Did you have a favourite record shop? Conceptually, this still exists in a lesser scale because of their rarity, but in the 70s, everywhere sold records. Even my local toy shop, Leslie Brown’s and not just a few but a proper department. It seems odd now to think about it. I mean, it was normal for Boots the chemists and Woolworths to have a record department and a chart too.
But if you were, like me, serious about records, you ‘adopted’ an independent record shop as a place your universe revolved around. Mine was Alan Fearnley on Linthorpe Road in Middlesbrough.
It’s impossible to recreate the excitement or the anticipation I felt as I got the bus from Stockton, clutching my worn and folded lists every Saturday, most Saturday’s aged 14 to 18 to look through the racks of secondhand albums which seemed to constantly change because, to many people, records were disposable items which were bought and sold all the time and not the holy relics they were to me.
One memory, I was just starting my Steve Miller Band collection, I had Fly Like An Eagle and Children Of The Future (a first UK pressing no less) and Fearnley’s had a copy of Your Saving Grace but I didn’t have enough money this particular day, so I tried to hide it in what I hoped was a secret place in the hope it’d still be there next week, the next time I had money. Of course, it wasn’t. Someone had found it, a UK laminated copy on green Capitol. I can still feel my disappointment. However, a month later, I’d forgotten all about it when another, or possibly the same, copy was just sitting there and I snaffled it and still have it to this day. The thrill was intense. I literally had to catch my breath as I saw it.
That used to happen a lot because I had such massive lists and not a lot of money. I once had to put back Hendrix In The West because I had to spend £1.50 on the Woodstock triple soundtrack. That was an example of a record actually still being there next week. Still got both of them too.
It felt new and exotic and I always went alone. It wasn’t a social thing at all. This was a serious business and required concentration. This being the 70s, shops were owned by actual people, not corporations, so Alan was always there, usually bearded, wearing a denim shirt. He seemed impossibly old to me, a teenager, but was probably only 30. I only ever spoke to him when I handed over my purchases and then only small talk, but he was such an important figure in my young life because that shop expanded my horizons massively. It was small but full of records from floor to roof. I think they had posters, badges and patches too. I have a great memory of looking up to a high shelf which had imports and rarities on it and seeing Cream’s 7” of Crossroads, an import on yellow and white Atco. £3.00, which I recall feeling was a really high price as I routinely paid 50p for second hand albums. I don’t think I’d even heard it, but you know what it’s like, you get an irrational desire for something and have to have it. So I asked him to take it down for me and I took it home and played it over and over. The b-side was Anyone For Tennis but I don’t remember playing that much.
When not at Fearnley’s, I could be found at the HMV shop in Stockton, but they only had new records and I only rarely bought new records. I just looked at the albums. On leaving home for Newcastle, the first thing I did was establish my record shop network including junk shops which sold records. As a city, there were loads of places. My favourite was on Pink Lane off Westgate Road, run by a balding man with grey plastic shoes. It was piled high with electrical equipment that I assumed was all stolen, especially the piles of car radio-cassettes. But in the centre of the shop were 100s of records in a big heap. All were a pound and I spent much of my grant there, and then there was the University library where leaving students sold their collections. It was cheap and brilliant as old hippy collections were dumped by hairy students who were growing up into the world of work and no longer needed their Jade Warrior records, their dope smoking days behind them now. I swept them all up for 25p to £1.
The best actual record shop was Volume Records, which might have been called Listen Ear in 1979, just across the road from the City Hall, but it didn’t have the romance of Fearnley’s.
An obscure place to buy records was up the escalator off Northumberland Street in Callers department store. It certainly had travel agents!
Downstairs at Windows, just closed, was as much a meeting place as a store. I don’t think I ever bought anything, but I hung out there on a Saturday. I remember Kim Wilde did an in-store appearance there one time. Newcastle also had a Virgin Megastore, which was huge and was where you got limited edition picture discs and deleted 12” singles in the late 80s, especially.
The irony of second-hand records now being expensive items is not lost on me, as someone who has bought them cheap my whole life, I know that everyone of my age had their favourite store, but they were as much cultural centres as pure shops. They also sold gig tickets. Places you could go and learn which is the best Return To Forever album. The romance these shops held was like nothing else and in a very real sense, were a home, a safe space to indulge your passions, in fact I didn’t just view Fearnleys as a mere shop. Record shops were a cultural force, alien to old people or others who didn’t follow music, but the centre of our universe.
