It was the Sixties, when tales of Twiggy and Dusty, of Beatles and Stones, of Marianne and Mars Bars lined the capital from Carnaby Street to the Kings Road via the its ritziest hair salon. Vidal Sassoon on New Bond Street was already a name in celebrity coiffure, attracting Mayfair's mavens, Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton and Mia Farrow alongside dedicated followers of London fashion.
Cass Elliot, ample Mamas and the Papas vocalist, checked in there every time she landed. There was a particular junior she'd always ask for: an apologetic, tongue-tied teenager by the name of Phil who had taken rather a lather to her. He also seemed endearingly obsessed with pop music. He'd shampoo his lady and she would slip him a five pound note. When 32 year-old Cass died in 1974 in a rented Curzon Place flat (on loan from Harry Nilsson, where Who drummer Keith Moon would also expire there four years later), little did she know of her appreciable contribution to what would one day become the world's largest and most comprehensive record collection.
Hairdressers say that it's all in the tips. It was for Phil Swern. Addicted to the weekly pop chart since it started in 1952, Phil would grab his gratuities at the end of each week and make a beeline for the record shop on South Molton Street, where he'd snap up as many new releases as he could afford. He spent so much time and money there, hanging with fellow collector Reg Dwight ahead of his reincarnation as Elton John, that the store owner took to gifting Phil surplus samples and demos. Thus began his lifelong obsession with pop records. It consumed his life, led to lucrative careers as a record producer, songwriter and television writer, and to Phil evolving into one of the industry's most sought-after radio producers.
Eventually responsible for BBC Radio 2's Pick Of the Pops with Tony Blackburn, Sounds of the Sixties with Brian Matthew and Ken Bruce's Pop Master quiz, Phil also produced shows for Bob Harris, Paul Gambaccini, Mike Read, David Hamilton, Paul Burnett, Roger Scott and Tommy Vance. All the while, he continued to update and add to his pile of records. It came to comprise some three million titles and was made available privately, educationally and commercially through online supplier I Like Music. By 2010, not only did the BBC access all music through them, but when Vintage TV - a 24/7 music channel for the young at heart - went in search of the most comprehensive source of popular music from 1940 to 1989, they stopped looking when they found Phil. He and I worked there together too.
The Collection - an inadequate term for such an awe-inspiring entity, built as it was from scratch by a single person's loving hand - was by then housed in a quaint, converted church hall in Richmond. In 2014, I encountered it again for the first time in thirty years. The last time I'd seen it, it existed only in vinyl form, and choked three bedrooms, the back room and half the cramped staircase of Phil's musty bachelor semi in Wembley Park. Its journey had been hazardous. There was even a time when Phil feared his life's work had been lost for good.
I first met Phil when I was 21. He was already making a name for himself at London-wide radio station Capital, where he would launch the oldies sub-station Capital Gold. I was a wet graduate with a yearning to work in the music industry, and had a cameo role in a Eurovision promo video for the pop duo Bardo. Their agent, Charles Armitage of the Noel Gay Organisation, was also Phil's. He introduced us.
On his show Vinyl Vaults, Phil pledged to locate, line up and play any record within 60 seconds. A doddle in the digital age, back then this involved a dash to his library and a fumble through racks of vinyl, all stored, if you can believe it, by catalogue number. Phil appeared to know the numbers by heart. This had to be seen to be believed. When quiz show You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet debuted, I was invited on as a regular. Phil and I, together with pop journalist Robin Eggar, edited and wrote the best-selling Sony Rock Review, a book that shifted more than 300,000 copies. It marked the beginning of a precious friendship and working partnership. Further books, radio and television ensued, including pop magazine series Ear-Say for Channel 4.
Phil's leap of faith from back-wash to turntable had been thanks to another Sassoon regular, music writer Penny Valentine, who helped him land a job as a runner with Strike Records. 'That's how I met Jimi Hendrix', remembered Phil. 'He had a flat on the second floor of the same building, and we got in the lift together one day. We were both shy. He knew where I worked, and he asked me for a copy of a Roy Harper record. I got him one, delivered it, and he invited me into the flat for afternoon tea. Cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches and a glass of juice. I loved the blues he was into, and we had a few more teas together. But there was never any sex or drugs. Not so far as I can recall.'
As a record plugger – a promotions man paid commission to persuade DJs to play records – Phil worked with Alvin Stardust, Rick Wakeman and the Strawbs, Barry White and many more. Still painfully shy, he perfected a technique that involved bursting into tears whenever a DJ or radio producer turned him down. The advent of Punk sent him scuttling into songwriting and producing, but he continued to collect every record in the British charts. As well as the hits, he gathered dross and compositions from other genres, and found himself zipping endlessly from Europe to the States to Canada to Japan to Australia and back, indulging his passion in the planet's remotest and most obscure record shops.
'My problems began when I started replacing everything with CD, and put my vinyl collection on permanent loan to the BBC', he remembered. 'They paid me a retainer to have use of the vinyl, as mine was perfect. Theirs had been damaged on road-shows, left in the sun, or had got scratched, so they had run out of decent copies. I agreed to them using mine, but then they lost the lot. 200,000 records. Dave Price, their Head of Resources, had diabetes, and was prone to having fits. He'd had several already in front of me at the Beeb. He went on Hampstead Heath with his dog one morning, had another fit, fell in the pond and drowned. The BBC, who were always reorganising and moving things to make room for other stuff, had only just asked Dave to move my collection. He was the only person who knew where it was – but the poor man had snuffed it. It was ages before it turned up in a storage space in Windmill Road, by which time it was in no fit state for anything, having been shuffled like a pack of cards. A library is only ever as good as its filing system. They asked me in to sort it out, but I told them it was an impossible task. Anyway, I didn't have the time.'
Enter knight on white charger. Andy Hill, motor-mouth entrepreneur and former IBM executive with extensive online experience, knew the legend of Phil Swern, music expert, toiling away at his kitchen table with his vast CD collection, making some of the best music shows around. Hill convinced Phil to maximise the collection's worth by applying digital technology. He snapped up the CDs, brought back the vinyl, and found and converted a church hall in which to house it. The rest, as they say. Their original company Broadchart metamorphosed into I Like Music when Hill added to the mix James Suddaby, award-winning young founder of the eponymous online music magazine. The world-famous Phil Swern Collection soon includes a CD copy of every UK Top Forty hit since the charts began, and original, mint-condition, single and album vinyl versions where recordings were released. The CD and vinyl armoury also contained almost all recordings that had made the US Hot 100 singles chart since it began in 1954, as well as a vast selection of non-chart pop, jazz, country, comedy, classical, musical and film soundtracks. It was the most complete collection of its kind, anywhere on Earth.
Same old Swerny remained the hunched, apologetic walking encyclopaedia we knew and loved. He never left home without a supermarket carrier bag stuffed with CDs, despite the fact that almost every one of his friends had gifted him a briefcase for Christmas or a birthday. He kept them all in a wardrobe in his back bedroom, and continued to use his trusty plastic bags.
It was always going to take a very complacent wife. The die-hard bachelor rediscovered Lyndsey, a former Radio One colleague, over the coffin at Alan Freeman's funeral in November 2006. They tied the knot in 2012. Like the rest of his life, you couldn't make it up.
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