– and so did the bootleggers: inside the booming business of knock-off records

n July 2018, the peace of an upmarket cul-de-sac in rural Hampshire was suddenly disturbed by the arrival of two police officers and three people from trading standards banging on the door of a big redbrick house. They had a warrant to carry out what was called an “inspection”, but was really a raid.

Vinyl has become known as the music format that came back from the dead; its renaissance has spawned a growing criminal industry Illicit vinyl has been in circulation for as long as records themselves, but they last reached a peak of production between the mid-1960s and late-70s . Then, as now, what was produced often followed a predictable pattern: if an album by a successful artist was in short supply, ideally to the point of being considered collectible, then piracy would fill the gap.The same period saw the advent of so-called bootleg albums.

They reckon that 50% of the work they do is now focused on vinyl. Some record shops, David tells me, will have up to 5% “counterfeit or bootleg content”, which they accept as an unalterable fact of life. “It’s like speeding – quite a few people do it, and you can’t catch everybody on a given day.” When the proportion starts to exceed 20%, “then that’s when we start to get really interested”.

“About 10 years ago,” says Paul, “I raided a pressing plant in this country. We thought there was nobody there. It was quite early in the morning: the police forced entry, and there were two German nationals fast asleep in the control room. They’d brought some stampers over from Germany and were using the premises in the UK to press 12-inch bootlegs, and take them back that morning. So they got nicked, as did the owner.

This whistleblower, Evans says, soon went silent. But he himself then bought two albums from Vinyl Groove UK, by Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses, both of which turned out to be counterfeit. That, in turn, allowed him to access eBay’s list of people who had previously bought records from Hutter. Three of them agreed to make legal statements: two had bought Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, and one an illegal version of the Clash’s London Calling.

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