Record Shops

John Peel wrote an article for Punch magazine on record shops, which appeared in the issue dated 16 January 1980 and was reprinted in The Olivetti Chronicles (pp. 251-254). In it he mentions the first record shops he visited; as a schoolboy he would listen to records in the basement of Wildings of Shrewsbury (the "dear, dead days of the mid-1950s" being "the Golden Age of the listening booth"), while the first record he bought, Ray Martin and his Concert Orchestra's "Blue Tango", came from Crane's of Liverpool, which he describes as being a furniture and musical instrument shop with a record department - like many other similar shops of the era.

The late 1960s
When Peel returned to Britain in 1967, record shops in Britain were beginning to change, reflecting not only the dominance of the teenage market but the growing interest is specialist genres of music. Some shops had begun to import records from the USA, initially blues and soul releases, but as "West Coast" psychedelic music began to arouse interest, a few became known as outlets for LPs not yet released in the UK - and as record companies were slow to respond to the new trend, were able to increase their business by branching out into mail order sales. The two most important shops of this kind were both in London's Soho; Musicland in Berwick Street and One Stop in South Moulton Street and Peel became a regular customer of both. Peel mentioned them in his columns in International Times and occasionally on-air, including hidden plugs for One Stop Records on the Top Gears of 31 December 1967 and 11 August 1968.

tbc

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