At Home With Pat Nevin: The Scottish international footballer Chelsea fans knew and loved as Wee Pat is also a fanatical vinyl collector.

From Long Live Vinyl

He played 28 times for Scotland and made more than 600 appearances during an illustrious professional career that saw him line up for Everton and Chelsea and play in an FA Cup Final before hanging up his boots to become a TV pundit celebrated for his cerebral analysis of the sport. Yet despite devoting four decades of his life to football, Pat Nevin has never loved the beautiful game as much as he loves vinyl.

Influenced by his older siblings, Nevin developed a deep-rooted passion for records in his childhood that would see him go on to collect thousands of albums and seven-inches, befriend legendary DJ John Peel, become a DJ himself, and even leave a professional football match he was playing in at half-time to go to a gig at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

Nevin was a rarity in the football world – an intellectual stimulated by art, literature and most of all, music. His vinyl-collecting journey began in his home city of Glasgow in the 1970s, with the sounds of prog giving way to punk and post-punk, before a move to the bright lights of London saw him sharing a flat with NME writer Adrian Thrills and becoming best mates with Cocteau Twin and Bella Union founder Simon Raymonde. However, despite that enviable musical CV, Nevin admits to being embarrassed about the first record he bought.

“I inherited a lot of good stuff from my older brothers and sisters, but I have to be honest, the first album I bought was a double concept album by Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. In those days, I liked a lot of Pink Floyd and Genesis. I wasn’t a total prog fanatic, but I did like Yes, too.

“Quite soon after that, when I was 14 or 15, punk began to happen and I started to listen to John Peel’s show. I remember the days when Peel’s Festive 50 was part Stairway To Heaven and part Anarchy In The UK. A lot of people my age were like that. It was maybe more late punk and post-punk when I got involved, going to see a lot of bands and buying lots of vinyl.

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