VIEW PROFILE: Roy Gregory

ROY GREGORY is the mastermind behind Bridport’s increasingly popular Vinyl

Saturday.

Last month the world’s leading authority on all things vinyl Record Collector Magazine recognised it as Fair of the year 2009.

Having only begun in November 2008 the event has grown rapidly. Roy spoke to View From reporter TOM GLOVER about why he thinks the event is so popular and where it is set to go in 2010.

GROWING up in 1960’s Merseyside it would have been hard to escape untouched from the thriving music scene.

Although a little young to have seen Liverpool’s most famous export, The Beatles, Roy Gregory found plenty of live music to keep him entertained, naming Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead as a few of his favourites.

As a teenager Roy and his friends were all music lovers but it was something he aimed to appreciate and not emulate.

“I’m incapable of playing any instrument and I can’t sing but I think early on a lot of my friends were in groups,” he said.

“As I couldn’t play I was a bit more interested in listening to stuff and very early on I did a bit of buying and selling records and I built up a reasonable collection of records.”

It was in the late sixties with the arrival of the psychedelic era that Roy really found a genre that spoke to him. As times changed so did the music but Roy has always found something to interest him, from punk to Elvis Costello and from The Smiths to Britpop.

Roy moved to Bridport just over three-years-ago bringing with him an extensive collection of records and CDs built up over a lifetime.

Feeling he needed to free up some space at home he combined his love of records with that of the market, which had played its role in attracting him to the area.

Roy found his record and CD stall to be very popular and soon spotted charity shops and other stalls picking up on the opportunity.

This sowed the seeds of what would later become “Vinyl Saturday”.

“I had seen something about Hay-on-Wye being the town for books and I thought that was an interesting concept. There is actually nowhere that I have seen in Europe where a whole town gets behind music in terms of selling it,” he explained.

“We have a lot to offer in Bridport for tourists and visitors but we could always do with a few more because the way the economy is. The more people we bring in the better.

“I thought why not try and create this environment four times a year when people come to Bridport to look for records and CDs. I realised that just me on a market stall wasn’t going to do that and it needed actually to encompass more of the shops and the market traders and the venues.”

Roy was wary of similar towns to Bridport that had lost their individuality with the arrival of large shops and supermarket chains.

He felt sure that an attraction like this would bring people into the town not only to shop for records but also to support other local traders.

His enthusiasm was shared by Bridport Town Council who actively encouraged other traders to take part in the event.

“The first fair took a great deal of legwork to put on but I got a great deal of support from the town council and the tourist board in promoting it,” Roy said.

“The first one seemed to go very well and everyone enjoyed it. You could judge that because when we said we were going to do another one, all the sellers said they wanted to do it again. Over time more of the traders remember and get into it.

“A lot of the shops have done window displays and everyone recognises that it brings people into the town.”

In just a year “Vinyl Saturday” had become a regular and popular feature in Bridport’s events diary. Its success peaked in August last year when an estimated 450 people travelled to Bridport in search of the elusive album to add to their collection.

“A lot of the people who sell believe that if we can keep the momentum going and keep getting more people involved then it will soon become the premier event in the south west of England for record collectors,” said Roy.

Roy is not exclusively a vinyl enthusiast and has his fair share of CDs too, but it was the arrival of the MP3 that re-kindled his love for the fallen format.

He said: “Eventually you start to think in terms of ‘what are you doing?’ It’s almost become no different to standing in a lift, its music in the background,”

“I have noticed the difference since selling vinyl again. If you choose to put a record on you actually go and select it, you put it on the deck and you’ve got 20 minutes where you know you’ve got to sit and listen to it because at the end you’ve got to lift the stylus up. It’s a conscious decision, like picking up a book, so you listen to it.

“I think with a CD you put it on and you wander off, with iPods it’s on constantly in the background and I think it’s a different type of listen personally.”

For Roy the transition to an MP3 file may have made music more accessible but he felt something had been lost.

“It didn’t occur to me when CDs first came out but it did later,” he said.

“The things you miss are the experience of actually having something almost organic in your

hands, an LP cover. If you look at classic album art they are a statement in their own right, they were artistic. Once you condense it down to a CD it loses some of the effect and then even more once you move it to your iPod and it’s just a visual on the screen.”

“I think people miss going to the record shop and getting something with an intrinsic value and that has been my experience from Vinyl Saturday.”

The success of Vinyl Saturday has snowballed in its short existence and following its praise from the vinyl enthusiast’s highest authority, Record Collector magazine, Roy hopes that it will grow and grow.

“The next stage is to try and make it a weekend event so that the town benefits even more with people staying over,” he said.

Roy is planning to create a “Brid Music Weekender” which will take place on the weekend of this year’s August fair. The idea being to create a banner under which venues around the town can host live music.

Roy has already been in talks with The Electric Palace about hosting the main event on the Saturday night and has been on the hunt for bands to headline the gig.

“I went back to my psychedelic, proggy days to find something that was a bit different. That came when I saw this band ‘Achilles Sound’ at the Larmer Tree Festival. It was the first band I had seen in 20 years where there were loads of teenagers sat crossed legged and nodding their heads like in the prog days.

“At the time they were voted the best unsigned band in the south west, but they have now just signed a deal and have been on BBC Radio 1 and Radio 6music. I am expecting by the August that they will have quite a prominence so I think we might have picked quite well there.”

Having secured his first act Roy has since booked the Gilbert Quick Orchestra, the band of Simon Barber formerly of The Chesterfields. Roy is hoping to confirm Pineapple Thief to complete the line up. The Yeovil based band has sold more than 35,000 records since the launch of their debut album.

For someone with such a rich knowledge of music I couldn’t go without asking him the question that every music lover has contemplated.

“What would be my three desert island discs? The Grateful Dead – Dark Star, Traffic – Mr Fantasy and Love - Forever Changes. I think it was because they were the first tracks I heard where I really appreciated music and it really grabbed me to think I needed to hear more.”

The next Vinyl Saturday event will be held in Bridport on Saturday, February 20th.

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