Vinylrichie’s Weblog

 Being a record dealer in a specialist (special needs?) shop engenders one with a certain degree of fame in the local area. When we think of fame, we’ll conjure up vague images of champagne parties, being constantly asked to scribble autographs, having quite a lot of money, owning fast cars and being rather popular with attractive members of the opposite sex.

However, fame through working in a shop adds up to people stopping me in the street to ask: ‘You’re that bloke from the record shop aren’t you?’ before wittering on about T.Rex test pressings or, a lot more distressingly, getting dribbled on in pubs by mightily hammered Clifford T. Ward fans. The only times I’ve been asked to sign something has been when accepting deliveries or upon completing police statements.  Popularity with women hasn’t ensued, but my popularity with chubby middle aged men with pony tails has grown steadily over the years. Oh, the glamour.

 It is necessary, in order to stay as sane for as long as possible, to use avoidance techniques to get rid of these people as soon as possible after parting with their cash, otherwise I’m in danger of having a mental collapse after having to discuss Shadows E.Ps for an hour. My favourite and most effective method wasn’t possible when I first started here as the technology wasn’t as widespread. It’s the good ol’ mobile telephone. Upon seeing one of the customer types that inspire soul shrinking dread, I quickly find the shop number and have it ready to dial. In the case that the visitor starts excelling himself in an anally retentive fashion just press dial…then I can pretend I’m very busy on the phone and can’t discuss Duane Eddy B-Sides just now. This can fail miserably if you don’t remember to answer the phone so it is off the hook. Talking down a phone that starts really ringing can leave one looking a little silly. Texting someone to rescue me from a socially awful situation is also well utilised but can be distressingly ineffective if that person doesn’t respond immediately. Seeing as most people have proper jobs that require attention, usually I’m left waiting for the response to my desperate ‘RING ME. PLEASE!’

But there are some that cannot be disuaded from their annoyance quest. Some seem to make it their life’s work. The main protagonist is someone who has come in almost everyday since my first day. My nemesis – Peter the Manc, or Manx as we call him for a totally geographically wrong reason. I swear if you had the stupidity and gloves to go through his greasy hair, you would find the number of the beast. This man (oh dear, I’ve started now) looks like a cross between Charles Manson and ex QPR footballer Gary Penrice (go on, Google image search him). Behind his small, pissy little eyes latent hatred lurks. His body odour is so intense that I considered getting a shop canary to know when to evacuate if it keeled over. The most ironic thing is that his unswerving dedication to not caring about his own cleanliness is totally the opposite in his record collecting. Whereas he is marked and scummy, any slight mark on a sleeve, case, record or CD inlay is met with scorn and rejection. He’ll even open sealed CDs to inspect the disc. Insert your own insult here. And what’s worse is that he’ll sometimes visit the shop 3 times a day and he never spends any money. All he wants to do is trade all of his crap for all of our best jazz and funk and has never been able to grasp the fact that Sad Cafe records aren’t worth trading. And where does he get these records? Up the road at our rival’s shop. So backwards and forwards he’ll trek, picking up rubbish for a quid and trying to get me to give him three quid trade for them. All the while telling me what is ‘top’, ‘cream’ or ‘fucking good maaaate’ only for me to sink into despair. It’s like being stuck in Groundhog Day but without having Andi McDowell to look at.

This won’t be the last you hear of this lovely fella. And he hasn’t been in today yet. He’ll usually come in at the end of the day to stop me from going home. I just turn the lights off, make the alarm go off and leave to buy a replacement canary.

 ’The customer is always right’.

Whoever came up with this wisdom filled gem had the prescience never to seek gainful employment in a shop, that’s for certain. In fact, one wonders if they’ve actually ever been shopping.  Or maybe this adage was coined by someone like me but edited accordingly, just like those film posters that say ‘….fantastic…’, ‘a tour de force’ or ‘..startling’. When they actually  should read: ‘When the end finally came I thought – fantastic’, ‘Wished I gone to see a Tour de Force’ and ‘This drivel was so appalling I found it startling’. Amazing what a few well placed ellipsis can transform. So the above maxim may really be read as: ‘The customer is always (a) right (pain in the arse.)’

Some customers are great. They are interesting, witty and considerate; some become friends and enchance life considerably. Unfortunately for me, these people tend to be fully functioning members of society with jobs and families and fulfilling lives. Therefore they don’t visit the shop that often. That leaves plenty of space in here for the more challenging members of society to occupy my time. The only things that these people enchance is my collection of grey hairs.

