DJs reunited with missing record collection after 10 years

Bristol DJ duo The Kelly Twins have shared the story of how they came to be reunited with a set of missing records a decade after they were originally assumed long gone.

The story begins with the brothers DJing an eight-hour set of UK garage, house and disco at The Bell near Stokes Croft in their base of Bristol in 2011, for which they packed a number of rare records along. After finishing up and taking a taxi home, they later realised that one bag of the three they had taken with them was missing, and it contained around 80 records.

Speaking to the Bristol Post, Sean Kelly said: “We had cherry-picked our record collection for the choice cuts and that was the bag we lost so we were particularly gutted as it contained a lot of rare white labels which are hard to find.

“When we realised we’d lost it, we started to phone around cab companies, retraced our steps back to The Bell and called friends. We eventually had to accept they had gone for good. It still feels pretty fresh actually – it’s always really sad if you lose records as they cost money but also because they all have memories attached to them.”

Taking to Twitter earlier this week, the brothers revealed that the records had incredibly recently turned up, 10 years after they were assumed lost, after an old friend contacted them to say he had found a bag of records in a garage he had been clearing.

“I got a call from my friend Vicaas, who I know from the Bristol scene, and he was at his cousin’s house in St Werburgh’s sorting out the garage,” Sean told the Bristol Post. “He came across this bag of records and had a look through them. Vicaas saw a Mary J. Blige record in the bag and thought there were only a certain number of DJs who would play that sort of thing including us.”

Also in the bag was a letter with Sean’s name on it, and a drawing that his nephew had done for him when he was aged just one.

Though some of the lost records have been replaced in the years since they were believed forever lost, Sean is grateful to have been reunited with them and speculated: “I can only assume that this was the taxi driver who took us home and he had obviously just put them in his garage for safe-keeping.

“The weirdest thing is that I’ve probably walked past that garage loads of times over the past ten years not realising my records were in there!”