Introduction and a bit of history.....

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 technical details, but also my memories of buying these records or how I got them. It's a lot better than asking me what I did ten minutes ago!!

So here we go. The Beatles signed to Parlophone Records in 1962. Parlophone was a subsidiary of the giant EMI (Electrical and Musical Industries) conglomerate. EMI had a certain way of creating and manufacturing these records I will present, and the process didn't change throughout the 1960s. Consequently, it's both very easy, and quite complicated, to properly date when these records were actually made.

An artist would record an album. The album was produced, engineered and mixed by a production team who would passed the finished tapes to a cutting engineer. The cutting engineer would sit at a lathe and transfer the sounds from the tape to a master laquer disc. This disc would be assigned a matrix number.

From the laquer disc, mother stampers were created, and from the mother stamper, sub-stampers were created. These sub-stampers were the tools used to punch out the black, plastic discs from which we hear the music. The sub-stampers would wear out, around 5,000 discs were manufactured from each sub-stamper, so new ones were created from mother stampers. Beatles records were sold in vast quantites, so the total number of stampers is probably unknown. But by looking at some of my records, I know hundreds of sub-stampers were used in the creation of the vinyl I possess.

EMI used a method of assigning stamper numbers to their records. The trick is the earlier the number, the earlier the manufacture of the disc. This doesn't intrigue me too much, personally, but for some Beatles' vinyl fans it is the be-all-end-all of collecting.

This information can be found on the run-out grooves of a EMI-manufactured record. The example below says that at 1) the number of the mother stamper, at 2) the matrix number of the lacquer disc, and at 3) the letters that denote the stamper used.

EMI used a stamper code thus "GRAMOPHLTD", so G - 1, R -2, A - 3, M - 4, O - 5, P - 6, H - 7, L - 8, T - 9, and  D - 0 

So our example has a 1) Mother Stamper number "3"

                                2) Matrix Number "XEX710 - 1"

                                3) Stamper number "PA" which means 63rd stamper  

To be absolutely honest, you will find out that a lot of my records are not in the greatest of conditions - a better word would be to describe some of them as "destroyed". When I was young I didn't appreciate that handling these records roughly would impact on their general condition.  Some of them are quite scratched, some jump or stick when played, and general wear and tear can make these vinyl records and their cardboard sleeves quite worn. But that's irrelevant to me. I am custodian to some pieces of family history, a direct link to my Mum and Dad. 

Anyway, this is an introduction. I hope it's made a little sense. Keep your eyes peeled!!!