In 2026, it’s hard to convey to teenagers just how omnipresent records were when we were teenagers in the 70s and 80s. They’re used to them being a specialist outlet thing, whereas we could buy them from any number of places, many of which were very incongruous and random.
We had a chemist and newsagents which had a revolving stand of singles for 10p and were obviously sold to them by a rep getting rid of excess stock.
But shops that had albums were also numerous. Off the top of my head, in Stockton these included Boots, Woolworths, WHSmiths, Leslie Brown’s toy shop, Debenhams, HMV, Timothy Whites (a sort of chemist chain) Littlewoods, Dressers (a stationary shop) And this is just in a small market town and not to mention all the independents which were doing trade.
On top of that you came across those stands of cheap singles everywhere. They must have been seen as an easy cashflow boost.
It’s strange to think this was just a phase that lasted, at its peak, about 20 years from 1970-1990. It felt like it would last forever but none of those places even exist or if they do, certainly don’t sell records now. I remember in the 60s, we lived in Hull and there was just one record shop called, I think, Scarborough’s. Records still were not such a big thing in regular real society as they would become in the 70s. It might have sold musical instruments too, such shops often did. Hamilton’s in Middlesbrough certainly did. We used to go in just to look at the guitars.
As far as I remember, the people who largely used the non record shops were not considered by our rather elitist attitude as ‘serious’ collectors. We went to Alan Fearnley’s or HMV. Even though Woolworths had their own chart, I don’t think anyone took it seriously. It was for people who bought a quarter of midget gems and Showaddywaddy’s latest hit, not people seeking the latest Van Der Graaf Generator album.
These shops were for pop music, we would sneer, like it was a bad thing. This was at a time when a hit single was automatically deemed ‘too commercial’ even though we secretly loved it when one of ‘our’ bands had one. Such silly attitudes.
But not only were they everywhere, the shops which were dedicated to record retailing were hubs around which our lives revolved. Not that I ever spoke much to Alan Fearnley who seemed old to me but was probably only 30 but there were older people than me who did and I felt part of it all, even though I was just there for an hour on a Saturday. It was a home from home and very much part of my nascent teenage identity which enhanced and added to my self-defined status as a rock music ‘expert’ . It was the most important thing in my world at the time. Nothing mattered to me more but its all so different now and in a way that I never could have imagined
