Early juke boxes, really early juke boxes, resemble the kind of walnut-shimmed cabinet you see at your grans or on the opening segment of the first episode of the World at War - the cosy introspective part before the killing starts. An earnest family gathers around a glowing valve radio and listens to Mr Chamberlain politely declaring war on Herr Hitler.

The 1938 model 61 Wurlitzer is a sedate, solid piece of furniture, a lot like one of those early valve sets and wouldn't look out of place itself in granny's front room - except, perhaps, for the monster chrome trim, the telephone dial selector and the glowing curved scarlet backlit translucent bakelite styling.

This one and the even earlier 1935 Gabel's Junior in Tony's showroom represent the disturbing crossdressing equivalent of a Shackletons High Seat with attitude - something entirely functional with a comic vicious streak.

It's chilling to think that the spread of this piece of valve-driven sub-deco furniture was instrumental in changing the face of music for ever more.

It's a fully operational example of the same machine that played the Race Records - the records made by and only available to southern blacks in the honky-tonks, the juke joints, the juice joints and the road houses - raw, powerful music spawned from trouble that made even more trouble.

The same music that most white Americans weren't even aware of until it was redigested and spooned out piecemeal for them by docile white guys with oily hair and cream socks.

These ancient machines helped popularise top quality hard-faced stuff, music that could get you lynched if you played it wrong place wrong time... the blues, the train and the protest songs, the ballads,. the prison songs, the drinking songs and the blue yodels.

Tony grins at me and cranks it up a few notches. Howling Wolf is very pointedly and impolitely telling us how his woman likes him to come in through the back door and that phrase means exactly what you think it does.

Slot your ten pence question to Tony and stand well back. He's an affable, burly man possessed of an incurable mania. If it was footy, god, real ale or morris dancing I'd have run screaming from the building but Tony's thing is jukeboxes and he's entirely captivating.

Tony Holmes' shop on Staniforth Road, Darnall, has been covered pretty heavily by the gentlemen of the-press over the last 27 years. At present he's waiting for an article to appear in the Money section of The Daily Telegraph - a piece about exotic investments, how you can put your money into something that's unusual and fun and still turn a profit.

"Well, I'm a star," he says modestly. "But what I want you to do and what nobody who's talked to me has ever done is to relate the history of the jukebox and the part it played in the history of pop music.

At this juncture he says some terrible and unrepeatable things about the National Unpopular Centre for Unpopular and Disorganised Unpopular Music, about "how they were a complete bunch of arty-assed twits who couldn't..." well, I promised him I wouldn't repeat any of this. And then he Iaunches into a detailed and fascinating fact-filled two-hour monologue.

He takes me through the Radio Age, the early coin-operated phonographs - the walnut stuff we've already covered - the transition from 78s to 45s and into The Golden Age.

Smooth, candy-illuminated Seeburgs Amis and Rockolas which were the classic curved numbers - the ones designed by the same bloke who'd just escaped frown design mental hospital, finished off the Vatican and fancied a bit of light relief before he branched out into rococo dodgern design and then finally into The Silver Age.

The heartwrenchingly beautiful Silver Age. In Tony's back room there Is the most incredible, most bonkers piece of unrestrained design that I have ever, ever laid eyes on. I get so close to it, staring into its guts, that I crack my head against the glass, yelp, try to get close and do it again.

"Its an Ami Continental 2 Space Bubble," he smirks. "Please try not to dribble. You've probably seen the exact same one in the movie Ghost."

A silver box slopes backwards, half a glass fishbowl encapsulates a basic signal red record-playing mechanism and then the entire mad edifice swoops upwards into a light-encrusted radar-detecting structure such as you might see only on a chromed cross between a Sixties twintub and an aircraft carrier. "Do you fancy a bit of a treat?" he says and plugs it in. Tony drops a quarter into £3,500 worth of perfectly restored juke box and selects a record.

There's a brief passage of static and you realise you've forgotten how much you miss that grinding hiss before the music starts, the crackle of electric interference before the storm kicks in. Deep swampy bass and arpeggios of falsetto guitar, then vocals burst In like the weather.

There's plenty of hi-fi manufacturers whose main claim to fame is that if you purchase and install their equipment; stick a CD on and relax it will fed like the band's actually in your living room with you. But with the Ami Continental 2 it really does fed like the combo's wedged inside that little box, fighting to get out.

'What is this music, Tony?" I shout above the din.

'It's Cliff Richard," he yells and I pull a face. "Yeah, I know," he says, "but he always sounded great on the jukeboxes" and suddenly I feel cheap and ashamed. For a moment there I actually liked Cliff Richard.

"How can you possibly bear to sell this, Tony? I mean, do you already own one?"

"No," He says. "I've got the next one up from this and it's even better." Time to go.

"One last one," Tony says and drops a threepenny bit into a converted V200 Seeburg - four foot of chromed metal teeth just waiting to bite your legs off if you make the wrong selection (Cliff, for example).

The music starts up and all the other dead juke boxes in the place start to rattle, resonate and join in.

Tony, aged 62, jumps around the room playing air guitar and yodelling along to Gene Vincent's Be Bop A Lula. I see myself out.