Daily Mail, 11.5.15
Some boys collect train numbers, others have stamp albums. But for Keith Sivyer, as with many boys of his generation – including, I confess, this one – the great hobby was records.
As a schoolboy I couldn’t afford to buy many, but those that I did get became treasured objects, their sleeves regularly ironed, and their numbers memorised and copied into a blue notebook. I was, I suppose, a bit of a nerd.
Compared with Keith Sivyer, however, my obsession would have amounted to nothing more than that of a casual dilettante. Keith was the real thing. For over sixty years, he bought a copy of every single record that ever made it into the UK Top Thirty. Putting most into hard backed sleeves, with the name and date on them, he then catalogued them in notebooks and later on his computer. It must have taken him thousands of hours over the decades. That’s devotion for you.
It all began for Keith in 1954 when, aged 15, he’d just left school. His first pay packets went on records. Soon, realising that his passion had been a couple of years’ late in developing, as the first Top Ten charts had begun in 1952, he retrospectively bought every disc he’d missed.
After that, he just kept on buying. Week in, week out, he would go around to his local record shop armed with a copy of the New Musical Express and add a few more to his collection. The result was that by the time he died alone in February, aged 75, of a sudden heart attack, his tiny, terraced cottage in Teddington, Surrey, contained an estimated forty five thousand records.
They’re everywhere, lining the walls of both his sitting room and a back bedroom, while boxes of albums and CDs fill other rooms. As a private collection, it must surely be unique. If you like music,
Keith’s modest home is a stately pleasure dome of pop.
Unfortunately there isn’t any space left for furniture, and the floors had to be reinforced by his brother, Gerald, to stop them collapsing under the weight of so much vinyl.
John Carroll, who owned a record shop and would look forward to his best customer’s weekly visits, reckoned Keith must have spent £150,000 during his lifetime on his collection, which makes the current probate estimate of its value at around £10,000 seem very conservative to me.
We’ll find out when the whole lot goes to auction on May 21. Gerald would like to have kept them, but he hasn’t the space in his house, much to the relief of his wife, Wendy.
Not that the financial worth of his records ever mattered to Keith Sivyer. As long as he earned enough to indulge his hobby from his job, which was towing aeroplanes into and out of the embarkation areas at Heathrow, he was content.
Quite when that hobby turned into an obsession isn’t easy to tell. Was it after he and his wife divorced after she had an affair? She was, his brother Gerald believes, the love of his life. After her, he never had another girl friend, and he retreated into his world of music.
Eventually he sold his flat and moved back home to live with his mother. Not surprisingly, she complained as year by year the records began to take over the house, but, she was a mum, so she put up with it.
Many women wouldn’t have done. But that’s girls and record collecting. It’s overwhelmingly a boys’ hobby. Girls just don’t get it. They never know the really important stuff, such as what’s on the flip side of anything, or who played lead guitar and why the bass player was sacked. They don’t even remember the colour of the label.
It’s amazing really, but, to most women, a record is just something to listen to. Sometimes I don’t understand them. I don’t suppose Keith did either.
But, for an enthusiast like me, just to stand for a moment in the midst of so much seven inch 45 rpm music is almost intoxicating. Pull out a record at random and a memory will spin forward.
For instance, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers’ Why Do Fools Fall In Love from 1956. I swam across Coniston Water with that playing in my head – breast stroke, chin always up, not wanting to get my hair wet, and frozen almost rigid. I was fifteen and on a camping trip with a lot of big rugby players from my school. Sleeping in a tent with them was like being the ball in the middle of a scrum.
Then there’s Cathy’s Clown by the Everly Brothers, and I’m at Southport Open Air Swimming Pool in 1960 as the Miss Southport contestants in their white swimsuits and white high heels parade around. Meanwhile my flesh is being gently cooked by the olive oil I’ve rubbed into it, in those days before we discovered Ambre Solaire.
Girls might never have become record nerds like Keith and me, but, mention a favourite song and a girl will probably come to mind, although I can’t promise that she will remember me.
The intro to Easier Said Than Done by the Essex and it’s Audrey and me sheltering from the rain in a woodshed by a lake in Vermont. The song Somewhere from the West Side Story movie soundtrack brings me French Hilde at the pictures in Liverpool; while Del Shannon’s Runaway conjures up Christine Jones in a student hostel in London’s Bayswater – the only girl I ever went out with who got a first class degree. Could it be that clever girls don’t go for nerdy boys?
