Vinyl records back in the groove

Most Hongkongers will be surprised to learn that tomorrow is Record Store Day. This is the time to register appreciation for our city's record dealers who toil in relative obscurity and, more often than not, poverty, to keep Hong Kong's vinyl obsessives happy.

Chris Brown, an independent music store employee in the United States, came up with the idea in 2007, and Record Store Day has since grown into an international event. Vinyl aficionados around the world now organise concerts, sales, special vinyl pressings and other promotions each year, and appoint an official ambassador. This year it's Jack White, a founding member of The White Stripes.

Those who assume vinyl records were killed off by the CD revolution and went out of fashion in the '80s couldn't be more wrong. In fact, worldwide vinyl sales grew 19 per cent last year, 10 per cent more than MP3 sales, and sales of turntables are predicted by the US Consumer Electronics Association to rise a remarkable 40 per cent this year. These numbers are even more staggering when you consider that the music industry as a whole is doing dismally; vinyl is one of the sector's only recent success stories.

Yet vinyl records and the stores that sell them remain unknown to many Hongkongers, who are content to listen to music on their smartphones or assume that independent record stores survive mainly in the hippy enclaves of New York, London and Tokyo. The truth is our city, too often derided as a cultural wasteland, is home to many record stores catering to every taste and budget - it's just that you have to be willing to dig a bit beneath the surface.

One stockist is Paul Au Tak-shing, whose tiny Sham Shui Po flat also serves as premises for Paul's Used Records. "I sleep with my records. I live with my records 24 hours a day. They are my girlfriend, they're my wife. The records are my family," he says, standing on an island of floor, the only space not given over to records.

Pale and wiry, Au grew up in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam war where he hung around American GIs and became a self-described fanatic of biker culture, "heavy metal, psychedelic music and hippy stuff". He bought his first LP when he was a child, a bootleg of the Creedence Clearwater Revival album, Cosmo's Factory.

His collection has since exploded to more than 300,000 records. There are 35,000 records in his tiny flat and nearly 10 times more in an off-site warehouse. Still, business has never been easy and Au has rarely made a profit. On the wall of his shop is a picture of him on a Harley, a bike he had to sell to buy his warehouse.