Those born in the last 20 years or so, and now used to having the internet on screens all around them, might skip the first few lines of this story. It is a story of struggle from the 1990s. A time when songs you once heard on a public speaker would not "magically" appear on your computer, much less a phone. You had to search for it (not on Google), ask around. In little Shijo Manuel’s case, he had to hang around the Venus Cassettes shop in the Thopramkudy village of Idukki, until Vincent chettan, the shop owner, shooed him away. He would wait for the radio to play his favourite songs and hurriedly write down the lyrics. But Vincent chettan would rarely have the songs he wanted. It would take him a few more years to start buying audio cassettes, mixtapes of all the songs he loved.
The collection that he began back in the early 1990s grew to tens of thousands of songs in three decades: Shijo now has an enviable collection of cassettes, CDs, LP records, old articles and everything related to music that he could gather. “I hope to build a museum with it. I don’t want all of this to be lost, so I have already begun documenting and sharing the material I collected on an online page called Geeths N’ Grooves,” says Shijo, who works as a music professional in Ernakulam.
A few days ago, he shared on his page the handwritten lyrics of singer Minmini when she visited AR Rahman’s house in January 1992 to record the song ‘Chinna Chinna Asai’. It was from Rahman’s first film as a composer, Roja.
Shijo says he did not begin his collection thinking that it’d one day make him famous; he was just that passionate about music. In a long note on Facebook, he once shared the story of working as a cleaning staff and a bar attendant in Ernakulam, keeping aside a little from his monthly salary of Rs 300 to buy mixtapes. An original audio cassette would cost Rs 25 to Rs 40, and Shijo could not afford to buy them all. So, he relied on mixtapes of his favourites, and even for that, he had to cut down on other expenses such as a day’s lunch or dinner.
A part of Shijo's collection
When he got the job of a peon at an advertising firm and his salary rose to Rs 800 a month, he bought his first walkman and later a Panasonic stereo. Shijo wrote on Facebook, proudly, that he still has that stereo and still listens to songs on it. From Vincent chettan in Idukki he moved on to a man called Krishnan Namboothiri in Kaloor, Ernakulam, who had a collection of film songs that his son would record for Shijo at the price of Rs 90 for three mixtapes.
“Gradually I moved onto [buying] original cassettes and then stumbled on vinyl records. I had not heard of those before. It gave me great joy to see the records move on the player, like it was a performance,” Shijo says, the passion seeping out of his descriptions.
Along with the records and the Long Play (LP) records, Shijo also kept aside cuttings of music-related interviews and articles that came in print. Minmini’s is one such interview. “It is from the audio cassette of Roja which came with Tamil lyrics that I learnt to read and write in Tamil,” he says.
Audio cassettes, records and players in Shijo's collection
His collections include articles about Jency Anthony, a Malayali singer who sang a number of songs in Tamil for the likes of Ilaiyaraaja. “She got more recognised in Tamil; there is even a Tamil book about her,” says Shijo, who was once awed to watch her record a song at a studio in Ernakulam with such ease.
Shijo believes he has now managed to collect most of the audio recordings of Malayalam film songs of all times, and a vast number in Hindi and Tamil as well. “I have roamed in different places for this – the Moor Market in Chennai, and in Kozhikode, where I have a few sources, and so on. There was a man called Raja I used to know, who came with rare songs,” he says dreamily.
He has helped B Vijayakumar, a music historian and one of the biggest contributors of music and lyrics in the Malayalam movie database msidb.org, in his works. The passing of Vijayakumar in October 2020 had shocked and saddened Shijo deeply. He doesn’t want his own collection to vanish the day his time comes, he says, so he is carefully documenting it all.