Most fans will have a few favourite Motown singles, but Keith had hundreds. Here’s Little Stevie Wonder, aged 13, singing Fingertips (Part 2), and immediately I’m dossing down on a friend’s floor in New York’s Lower East Side in 1963. It was hot, and all day and night there was a cacophony of Motown and Phil Spector records coming from every open window on the block – from the Crystals’ Da-Doo-Ron-Ron to Martha and the Vandellas’ Heatwave.
Music – it’s like a time machine, and Keith Sivyer was Dr Who, collecting and saving the songs that accompany all our memories, yours as much a mine. Here’s the Kinks singing Waterloo Sunset as my wife, Plum, and I looked for our first London house in 1967, then Abba singing Dancing Queen on the hire car radio as we drove the children and their cousins around New Zealand in 1978.
Another record comes out. It’s Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and immediately I’m hiding my eyes as a girl’s head appears to spin on her shoulders in The Exorcist as the record plays on the film’s soundtrack. Then it’s Oldfield’s other hit, Moonlight Shadow, and it’s now 1983 and my children, then in or approaching their early teens, are watching Maggie Reilly sing the lyrics on Top Of the Pops.
Was it really about the death of John Lennon, they wanted to know. I had no idea.
While Keith’s hobby turned into his life, my luck was that I was eventually able to turn mine into my job. So hearing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody takes me on a trip to Brazil, with Freddie Mercury suggesting I get up on stage behind the group so that I could see what they saw when the lights were turned on the multitude in the Sao Paulo football stadium in front of them. That was the first time I fully realised the buzz that musicians get on those world tours.
As rock became a part of my career, and I had an awful lot if singles, I allowed myself at one point to be talked into buying a huge, Fifties juke box. It was a beast of chrome and glass like the front of a Chevrolet, and an electric storm of flashing coloured lights, its mechanical devices whirring and growling as records were chosen and dropped on to its turntable.
I loved it. I felt as though I was back on the dodgems at the fair whenever the records came on. Plum, however, didn’t quite see the attraction. It didn’t fit in with the antique furniture she’d inherited from her Auntie Mary, she said.
She was right. It didn’t fit in with anything. Perhaps she should sell the George III desk then, I suggested. We didn’t need it. Or what about that seventeenth century oak chest?
She wasn’t amused. Like I said, that’s women and records. No idea. The juke box had to go.
Keith didn’t have a juke box. There would have been nowhere to put it in his little house. But he did have a twin deck turntable, which, along with a case of appropriate records, he would load into his van to take out to functions most Saturday nights, where he would become a rock and roll disc jockey.
Obviously he wasn’t one of those noisy DJs who think they’re more famous than the stars on the discs. No. Keith just played the music and then went home to his tortoise, cats and records.
It sounds a lonely life, but Gerald doesn’t think Keith was lonely. It seems he was just alone, a solitary man, like the character in the Neil Diamond song. That doesn’t make him lonely. He got on well with the man next door, and with the postman, who would bring him the latest CDs he bought off the internet when all the record shops in his area closed down.
He retired early at 55, and as a diabetic, eventually ill health got in the way of his part-time disc-jockeying. So instead he would ride his mobility scooter up to the cemetery to his mother’s grave every Sunday afternoon, and meet a couple of friends there – known locally as Albert Brazil and Gibraltar Frank.
‘Then, when they left,’ remembers Gerald,’ he’d put two fingers to his mouth and whistle, and the birds would come from all around. I’ve seen it happen. It was amazing. Then squirrels would come, too, and he’d feed them all monkey nuts. After he died, we found a letter from the local council asking him not do that anymore because the shells were making too much litter.’
Naturally, as a music loving man, Keith had his own funeral carefully planned and paid for in advance. ‘He always liked Elvis, so he wanted him singing For The Good Times,’ says Gerald. Then Wendy found a copy of Billy Fury’s Halfway To Paradise in his collection, so they played that was well, to send him on his way.
I never met Keith, which is a shame. If I had done, I’m sure we would have had a lot to talk about.
