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Stuart: Hello. Jukebox Sales.

Stuart: Hello David.

Stuart: I’m alright, how are you?

Stuart: The Jukebox Shop is a family business, my father started it and has been involved with jukeboxes for the past 45 years so I grew up with jukeboxes.

Stuart: Yes, in a way. My father used to be one of the original operators of anything coin operated in pubs and clubs in the sixties and seventies.

Stuart: Oh God yes. He started out with a company called Ditchburn Ltd from Lytham in Lancashire who were the UK Wurlitzer importers and distributors in the fifties and sixties. So he started there, then started up on his own and from my earliest age and earliest memory I can remember jukeboxes and arcade machines being in and around the house, working with dad fixing them or just going out emptying the five and ten pence coins from them.

Stuart: Oh yes.

Stuart: Oh no. People think it’s a new thing but they were always getting broken into and turned upside down.

Stuart: Yes. Everyone knows a trick.

Stuart: You could ride your pushbike to school without fear of being knocked off by some great wagon.

Stuart: I think it’s because people can see and feel the quality and value in the workmanship with everything that The Jukebox Shop deals with.

Stuart: Exactly. It’s a very tactile thing. Whenever someone comes into the shop I say you’re looking at the aesthetic value and the financial value. Those are the only two things you really need to consider – if you can afford it and you like what you see then you should buy it.

Stuart: It isn’t an issue with our restored machines because they all sound equally as good. So people don’t normally don’t need to make the choice of "Oh, that one doesn’t sound as good as this." Overall I think people like jukeboxes and associated memorabilia because it harks back to a time when we built things to last.

Stuart: Yes, this is why they’re still here and why we can still restore them. It brings back memories for a lot of people of a youthful age where anything was possible, everyone had a job and you could go down the local coffee bar and put your money in the machine and dance the night away without having to go out and get drunk. Everything was immediate and it was there for you to touch. We find with the younger generation who don’t remember vinyl jukeboxes, it’s CDs and MP3s and iPods to them, they are still fascinated by an era when people could play these things in pubs and clubs. And in a way a lot of our customers that are in the younger generation would like to see these kinds of things back. They’d like to be able to live in that time when they could go to a local corner café and play a juke box and listen to some music. Instead of having five different people at five different tables with different Walkmans or phones playing different music and not interacting with each other.

Stuart: Exactly. These things that we sell do create a community spirit and a presence and it’s almost like a meeting place for people, whether it’s a jukebox or an arcade game or whether it’s a Coke machine or diner furniture. It all brings in that community feel for things.

Stuart: It certainly is and it always amazes me every time someone comes in with their son or their daughter and it’s the father that want to buy a jukebox, but the son or the daughter are loving everything about it and getting really enthusiastic. I know they probably just like the idea of speeding £6,000 or £7,000, but it is good to see that they can still be excited by something as old as a 1950s jukebox.

Stuart: Indeed, not many people had record players at home in the fifties. You were lucky if you had a radiogram, you were quite rich, so you went out to listen to the music and it was a lot cheaper for the proprietor to have a jukebox in the corner than it was to hire a live band. So this is how people accessed their live entertainment, you’re right, and they had to go outside of their front door to do it. Whereas now you can sit on The Internet and you can listen to and play absolutely anything you want.

Stuart: Instant gratification.

Stuart: I believe so and it’s strange you should say that. I was having a conversation with somebody regarding The X Factor, which seems a bit of a sideline, but they said exactly the same thing. They said you’re destroying the choice that people have got because you’re telling them what they should be listening to instead of giving them the option.

Stuart: No there isn’t and the cult of celebrity aspiration that all the youngsters have these days is just a false dream for millions of people but they don’t realise that it’s a false dream because it’s pumped in to them all the time. It is available, and if you’re lucky enough, and can get under the noses of the right people, then you’ll be fine.

Stuart: In the early days it was all the Americans who were doing it. We had offshoots in various parts of the world and Europe has its own small mix of companies – there was a German company called NSM that were producing in the fifties and obviously Wurlitzer. Although Rudolph Wurlitzer was a German immigrant into America he set up his factory in the mid 1800s just making trumpets and stuff like that, eventually the Wurlitzer factory opened another base in Germany which is where they are working now rather than America. They closed the American factory ten years later. But mainly what everyone yearns for now tends to be American. There are a few oddities from the European market like the Chantal Meteors that were made in Switzerland and the UK but most of it is American designed, American manufactured. They’re the ones that had the money and the lifestyle to be able to afford to manufacture and to have these things.

Stuart: Yes, we were in the dark ages.

Stuart: Yes.

Stuart: Yes, outside of the things that we believe in, materialistically the Americans were always ahead. They probably are still now and if you have money in America you probably still have a better lifestyle with that money than you would here – you may not be as healthy or it may not be good for your soul, but they can have anything they want.

