I
don’t know many people of his generation who
would have even a f licker of interest,” says Graham
Lindsay, owner of Relics, a vintage audio and
record shop in Bristol. He is talking about Tim
Colivet, his amp whisperer – born in the digital
age but professionally devoted to restoring their
analogue antecedents. “His favourite band is
The Beatles and he likes to hear them through a valve
amp. We call him Monotastic.”
The shop stands just beyond the shadow of the
cathedral. Tim works upstairs, but we’re not going to
rush past the cornucopia of delight between us and the
stairway. To our left, abundant racks of choice vinyl,
from which we’ll later take home a 1960s compilation of
steel band music by the Jamaican All Stars, replete with
distinctly of-their-time sleeve notes (‘While the feeling
is primitive and throbbing...’). Ahead and right, the
restoration handiwork, where perky little Dansette
portables nuzzle up to hulking old radios, dials
adorned with exotic European frequencies: places like
Bucharest, Florence and, that sanctuary for any halfway
curious pop picker of the 1960s, Luxembourg. In the
background, Buddy Holly sings f latly over rudimentary
guitar, a collection of demos reminding us that, when
you hear the words “previously unreleased”, the “with
good reason” is often silent.
Finally, we talk to Tim. “I’m not a purist,” he insists,
“but I do love analogue. Each amplifier has its own
character. Recordings from the 50s and 60s have a real
charm; technically imperfect, but pleasing to the ear.”
Valve amps are particularly special, he says. “You get
a purity of tone because you can amplify the signal with
fewer stages – in a transistor amplifier, the same
volume requires being sent through more transistors; if
you use more, you lose some of the tone.”
Then there’s the fact they need to warm up before
a magical glow confirms they’re ready to make waves.
“I do lots of demonstrations, particularly in thiscold weather,” says Graham, “where I turn one on
and the customer says, ‘It doesn’t work, does it?’ I say
‘Count to 20...’ Isn’t it nice that it doesn’t have to be
instant? It’s like toast, though – if you walk away, they
will be much quicker.”
Another part of Tim’s analogue love, he says, is
“getting a kick out of working on stuff that is much older
than me and bringing it back to life”. Now 33, he
qualified as an analogue repairman in his 20s. “I was in
surf rock guitar bands, so using vintage amplifiers and
reverb units. Being 50 years old, they’d work for two
weeks or so and then die, and you’d have the hassle of
finding someone to fix them. My grandfather was an
electronics teacher at a tech college in the 50s, so he
gave me his technicians’ books and I read them all. He’d
help me if I was stuck and I got pretty good at it.”
As you might expect of an age in which vinyl records
have attained hipster status, Graham has seen
a significant drop in the average age of his rack
rif lers. “While they’re here, they say, ‘Oh look, that’s
a nice deck’. We’re bringing a new generation into
vintage. They’re also seeing stuff at car-boot sales,
buying it cheap and bringing it in for us to fix. We
really like the idea of it not being disposable. If you
see a CD player for a fiver at a car boot and it says
‘doesn’t work’, I don’t think you’d say, ‘Let’s see if I can
get it fixed’. Analogue equipment comes from an era
when it cost a bigger part of your income and people
mended stuff – when you get inside, it’s like reading
a map. You weren’t just going to buy another one after
two years – you expected it to last.”
relicsbristol.co.uk“I get a kick out of working on
stuff that’s much older than me
and bringing it back to life”THINK (^) | CRAFTSMANSHIP