If you ask anyone who was a teenager from the 60s to the 80s, they’ll almost certainly tell you about their favourite record shop. It would probably be a one man band, independent place because chains didn’t really exist, apart from places like Boots, Woolworths and WH Smith which had record departments but were a totally different animal.
When one opens up now, it's a cause for celebration because record shops were indispensable to us and you could listen to a record before you bought it.
This was the case downstairs in Windows in Newcastle. On a weekend it was as much a social club as a record shop with knots of people milling around and only occasionally buying something.
My formative years owe much to Alan Fearnley’s in Middlesbrough, not because I listened to music there but because it was where I got all my secondhand records and it was a place of mystery and great learning. He was more like an older cousin who knew more than you about music.
By the time I got to college I think I knew where everywhere that sold records in Newcastle was and would routinely patrol each and everyone at least once a week, usually a Monday.
The advantage of being known in a record shop was that the owner or a worker would put aside records for you because they knew your interests.
I remember the day the Virgin megastore opened in the late 70s or early 80s. It seemed huge but compared to the little record shops, impersonal. Little did I know it was to be the future. HMV had a shop in Stockton and I used to go in there to ogle the expensive imports but never bought anything.
It seems we have had to go through a period of corporate megastores in order to realise what was always used to have was a superior service and lifestyle, just after putting many of them out of business.
Photo by Geoff Charles
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