Stuart: Indeed, poor is poor and rich is rich in America whereas over here we have a good welfare state system. But as far as what we sell, we are creating that idea of the American dream lifestyle for somebody, where anything was possible. If you get a jukebox and all the trimmings of your American lifestyle then you can create the scene for your American dream.

Stuart: Some parts we make ourselves, a lot of dress parts and trim parts we will have manufactured or they’re available as reproduction parts. We buy a lot of jukeboxes and anything that’s beyond repair we strip for spares and use the parts to rebuild the ones that are better. Ten or fifteen years ago you could go to America and get your pick of machines. Now it’s getting harder to find them so you’re doing more restoration work than you used to have to because things aren’t in as good condition. All the ones that were really nice have gone so we’re restoring ones that you couldn’t just sell unrestored because no-one would know what to do with them. We also have to ensure that we buy enough to keep the ones that we’ve sold going.

Stuart: That’s right, without a doubt, and repairs and restorations is full steam ahead all of the time. To be honest, even if we closed the shop and stopped using the shop as a showroom the repairs and restorations would carry on with no problem at all.

Stuart: Okay. Probably nearly the same question because the best sellers are probably the more expensive machines which would be any of the mid-fifties Wurlitzer’s. A 1700 from 1954 right up to the Wurlitzer 2100 from 1957.

Stuart: That would be the 1015 or the 1100 Wurlitzer Simplex mechanism – that’s the 1940s machines. There was a time when we’d be saying that 1940s stuff is the one to buy and the collectable items – the ones that play the 78s. But because most people now want to listen to music that was on 45 not 78 obviously the 45 players are overtaking them in value. There are still your extremely collectable 78 players – the Wurlitzer 950 Gazelles are still worth £35,000 if you can find one. And probably the most expensive jukebox you could ever buy recently came up for auction: a Gable Kuro, apparently there’s only two of them in the world and it sold for $110,000 at auction.

Stuart: Yes, indeed, but any jukebox is increasing in value and the more desirable it is the larger the increase. All the models I mentioned are increasing in value more rapidly than the 70s and 80s ones although we are beginning to get a little bit more interest in the non-visual 1970s jukeboxes. I suppose it is because the generation that remembers them in the pubs have now got the money in their pocket to buy them and they want to listen to their heavy rock music and their punk music and reggae and Ska music and they don’t want to listen to it on a 1950s Wurlitzer. They want to listen to it on a 1970s jukebox to suit the mood. I digress, if you want collectability then go for your mid-fifties Wurlitzer’s and AMI’s or your late fifties Rock-Ola’s.

Stuart: I’d like to say always good. The biggest cause of customer complaints is when we’ve tried to repair a jukebox bought from somewhere else and they’re having to spend a lot of money getting it to our standard. That’s unfortunately a problem we come across quite a lot. Generally most of our customers come into the shop after buying and say "That is the best thing I’ve bought in a long time. We use it every day and it’s brought so much pleasure to us and all of our friends and we should have done it years ago. Why did we waste all that money on brand new cars when we could have just bought a jukebox and kept it and it would have been increasing in value." Sometimes couples come in and one of them is unsure but once they’ve lived with a jukebox for a while they fall under it’s spell also.

Stuart: Probably what we’ve just mentioned, customer satisfaction. It’s always nice to hear people’s comments about how much they love them. It’s also working with something that is probably going to last longer than I do and is going to give people years of pleasure. Oh and I love introducing new people to the idea of jukeboxes, yes that’s what I enjoy the most – talking to people about them and enthusing with them about what a jukebox is all about.

Stuart: Yes, we are. We are also a dying breed that try to sell something that’s going to last. We’re not dealing with the throwaway last you for three years and then you’ll want a new one culture. We’re dealing with something that will probably be passed down to your children and it will end up as a an heirloom for everyone to enjoy.

Stuart: That’s right. Although they wouldn’t be so collectable if everybody had hung onto them rather than smashed up. Thank god there are just enough of them left.

Stuart: I know and one of my biggest regrets is not having the foresight to buy up a load of red phone boxes that a friend of mine at the GPO had in a depot. If only I’d had the space to store them – the depot was close to us and they were pulling out the red ones and putting those horrible aluminium ones up. They were just sat there and the scrap man was just taking them away and melting them down. It was Sacrilege.

Stuart: I know a couple of people who have got them in their gardens and they’re fantastic talking points. If there is a typically British item that could be shipped to America and sold then it’s the red phone box or a red Routemaster bus. That’s what everybody wants. If you could find forty telephone boxes you’d make a fortune in the States.

Stuart: Yes, and I think that’s because we take a pride in what we do and that will show through at the end of the day. I can only see the business going from strength to strength really.