Where it all began...
Sometimes I forget what got me hooked on technology – my love for music.
When my parents went out and bought a new hi-fi system when I was about 14 years old, I got a hand me down that made my younger brother rather jealous. Whilst the best he could expect was an old pair of trousers or a shrunken t-shirt of mine, I was given a rather fabulous Amstrad music system, with a CD player! This was at a time when we still had eight-track cartridges lying around the house, so a having a CD player of my very own was really quite special. The only snag was that I didn’t own any CDs to play on it. Whilst I had a plethora of cassette tapes that I’d recorded from various friends at school, the only CDs available to me were what I could pinch from my parent’s collection (which may explain my soft spot for Phil Collins and Genesis). This simply wouldn’t do.
So with little money of my own and even less music, I soon realised that I was going to have to earn money to expand my non-existent CD collection. I’d tried my hand at delivering newspapers, but the £1.97 a week I earned from my round was barely enough to keep me in fizzy cola bottles and football magazines. CDs were at least a tenner at the time and seemed like a fiscal impossibility to me. I needed more money…
So I brushed my hair, put on my best Bart Simpson tie and asked my Mum to give me a lift to our local town centre, so I could take control of my earning power and get a job. I went to all the obvious places - Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Argos, Our Price, but none of them would entertain the possibility of employing a 14 year old boy, regardless of how keen to work I might have been. Feeling rather dejected I headed back towards to the car park with my Mum, so we could head back home and start the monotonous task of putting leaflets inside of newspapers once again.
Just on the edge of the town on the way back to the car park there was a hi-fi shop that I’d spent rather a lot of time peering into the window of but had always been too intimidated to go into. Anyone who remembers the classic Not the 9 O’clock News Gramophone sketch with Rowan Atkinson playing the rude and belittling hi-fi salesman will be able to relate to my reticence to get up close to the speakers and amplifiers I lusted after. Grown men thought twice about browsing in these places, let alone 14 year old boys. But I needed a job and having been rejected countless times in one day I figured one more rejection wouldn’t hurt, so I puffed out my chest, walked up to the counter and asked for a job, desperately hoping for a positive response.
The response I got didn’t immediately strike me as positive, more puzzling than anything… the shop manager told me to go upstairs to the kitchen and make him a cup of tea. Not feeling like I was in a position to be asking questions just yet, I nervously reiterated his order ‘milk and none – no problem!’ and went upstairs towards the kitchen to set about making the best tasting cup of tea I could muster. Upon arriving in the kitchen I looked around for the necessary tea making items – kettle, sink, milk, cups and tea bags. The tea bags weren’t immediately apparent, dwarfed as they were by the biggest stack of porno magazines I’ve ever seen. This was not the environment for a 14 year old boy to be working in, but I certainly wouldn’t be mentioning that to my Mum, who was busy shopping for shoes in the department shop across the road no doubt thinking that I would be being quizzed on my knowledge of woofers, tweeters, watts and phono cables.
Having made the kind of brew that Emperor Shen Nong himself would have been pleased to drink, I carefully carried the most important cuppa I’d ever made down the stairs and delivered it to the shop manager. He didn’t say anything, let alone offer me any thanks. He just took a gulp. There was a long, long pause as he evaluated the strength, milk/tea ratio and temperature of my nervously made cuppa. Then he uttered a sentence which I will never forget, the sentence which set me off on the long hi-fi road which led me to where I am today – ‘you can start on Saturday, I’ll pay you £25 a day’.
And that was that. My love affair with music and hi-fi had begun. I had no idea what I was going to do with all the money – going from earning £1.97 to £25 a week was not exactly Premiership footballer territory, but it was pretty amazing to me at the time. With my first week’s pay I bought my very first CD – REM, Out Of Time. I put the rest towards some new speakers for my music system. This formula continued week after week until I had a very respectable CD collection and a pretty amazing set of speakers. Before long my manager encouraged me to start talking to customers and put me on commission. My unbridled enthusiasm for what I was selling seemed to rub off on our customers and I found myself earning more money than all my school friends put together. As my CD collection grew and my hi-fi system improved I realised that my enjoyment of music increased almost proportionally to the quality of my hi-fi system. As I slowly upgraded the speakers, then the CD player, then the amplifier, I was hearing more of the music that was hidden on the CD and just plain enjoying it more.