In December 2004 I had an idea that I thought was a good one – to make a zine about record collecting.

At the time, I had been out of touch with hardcore, music & record collecting for a while. When I started to get back in touch, one thing that struck me was the number of people who were now collecting records. Only a few years before, record collecting was an embarrassing habit that people used to laugh at, but somewhere, somehow everything had changed and it had become cool. And since it was something that I had been doing for a long time, I decided to make a zine about it.

What I planned to do was base the zine around interviews with collectors. The idea was to ask them all the same questions, and see if there was a pattern to the answers. I have always wondered whether collecting is a choice, or whether it is something that stems from a someone’s personality. In other words, I was trying to conduct some kind of amateur psychological experiment into the minds of collectors. The rest of the zine content was going to be articles about record related things, such as the best way to store records, tactics I have learnt about the best ways to acquire, trade and sell records, and stories about how I got some of my rarer items. The whole thing was going to be tongue in cheek and a bit of a self piss-take. Overall, I knew exactly how I wanted it to look, but I didn’t have a clue how I was going to do it, since my last attempts at a zine had taken place in 1997, and technology had moved on a fair bit in the meantime.

A couple of months later I started writing articles. I also drew up a list of questions and sent them out to a few collectors I knew. I chose people I had known for a long time. A couple of them replied very quickly, whilst others didn’t. Since I had decided that I needed all of them in the zine, I was reluctant to go ahead until I had all of the completed questions returned. So I waited.

Before I knew it, several months had passed by and I still only had a couple of questionnaires back. I chased hard on the rest, and eventually got a couple more back. But there were a couple more that didn’t come back. In time I gave up chasing, and decided to turn my attentions to putting out records instead.

More time passed. About a year after I sent out the questions I put out the Search & Destroy 7”. I then somehow ended up moving to the other end of the country. A few more months passed by. Then I decided to focus on getting the label going properly, so I roped my friend Rich into helping me put a website together. And in trying to figure out what content I wanted to put up, I came to the conclusion that I should put the interviews up that I had from the zine that never materialised. The way I looked at it, it would be a waste if nobody ever got to read those interviews. So this is where they have ended up… more than two years after I sent them out.

So that’s the story of this section and why I have these interviews up here. In time I hope to put more up, mainly because I think they provide an interesting read. Hopefully you will too…