For the record
What do you do if you're a cricket-playing vinyl fiend? You dump bats to make room in your luggage for LPs

Derek Pringle: just don't offer him any Phil Collins • Getty Images
[Graham] Gooch liked his music when he was young. When he first started at Essex, I'm told he used to arrive on his scooter with a mod parka and badges. He once told me that he was looking through an old suitcase and he's got loads of original singles from the sixties - Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, stuff like that. I said, "Let me have a look at it. Don't throw it away."
Certainly when I was at Essex they used to take the mickey out of what Clem Driver, the scorer, who was my travelling companion a lot of the time, used to refer to as "Pringle's handwritten tapes", which were my records put on to a cassette for the journey. John Stephenson shared my catholic taste in music. So when the two of us were there, they'd take the mickey out of us.
[Gravely] I'm afraid not.
I go through phases. I was a really big fan of Lee "Scratch" Perry [legendarily unhinged Jamaican reggae producer, who torched his own studio because it had "a bad vibe"] and early Bob Marley. I would say without a doubt Soul Revolution Pt. 2 by Marley and the Wailers. It was a Jamaican release, vinyl only, very hard to find even then. It's just got fantastic songs on it, really the sound of Kingston at that time and the Wailers starting to get it together. It's from about 1971, before they signed to Island. They were working with Lee Perry.
Nothing immediately springs to mind. I'm quite open-minded. A few Sweet [seventies glam rock band] things. "Ballroom Blitz" was one I had.
I didn't get dressed up but I always liked punk music, yeah. But I didn't go the whole hog.
One of the great advantages I have is being a player or a journalist and going to places where a lot of collectors, certainly English and European collectors, can't get to very easily without paying a lot of money - New Zealand, Australia. But eBay's killed all that because everyone can look at the price things are going for at a stroke. That's ruined collecting in a way.
Not huge, but I've got nowhere to keep them. I'd say a couple of thousand LPs and a couple of thousand singles.
[Very slightly annoyed] If you're talking about a record collection, you're talking about records - vinyl. Vinyl replay is the best to my ears.
Paul Coupar is assistant editor of the Wisden Cricketer. This article was first published in the Wisden Cricketer in 2005