Family firm using the past to look to the future

Wurlitzer family members Gudrun and Luise are joined by Chris, Alex, Alan and Michael Black

A family firm is celebrating one year of making one of music's most distinctive jukeboxes after bringing the distinctive player back to the market.

Leeds manufacturer Sound Leisure has been creating jukeboxes since 1978 but partnered with the German Wurlitzer family last year to produce the 1015 model, which first launched in 1946.

Managing director Chris Black, 54, said the machines - which can play seven-inch vinyl records or connect to Bluetooth - "sell themselves".

He said: “Even though they look like they're a machine from the 1950s, the technology inside them is bang up to date."

Alex, Chris, Catherine, Michael and Alan Black all work in the family business.

He added: “We’re exporting them all over the world, and we're getting photographs and videos from cruise lines, stately homes, from just normal everyday people that have saved up for one and it's something they've always wanted.”

Mr Black’s father Alan started the business making jukeboxes for the British market because the American equivalents were too big for traditional pubs.

In 1984 the company decided to start recreating “classic” machines.

He said: “Nobody had seen them for a long time.

"Wurlitzer had gone into Chapter 11 [Bankruptcy] in America in 1974. So really the old dome-top machines like everybody thinks of as a jukebox, the ones with the bubbles, nobody had really seen one of those in a pub for probably 30 to 40 years.

“When they went out of business, the man who was building them literally had two containers left.

“Somehow, and I still don't know how, my father tracked this man down in Mexico and said, 'Do you have any cabinets left from when it all closed down?'

“He shipped the cabinets across to the UK and that's where our love of classic jukeboxes started."

They added new mechanisms to the machines and sold them to pubs around Leeds, Hull and Sheffield.

He said: “They took off really well, which was a problem because we only had 60 cabinets. So we then had to try and devise a way of manufacturing these dome-top cabinets.”

Singer Nona Hendryx, from Labelle, poses with Wurlitzer jukeboxes in 1985

In the 1970s and 80s, Sound Leisure’s main clients were British pubs and hospitality businesses but today they export 70% of their products with the vast majority going into people's homes.

Mr Black said: “It’s a complete role reversal from where the business started.

“New York at the moment is one of our hottest cities. There's orders coming in every day from New York. Germany's flying, America in general, Saudi, UAE is going really mad, and Europe.”

The company, based in Crossgates, is now considered a supplier of luxury goods – something Mr Black said feels quite strange.

“I only saw that about two weeks ago and had a bit of a smile to myself.

“We've come from being a manufacturer in Leeds to be supplier of luxury goods.

“It's quite a strange thing to be alongside some of these really high-end names that everybody knows on the high street and we're moving into that space now.”

Wurlitzers were popular in their heyday of the 1940s

Alan, Chris’s dad, is still very much involved – in fact he’s in the office every day.

“He thinks we're crazy because we only want to work six days a week,” said Mr Black.

“But it's his toy shop now. He tinkers, he designs, he’s still inventing, still involved heavily with every machine that goes out of the factory.

“He loves to get involved with things and it's always trying to improve things, so he never sits still. He never stops trying to make it sound better or work better. All his life is devoted to this industry.”

Chris’ son Alexander, 24, works on the digital marketing, and brother Michael, 50, is also a director in the company.

“Within the business, we've got a range of other families,” he said.

“We have brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, mums, dads, all working alongside each other in different sections of the business. We are really, truly what you would call a family business because it's not just ours and we all class each other really as a family.”

The company still displays its first machine at the factory, where it sits in reception playing Mr Black’s favourite track.

He said: “It can play anything you want, but Blueberry Hill's my favourite, by Fats Domino.

“It always sounds really good on a jukebox because a jukebox sound is completely different to a hi-fi.

“If you get the old 50s records on the jukebox, they just sound absolutely stunning.”