The secret to restoring old records

It’s a kind of alchemy, transforming worthless clutter into pleasing and valuable collectors’ items, a slow but gratifying process all but forgotten in the modern age.

I first learned it from the woman who ran a second-hand record store in my hometown, Tunbridge Wells, from the late seventies to the early nineties, where I misspent much of my youth and most of my pocket money.

Fiona, a hangover from the hippie era, with her whispered husky voice and the endless extraordinarily-thin hand-rolled cigarettes that perhaps explained it, first imparted this lesson in around 1982.

I speak of the lost art of fixing warped records.

Anyone who has vinyl albums in any number will have them: those discs so wonky that the outer edge sends the phono arm jumping so that if you want to play them at all you have to put the stylus down closer to the centre than the outer edge.