Sounds on 45: How the jukebox is making a modern-day comeback

“People do tend to be pretty stunned when I tell them what we do,” says Chris Black. “They’re amazed these things are still even being manufactured.”

And yet, Sound Leisure, the third generation family business of which Black is managing director, can’t make enough jukeboxes at the moment - those colourful, playful, but seemingly anachronistic and outmoded record-playing boxes iconographic of Americana. After all, the first multi-selection coin-operated phonograph was introduced way back in 1906.

“And yet we have the largest order books we’ve ever had,” Black adds.

"A reaction against the on-demand digital age"

Alexander Walder-Smith would agree. Also managing director of a family firm, the Games Room Company, for decades it imported jukeboxes for a slowly dying pub and bar trade. But in 2019 Walder-Smith took the bold move to not only buy Rock-Ola - alongside Wurlitzer, Seeberg and AMI, one of the four great historic makers of jukeboxes, even giving us the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ - but to start making them the way they used to be made, too.

Indeed, Sound Leisure and Rock-Ola are the last two manufacturers of vinyl record-playing jukeboxes, anywhere. Both are enjoying something of a Covid bounce, with people investing in their homes and in home entertainment, but with bars and other hospitality venues also buying jukeboxes to tempt us back into going out.

Hotels are buying them to replace pianos in their grander suites. Companies are putting them in their office reception areas to signal how cool they are. And not just in those nations familiar with jukeboxes. The US, which might be expected to be Black’s biggest export market is, in fact, his second-biggest export market - after China.

“The revival of interest in vinyl records has certainly also helped inspire a nostalgia for jukeboxes,” reckons Walder-Smith.

"Much as people love the tactility and more personal aspect of vinyl - even among younger people who perhaps see it as a reaction against the on-demand digital age - so that’s been the case with jukeboxes.”

The sense of theatre

Certainly their appeal - with serious prices anywhere between £8000 and, for a bespoke model, £100,000, so you’ll need to be able to put more than another dime in the jukebox, baby - goes beyond nostalgia, though there is plenty of that.

If the first automatic multi-selection coin-operated phonograph was made by the John Gabel Manufacturing Co in 1906 (giving listeners a choice of 24 songs), the industry took off during the 1920s and 30s with machines with still evocative names the likes of the Autovox, Electramuse or Gabel’s Starlite, the first jukebox to make lightning, as much as listening, part of its its appeal.

That’s the kind of nostalgia that, thanks to Hollywood, means most of as are somehow familiar with the machines. Chris Black argues that there are multiple reasons for a jukebox to appeal even when most music is streamed on the move, not lease their sense of theatre, even of permanence.

“I once had a customer wave his phone at me and ask why he’d ever want a jukebox when he had millions of songs at his finger-tips,” he recalls.

“So I sent him over to a jukebox and, as he selected a song, pressed the buttons, watched the record be picked up and the needle come out, he had a big grin on his face. Streaming, he realised, is a service. But it’s not a pleasure. There’s no emotion in it.”

That a ‘true’ jukebox (the name comes from word ‘jook’, a slang word for dancing wildly) still does what it does mechanically, not digitally, is typically crucial to most fans. It’s akin to the difference for watch aficionados between a mechanical and a digital movement. But there’s also a recognition that today’s new build jukeboxes - less just a feat of technology as of craft, bringing together wood, glass, metal, electronics and even liquids into a hand-built piece of sonic cabinetry - also have to at least keep up with the times, even if they don’t embody them.

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Hence the jukeboxes of both Sound Leisure - which is based in Leeds - and the reborn, but still California-based Rock-Ola can also be configured to play CDs, and are also Bluetooth-enabled. They use LED lighting to create the rotating round of fluorescent lights, rather than the bulbs of old. The liquid used in those signature bubble tubes, long ago discovered to be carcinogenic, has been replaced with a safe alternative. The plastics used are reinforced, just in case your party gets a little too wild.

This is one of the advantages of buying new over the equally buoyant market for restored vintage jukeboxes.

“Of course, there are people who want an original, period jukebox much as there are some people who want a classic car and not a new one,” says Black.

"But the maintenance and sometimes the search for rare replacement parts puts a lot of people off. Besides, purists are less and less sniffy because they appreciate that we’re adding to jukebox history.

"The jukeboxes we make will be around in another 50 years. They’ll be handed down through generations much as the old ones have been.”

Riding the vinyl renaissance

Indeed, it’s not really the modernisation of the jukebox that sells them, so much as their retained authenticity - in build, performance and, of course, style.

Rock-Ola survived as a brand over recent decades by making digital jukeboxes; with the advent of the CD, Sound Leisure soon stopped making vinyl-playing juke boxes altogether, and never expected to make them again. But now both are focused on riding the vinyl renaissance and staying true to the classic jukebox aesthetic.

Conscious that not all markets around the world have a history of buying and enjoying ‘45’s - small vinyl records that played a single song either side, and the kind of record typically found in a jukebox - Sound Leisure, for example, has introduced a jukebox with a patented changer for 20 ‘LP’s, or album-length vinyl records. Rock-Ola, meanwhile, is re-issuing a series of its original, and much copied, designs from the 1950s.

“These have one hell of a sound system - that has to be a given now,” says Walder-Smith.

“But they’re also party pieces with a fantastic, evocative look to them that is, I think, still part of the public consciousness even if you don’t see them around so much anymore.

He is, he adds, doing all he can to change that.

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