Not antique but original! Gramophones are still the favourite for many

KOCHI:Open veranda, long-armed easy chair, a glass of piping hot coffee, the day’s newspaper and soft music coming from a gramophone...they evoke an image that is no longer a part of life today. Everything, even music, used to be untouched and original in the good old days. Today due to technological advancements, music is available on the tip of our fingers.

“But it has lost its ethereal magic,” says Sajan C Mathew, music critic. “However, it is heartening to see that many, especially those who had heared songs on the gramophone, are turning back to them.”
A Gen-Z person might not be able to comprehend the hullabaloo about the cumbersome vinyl records and the unwieldy music machines. “It is the lilting music in its original state that holds the listener spellbound. The generation today is served the modified music. There is no soul in it and the singer himself or herself is absent. But that is not the case with vinyl records. The throaty sounds, the slight but audible intake of breath and other tiny imperfections make the song sound real,” said Sajan, who recently brought out a book called Gramophone.

And this taste of the original is propelling music lovers, especially those between the age of 35 and late 50s, to buy old records sometimes even paying a huge amount of money. “A true music lover doesn’t think twice about the price. Recently, one of my friends bought a record for Rs 8,000 and it only had one song,” said the critic. There many who have a very large collection of records, some even going up to 1,000.
For Sunny Mathew, who owns a museum ‘Discs and Machines–Sunny’s Gramophone Museum and Records Archive’ at Plassanal, his love affair with gramophones and records began in his childhood. His father had an HMV gramophone. “The sound of the songs was a wonder to me,” said the 63-year-old. “In fact, the Hindi songs by singers such as K L Saigal, Shamshad Begum, Noor Jehan, Pankaj Mallik and C Ramchandra, which I heard then, are still my favourites.”

He has a collection of more than one lakh records in Indian and international languages. Recordings by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose are also there.  

Mathew started collecting them by accident. One day, in the 1980s, he came across a 1930s floral horn type gramophone and some records, while travelling in Madurai. Once he began listening to music on this machine, he got hooked on to it. “And, there was no looking back,” he said.

Gramophones and the records are priceless, said Sajan. The price of the records depends upon the material used to make it and also the year in which it was brought out. “Records made of shellac are very costly since they are few in number. They are no longer cut and hence not available in open market. These records are only available with collectors or individuals,” he said.  

According to Habeeb, there has been an increase in demand. “I have sold over a 1,000 pieces,” said Habeeb, who has been collecting and selling gramophones for the past 20 years. “I am travelling tradesman. I buy these musical devices from all over Kerala and sell them on the footpath or roadside. The prices range from Rs 3,000 to Rs 30,000 as per the size and shape,” he said. Gramophones come in different sizes and shapes. “There are the ones that are called the baby gramophone. Some have twin tubes while some very gigantic,” he said.