old when I got my hands on them. They were kept in a pull-down unit in the front room at home. Until Dad brought home a boxed Fidelity record player one day, I had no idea what these items did. My parents had the first six Beatles' albums, from "Please Please Me" to "Rubber Soul". After that, there was nothing. Mum claims the band, "..went weird.." after 1965, and one can appreciate her point of view. For other people, the Fab Four got more interesting as the years rolled by. I got my first Beatles album when I was ten, and have accumulated many more since. Hence this blog. I hope not only to give techn...