I keep hearing that vinyl is making a comeback, together with the stylus and the turntable. My 1980s model has kept going through years of changes and still works well for a modest collection of LPs, mainly jazz and country blues. If someone were to tell me that they hoard a pile of 45rpm singles from the 1960s, occasionally listened to, I would think it charming and slightly dotty. A delay – before I realise that I have such a trove myself. It includes discs in their original seven-inch paper sleeves, issued under half-forgotten labels such as Capitol, Pye, London, Top Rank and Parlophone, by, among others, the Beatles, Joan Baez, the Shadows, Cliff Richard and Little Richard. They arrived as a memento from the possessions of a friend who died a dozen years ago. I might do well on Mastermind, specialist subject ‘Pop Singles of the Golden Age’. Which songwriting team gave the Rolling Stones their first Top Twenty hit? Answer: Lennon–McCartney (‘I Wanna Be Your Man’). On which celebrated Beatles song does no member of the band play an instrument? Everyone knows that: ‘Eleanor Rigby’. What is the flipside (sometimes, prosaically, the B-side) of ‘Yesterday’? A trick question. There is no flipside as such: ‘Yesterday’ was not released as a single in Britain. It came out in 1965 on an EP under that title. 

I have always had a liking for the vinyl EP: four songs, glossy sleeve, with a photograph of the artiste – a word that went out with 45rpm records; we’re all artists now – and maybe a brief sleeve note. Recently, I bought three of these lovely objects, each of them French. Two feature songs written by Boris Vian, whose main fame is as a novelist. On one, the singer is Mouloudji, on the other, Serge Reggiani, chansonnier names familiar in France but barely recognised in the Anglosphere. Three more EPs are advertised on the back of the Reggiani sleeve: by Magali Noël, Pierre Brasseur and Marie-José Casanova, all devoted to Vian songs.

Vian’s best-known novels are L’Écume des jours (1947), translated as Froth on the Daydream, and J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946; I Spit on Your Graves). He also wrote jazz criticism and played trumpet in nightclubs in postwar Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At his death in 1959, he left behind some five hundred