Bob Bell's Confessions of a Record Collector - The Lost Archive
How I supervised the sale, burial, destruction and loss of tens of thousands of now very rare West Indian records
I returned to Island in 1968, and worked for them until the end of 1972, first as Warehouse Manager, and then as Production and Label manager for Trojan Records, then the world’s premier reggae label. Island owned 50% of Trojan and had formed the company in order to hive off its West Indian business from its fast-growing and wildly profitable pop business.
Three things stand out from that period that will, I am sure, be of interest to record collectors although these three instances have more to do with record losing rather than collecting. And if that raises your eyebrows, then read on.
The first instance concerned Island’s old premises at 108 Cambridge Road in Kilburn which lay in north west London. This was where I had started my music business career in 1965. The building, a shop storefront with offices outback, was owned by Lee Gopthal, who owned B & C Ltd, a company that owned several record stores. B & C were Island’s partners in Trojan. In the autumn of 1968, I was asked to go to the old offices and clean out the upstairs apartment. Apparently there were a lot of 45s upstairs that needed to be disposed of. It was strange to revisit the old offices. The building looked dirty and neglected, graffiti scrawled on the windows. Peg’s Café was closed, as was the Shakespeare. Newspapers blew about the street, and the area was deserted. For whatever reason, the records were in a couple of rooms upstairs, rooms which I had never been in before. The upstairs had been a flat, and had not been occupied by Island when I had last worked there.
The place was a catastrophic mess – there were Island 45s everywhere, scattered about the floor, some in jackets, some simply naked in their vinyl birthday suits. It seemed as if there was still someone living there, as one room had a mattress on the floor in the corner, and a profusion of clothes strewn around. And pages of handwritten letters. Fellow worker Brian Lee had come with me, and together we picked up a page or two and read them. They were from Uganda, I think, and were tragically sad, telling of missing relatives and dreadful and hopeless war and grinding poverty. It was the time of Idi Amin. Aware of the irony of cleaning up a building full of surplus records while mindful of the privations of the mysterious occupant and his ragged distant family, we silently filled the van outside with thousands of 45s. There were Island ‘sun’ labels, the more recent red and white Island labels, Black Swans, Jump Ups, Aladdins, probably a few Rio’s, Planetones, Hala Gala’s and who knows what else. By the end of two days we had cleaned out the apartment of records, and peddled them, approximately 75,000, to a very villainous looking junk shop operator at the seedy end of Portobello Road. Appropriately he wore a black eye patch over one eye and sported many gaps in his teeth. I think he paid us about three pence per record. And those were pre-decimal pennies ……
Today, in 2020, the majority of those records, in mint shape, would probably sell for anything from $5 to $100 up. I’m sure there are many ska and rock steady collectors who can remember buying many gems there.
Trojan Records had deals with just about every producer in Jamaica, which resulted in the company having to commit to releasing a certain amount of that producer’s output every year. A lot of the producers were also given their own labels. These deals meant that Trojan released anywhere from 8 to 16 45’s each and every week. That is a lot of records. Those that we knew were going to sell would have an initial pressing of perhaps 2,000, while those with longer odds might only have a pressing of 600.
It didn’t take long for the unsold stock to start clogging up the warehouse. So what to do with them? I am not quite sure just what the tax liability was with the old stock that we had disposed of from Cambridge Road, but I’m pretty sure that the stock had been written off a long time ago. What I do know is that by 1969 we had a situation where Purchase Tax was inflexible. It was tied into what was called Retail Price Maintenance. Briefly, this meant that the record industry collectively agreed that the price of a 45 to a retailer was around four shillings and ninepence, and the purchase tax was calculated upon that price. When the pressing plant delivered say 1,000 45’s to Music House, a copy of the delivery note was furnished to the Inland Revenue. And it was duly noted that Island records, the distributor, was liable for the tax on each of those 45’s.
I forget exactly how much that tax was – around one shilling and ninepence, I think. We would take inventory each year, counting the records in the warehouse. If we had 400 of those records left, we were liable to pay tax on the 600 sold. If we sold them at pennies on the pound, we would still be liable for the one and ninepence tax. The answer was to contact the Inland Revenue for guidance on what we could do to lessen the tax liability.
The answer was to destroy them under the surveillance of a tax agent.
So we loaded up a very large rented box truck, and filled it with hundreds of thousands of brand new 45’s, drove to a landfill near St. Albans in Hertfordshire, and unloaded the truck under the gaze of an agent from the Inland Revenue. The records were promptly bulldozed under. We did this upon two or three occasions until we got wind of 45’s turning up in record stores and junk stores around the St Albans area. Obviously word had got out to the entrepreneurial classes who had descended upon the rubbish dump, and frantically dug, under cover of darkness one imagines, amongst the soiled and stinking diapers, rotting food and odiferous castoffs of the consumer society, for these treasures. Whether these modern-day archeologists were primarily record collectors or just scavengers, it is impossible to tell. I strongly suspect the former, who, from my experience, will endure just about any discomfort when in the grip of collecting frenzy. The fact that records started turning up in record stores just points to the fact that there were boxes and boxes of the same records - your average collector only needs just one copy.
So we went to plan B. This entailed filling the entire parking lot of Music House (which usually held about 8 cars) with boxes of 45’s, set end upon end. When the taxman arrived, the destruction would begin. Armed variously with axes and electric drills, several eccentrically dressed, long-haired and very hirsute employees (remember, this was the late 60’s) gleefully set about breaking as many records as possible. The busted remains were then loaded into the rented truck and again transported to St. Albans, where they were bulldozed under. This time they stayed in the ground. I think we went through this procedure several times – probably until the advent of Value Added Tax, which would have made it much easier to sell the schlock (the industry term for overstock) at a greatly reduced price.
This is why so many classic UK reggae records are so very, very rare today. It's all my fault.
It was when I started as Production Manager with Trojan that I realised the paucity of the company’s archives. My main job was to schedule releases, which meant mastering the new releases, writing and ordering label copy, and ordering and co-ordinating records. Most of the releases were mastered from Jamaican 45’s … simply dubbed from the Jamaican pressings, as we rarely got master tapes in a timely manner. So I started a procedure whereby three copies of each release were put aside for me in the warehouse. At anywhere from 8 to 16 releases each week, this soon amounted to a very large stash of records. Every few weeks I took them home for safekeeping.
When I finally decided to leave Island and Trojan at the end of 1972, I had around eight or nine very large cardboard boxes, probably 30 inches by 30 by 30. Each had three mint copies of Trojan and subsidiary label releases; in all just about every record Trojan had put out. In triplicate. This was the company’s archive – not mine. On my last day, I handed over the boxes to the warehouse manager.
“Look after these,” I said. “This is the company’s heritage.”
Two years later, when living on a hill farm in Exmoor in Somerset, UK, I had a phone call from Chris Blackwell, Island’s owner and founder.
“Rob,” he said, “what happened to the archive? Do you still have it?”
It was then I realised that the archive I had so carefully assembled had been stolen. So much for being honest ….
Just as with the early Island 45's that we had sold for threepence apiece, the value of this archive, at today's prices, would quite likely be in the millions. Dammit, another fortune gone west.
