Inside the jukebox factory cafe serving up coffee and vinyl

Blackpool Gazette

We take a look inside the authentic 1950s jukebox museum and cafe in St Annes.  When Karl Dawson discovered the Fylde Coast had once housed a huge jukebox factory that had brought rock & roll to the UK, he wondered why there was hardly any information about it.   It set him on a mission, which led to him buying and restoring old machines and finally opening the Ditchburn Jukebox Museum.  *VIDEO FILMED AND EDITED BY LUCINDA HERBERT*

Transcript

00:00The project started in 2017 when I acquired the first jukebox, the red one. I was only here for

00:06like a few weeks every year so I'd come home and do a lot of work on it and go away again and come

00:12home and this went on for many years and now I've restored all these jukeboxes now and they're

00:18playing which is great so it's good fun. In about 2008 I was talking to a friend of mine

00:31who lives in America. He originally was living in the UK and he told me that he used to come

00:38to Lytham St. Anne's to the jukebox factory to buy jukeboxes and I said to him, I said

00:42well I didn't know there was a jukebox factory in Lytham St. Anne's. Nine years later I saw a

00:48jukebox for sale on eBay and I thought to myself that looks familiar the name and then it came

00:54to me that this is the jukebox that was built in Lytham St. Anne's at the jukebox factory.

01:01So I purchased it, it wasn't working so I ended up restoring it and yeah it started there and

01:08then it became a little bit of an obsession and I bought another jukebox then another jukebox but

01:16the interesting bit for me was the fact that there was no information out there about this

01:21jukebox factory in Lytham.

01:27What I'm trying to recreate is that coffee shop culture you know which we used to have in the 50s

01:35and 60s and 70s you can come in and sit down buy a coffee and listen to the jukebox and that's what

01:44a lot of people love to do now. They come in here they've got their favourite songs they'll sit down

01:50chill out and just play their favourite music which is great you know I love it. All the jukeboxes are

01:56on free play so they come in they don't need to put the money in but they can choose the records they

02:01want to play and they listen to them and sometimes it's magical. Everyone has got a story about a

02:07certain song and what they were doing and when that song was in the charts and when they bought

02:12that record. Now it's for me I love watching the magic that happens when you push that button and

02:19play the record.

02:20We get a lot of record collectors because they come in just because it's vinyl and it's playing and

02:29you know the sound and we get a lot of people talking to each other about yeah I love this song

02:35and what I was doing at that time you know it's yeah it's it's it's quite quite magical. We've had a few

02:42young people in and they they look at the record I show them on a record and they say well how is the

02:48sound in that plastic how does that how does the sound come out of there and it's I sort of tend to

02:55run explainer but the grooves and the sound is engraved in the in the record itself but I think

03:02when they listen to it as well it's not digital it's pure analogue the the machines themselves have

03:09got old valve amplifiers inside old speakers and the sound is so warm it's not like a bluetooth speaker

03:17today so what they listen to they go wow that sounds so good and it sounds just the same as it

03:26was 60 70 years ago but it was different it's not the sound that the younger generation are hearing

03:33today through computers and mobile phones and bluetooth and all that sort of stuff.

03:38In 1952 there was a ban by the government which didn't allow American jukeboxes to be imported

03:46into the UK. Ditchburn had nearly 2,000 jukeboxes in coffee bars and milk bars all over the UK

03:53and they were actually looking at the American music newspapers and looking through see what bands were

04:01going up the charts in America and then ordering the records from America and having them sent over

04:07and putting them on the jukeboxes so they actually were bringing rock and roll to the youth of Great

04:14Britain it was then when the the kids would hear this in the coffee bar and the milk bars

04:19they'd go off to the record shop and said can we get this record of this song you know and it

04:24it all started here.

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