VINYL is back – and how! Hay-on-Wye record shop owner Haydn Pugh says the yearning to buy vinyl has never been so strong.

Haydn, who runs Haystacks in Backfold below Hay Castle, says he’s never known a time like it since the heyday of records in the 1960s and 70s.

Having moved his bright purple shop the “full 12 yards” to the premises next door in June his business has never been so popular.

A sign of how well vinyl is selling is clear from a book called ‘Vinyl Revival’, which came out in time for the Christmas rush and features Haystacks along with other record shops around the UK. Graham Jones, the writer of Vinyl Revival, wrote a predecessor called ‘Last Shop Standing’ in which he eulogised the last shops selling vinyl after the emergence of CDs and then MP3s during the digital revolution of the 1980s and 1990s.

However, he decided to revisit his topic this year when he realised just how popular vinyl has become again. “It’s all about nostalgia and the urge to be reconnected with our youth,” said Haydn, whose personality and dress sense are as colourful as his shopfront. “I think a lot of people from my generation look back at that golden era, when you removed a record from its cover and placed it on the turntable. But lots of younger people are getting into vinyl too.”

Haydn says the craze means he currently has more than 4,000 33s, 45s and 78s in stock as well as 2,000 books about music and a host of music memorabilia. The entry in Vinyl Revival refers to a notorious incident, reported in the Brecon & Radnor Express two years ago, when police raided his shop and stripped down notices advertising ‘legal highs’ because they feared he was selling illegal chemical substances. Haydn still chuckles about it and says the police may have been misled by the psychedelic colours of the shop’s facade and his stocking of many records associated with that era.

He says some of his records arrive brand new from two distributors he uses but most are brought in and sold to him secondhand by customers. He machine cleans every record and any scratches that remain are part of the album’s “history”. He added: “We’ve had people like Roger Taylor the drummer, Alan Mcgee from Oasis in here. My most popular stock are Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and (Bob) Dillon. But Abba and the Beatles are popular too.”