THE BEAT GOES ON

Meet the music custodians working to save recordings from destruction-or oblivion

-  Simon Button

DEEP IN THE Vaults of the British Library lies a veritable treasure trove for lovers of popular music. Housed across two sites in London and Yorkshire are more than 3,50,000 CDs and 2,50,000 vinyl LPs, around a quarter of a million 78 RPM discs, and some 2,00,000 reel-to-reel and cassette tapes. All genres and eras are covered, from jazz to heavy metal, from the 1920s to the 2020s.

Throw in an array of wax cylinders the first commercially available medium for music-along with old issues of music magazines, books, newspaper clippings, catalogues and recorded interviews, and you have a vast collection that Andy Linehan, the library's former Curator of Popular Music Collections, is understandably proud of.

The Popular Music Collections team is not only preserving music but also honouring history. "One of the British Library's functions is to be the cultural memory of the nation," Linehan says. "We do that with books, journals and newspapers, and it's absolutely right that we should also do it with music."

The collection relies on donations from record labels, distributors, artists and members of the public. As Linehan notes: "If you publish a book, newspaper, or magazine in the UK, you're legally obliged to send a copy to the British Library. But that law does not apply to sound recordings."

Among the treasures are an 1890 recording of a fundraising appeal by pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale and a cassette tape that was sold at gigs in the 1980s by a British high-school band called On A Friday, whose members eventually formed Radiohead.

There are also old blues 78s, rare LPs from the 1950s with covers designed by a pre-fame Andy Warhol, and promotional copies of Beatles' singles that had only a couple of hundred pressings. Music fans can listen to much of the collection at the British Library's Reading Rooms, and some selections have been posted online (sounds.bl.uk).