When I was at school I was naive. I wasn’t particularly good at anything. I did stay on into the sixth form but I realised quite quickly that I was just getting nowhere. So I left. I think it must have been just before Christmas 1960. And I got a job as an office clerk at Dunlop Rubber Company. It was just a menial job. Just working in the office doing repetitive work all the time. And I think I stuck that for about a year and then I found a job in Wetherby at an agricultural engineers. And I went there.

And during this time my brother, who was still at school, had met some guys and formed a band. So I’d go along and watch them sometimes. And because it was not okay with the rest of the world and what went on outside my own little sphere I suddenly found this quite exciting. Music. And people who had expanded their ideas about how life should be lived. Dressed a bit different and things like that. And one night i noticed at a gig that everyone in the band was coming either with lifts from their dads or one of them had borrowed his dad’s car. And so I thought it’d be a good idea… I bought a van. And from there I started running bands round on an evening. While keeping a job down. And I must admit I enjoyed the agricultural engineers in Wetherby but I felt every day I was taking myself out of the city and getting far away from a life I was quite enjoying. So I gave that up in the mid 60s. Became a car salesman for a year. Which was the worst job I ever had! Still running bands around. I only lasted a year and then I got sacked. And I just sort of fell by chance into another job. A line job. It was fitting car radios into new cars. Company called Car Radio Services. I enjoyed that job. I was a salesman for them and I would travel around. And still running bands around on an evening. Sometimes it was difficult to get up on a morning when you’d run down to Bishops Stortford and back in the night! And then trying to get up the following morning.

And eventually, right towards the end of the sixties, I actually got fired from that job. In a nice way. We came to a mutual agreement. My life wasn’t in line with what was needed there. And I’d met someone through the trade who was starting a cassette shop in town. Selling cassettes, and cassette equipment and things like that. And he said ‘Well if you’re not doing anything Hunter, it may be a good idea if you take the back of my shop, pay me a bit of rent.’ And we just had a handshake. A gentlemen’s agreement. And this was how Jumbo Records started to be born.

And I thought it was a good idea at the time. It was something to do with music, which I was loving. And I was still running bands around. And so I started that. It wasn’t all as straightforward as I thought it might be. Trying to pay the bills and things like that. And not long after I started my mum rang me to tell me that my younger brother didn’t have long to live. Which was very difficult. I was still living at home at the time. Mum and dad were really struggling. They actually took him in from hospital and decided that he would spend his last days in their house. So life was quite difficult then. And I’d started DJing as well. I’d dropped the vans and was trying to do DJ work. Which was going hand in hand with my fledgling business. Anyhow, after four months of being in the back of this guy’s shop he asked me if he could have the space. He wanted me out. And of course I had lots and lots of bills to pay, and I was going to end up with nowhere to sell the stock that I had. Plus mum and dad were quite wrapped up, understandably, in other things.

Anyhow, my dad did help me and some other people in the trade helped me and we got all my kit out of this shop. This was Christmas. On Christmas Eve I was moving all my stock. My dad took his car out of the garage and I put all the browsers, the counter, everything, in their garage. Plus all the stock. And immediately after Christmas I walked round Leeds trying to find somewhere to actually hole up to just sell some of the stuff I had! And I was fortunate in that there was a little room on a balcony in the Queen’s Arcade. And it was really cheap, the rent. So with the help from my dad he shortened some browsers, and make racks to store singles on, I actually opened up at the beginning of January in the Queen’s Arcade on this little balcony. And I actually got a very nice gentleman who had a shop in Wakefield, I can’t remember the name of it now, he bought a lot of my album stock and left me with just singles. And I started to concentrate on mainly singles maybe dance music. Black music of the time. And things like that. In this little room with no toilet in or anything. I had to nip up the balcony and lock the door if I wanted to go to the toilet. Cos it was just me then. And sadly, in the February my brother died. So there were some very, very dark days in February and March of 1971.

And then slowly, slowly but surely, from there the business grew. Just mainly selling singles. And of course I was working on a night which was keeping me afloat. So I could just pay my mum and dad a little bit of board while I was living at home. And it sort of grew from there. In 1972 I actually got somebody to help me because I was finding it all too much just running it by myself. And Jumbo Records grew out of that really unsteady start and not very well thought out beginning. Something that just sounded like a good idea at the time. I thought ‘Great! I’m working for myself. I’ll be able to buy a motorbike! I’ll be able to do all these crazy things like… Easy Rider!’ [laughs] And I’d got all these images in my head. And it didn’t work out quite like that because running a shop is very, very, tying. But that’s the early days of Jumbo Records. Yeah… Yeah.