RECORD SALE
Tiny detail on dusty old vinyl forgotten in my attic made it worth £21k – I never batted an eyelid, but I’m glad I did
She needed the cash to pay for her daughter's wedding
A TINY detail on a vinyl disc which had been collecting dust in a woman’s attic meant the record was worth a huge £21,000.
Paul Fairweather, an expert in rare records and music memorabilia, got called to value the items belonging to a woman who was the granddaughter of Paul McCartney’s housekeeper.
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The woman, who has not been identified, wanted to sell her collection of signed letters and Christmas and birthday cards from the former Beatle so she could pay for her daughter’s wedding.
Mr Fairweather, who owns Omega Auctions, took a look and estimated it to be worth around £5,000, which fell short of the £15,000 the mum needed.
While he was still there, the woman remembered she had some records stored away in the attic and asked if he would mind taking a look.
Mr Fairweather told : “I am always happy to go through somebody’s records.
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“She came down with this pink suitcase with about 50 records.
“I pulled out the Beatles’ White Album and the first thing you always do with the White Album is look at the number stamped on the front.
“This one was zero zero zero zero zero zero seven. She had no idea what that meant so I explained that all the albums were numbered and 0000007 was about as low as it could get.
“It sold for £21,000.”
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However, vinyl specialist Jules Green sounds a note of caution for anyone thinking they could be sitting pretty with a valuable record collection.
He said: “A lot of time you have to manage expectations.
The Beatles - Please Please Me
“People have read that records are huge and have seen a record in Oxfam for £50 and you have to explain that some might be worth that much, but most are going to be worth £3 with hundreds online.
“My approach is to buy them all and give a fair, median price for the entire collection.
“Sometimes I will tell a person if I think they are better off selling their records themselves through eBay or Discogs, or – if they have something really spectacular – to take it to auction.
“If you choose to sell them individually yourself, you might make more per record, but you will struggle to get rid of every piece.”
It comes after an "incredibly rare" pressing of the Fab Four's debut studio album Please Please Me sold for more than £4,200 after it was found in a charity shop in Enfield, North London.
How to spot a rare record
How do you know if anything lurking in your collection is valuable?
“The really obvious factor is rarity because demand will be more than supply. Condition is critical too,” said vinyl specialist James Hancox.
That doesn’t mean it has to be mint, though – records are there to be played. “Just well looked after, no scratches. You shouldn't be able to see damage, you don't want the cover to look beaten up.”
There are exceptions to this though – if your vinyl is particularly rare, it will sell for a premium regardless of the condition.
“At Gorringe’s, we sold the archive of Brian Matthew, the late Radio 2 DJ .
"Because he was at the BBC, he'd been sent demo recordings of 7-inch singles going back to the year dot and he had all of the earliest Beatles demos.
"He didn't really look after them – but someone paid nearly £900 for one that was badly scratched.”
The early singles and albums of iconic bands tend to be the most valuable.
“A big name group such as the Beatles, their early works before they were famous – that tends to be where the major value is,” said James.
Another big draw is albums from certain eras with impressive artwork.
Though it’s not an exhaustive way of working out the value of your vinyl, James says that the matrix number, which is scratched or stamped into the actual vinyl on the "run out" (the bit in the middle when the grooves stop, before the centre label) can determine the rarity.
Then, look the number up online – there are useful websites like Discogs and the Record Collector guide.
“Very few records are worth a fortune, but there is a good number of records that are worth a good few 10s of pounds so, if you've got a box of records, it may well add up," he said.
It comes after a guest on Antiques Roadshow was stunned after discovering how much money his John Lennon memorabilia would collect at auction.
Now is the time to sell, says expert vinyl specialist James Hancox, a valuer at Gorringe’s Auctioneers.
“It’s such a burgeoning market. There’s a resurgence of interest and it’s the perfect time for records - demand has never been higher," he said.
“It’s nostalgia for older people, but it’s also become a trendy thing for young people to listen to and collect records.
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“There's a ceremony in putting a record on, as opposed to just looking through Spotify.”
James says that records that command the biggest prices tend to be from the late 60s and early 70s, though there can also be high returns for vinyl from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
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