As I’ve stated previously, the second hand record shop is a magnet for anoraks. Add to this the location. A few doors down we have the probation office, the Job Centre Plus (plus what? Plus the guarantee of a fight breaking out between chavs every twenty minutes?) and the bus station across the road that could double up as a Resident Evil theme park. Some days can get…er, interesting. Time is in abundance for these sorts. Money isn’t. So why not treat the local record shop as a drop in center for the terminally bored and unemployed? Because there you can spend hours listening to records you don’t want to buy, keep warm and fire increasingly stupid questions at the exasperated manager. I mean stupid questions. Here are some examples. These are all actual lines of enquiry:

‘Have you heard of a band called The Rolling Stones?’  I mean, Jesus, I look young but honestly….

‘Are these big CDs?’ asked a teenager holding up an LP.

‘Why won’t this play?’ asks a guy trying to play a Star Trek laser disc on the turntable.

‘Have you listened to everything in the shop?’ The fact that I’m not curled into a foetal position wailing should answer that. Surely if I’d filled my head with Robson and Jerome, Sonia or the entire back catalogue of Chris Rea I’d have been carted off quite some time ago…

And there are those who don’t know what they’re asking for. On any given day I will get asked for ‘that song that goes la la la and has a guitar in it, I heard it at three in the morning on Solent FM, do you know it?’ Obviously, just for cruel laughs I frequently ask them to sing it and turn the shop music down so all the other customers can experience some toe-curling embarrassment too. See, I can be thoughtful.

But the best question ever was: ‘Do you have any songs about love?’ Now there’s an idea for all you budding songwriters. Do let me know if it catches on.

1994- I was eighteen and just out of sixth form with one very mediocre A level (a D in History), and one appallingly almost unmentionably embarrassing one (an E in Home Economics - a subject which I did to be near the girl I loved, who barely even noticed me. That was time well spent). Needless to say, being under qualified due to downright laziness,  I was cast out into the adult world with absolutely no idea of what to do. My preference was to do my favourite thing – skive. But the parents were displeased and voiced this at every opportunity. So, my friendly Job Centre was my next stop.

I was asked what sort of job I would like. Disappointed on being told that there were no current vacancies for kitten stroker, I said that I’d like to do something in the music business. I’d done work experience for a week in my local used record shop two years earlier after all. Surely I was the next Phil Spector?

So I found myself working in a newly opened guitar shop in a nearby town. But my only musical experience was getting drunk and pretending to be Stewart Copeland and drumming along to ’Roxanne’ on the pub table. Badly. You try selling guitars to people when you can’t play a note, don’t know your ‘Fender’ from your ‘Gibson’ and have little aptitude for learning (the boss gave me a couple of lessons – I managed a passable ‘Mull of Kintyre’ one day, if that song can ever be described as passable). I knew I was a fraud and it was deathly dull being surrounded by shiny, exciting instruments all there ready to play when all I could do was dust them and tune them. Occasionally I’d get the odd one down and pretend to be a rock star, only to turn around and find someone had walked in and was watching. I’d rather have been caught masturbating. 

So, I thought I’d go back to the place of work experience to offer my services. Lucky for me, the manager there – Mr C, thought I was a good worker and was very busy running the shop on his own, so I got lucky. Two days before my eighteenth birthday, I was an assistant in a record shop. A teenage boy’s wet dream.

Then I realised, again, I was a fraud. My musical history was instantly revealed as laughable in this anally retentive world. I lost count of the amount of times I was sneered at for never having heard King Crimson, Funkadelic, The Incredible String Band etc.  I soon figured that being brought up on a diet of Wham!, Gloria Estefan, Rick Astley, Nik Kershaw et al (older sisters) and Barry Manilow, Moody Blues and The Eagles (Mum and Dad) wasn’t a good grounding. I knew absolutely tons about the Beatles, which was helpful, even more about Billy Joel (wasn’t, never has been). I should’ve been working in ‘Our Price’ with the other non-music lovers. What I lacked in cool and knowledge I made up for in enthusiasm and geekiness.  Actually, the shop was at geek central in the town. Being next to a model shop (mostly WWII aircraft and train sets) you can only imagine what sort of people were around. Not only that, there was (and is) a bus station opposite which attracted a fair amount of bus spotters who would literally chase the buses as they moved off, maybe even leaking a little bit of wee in their diesel fuelled excitement.

I’d say that my chances of pulling were slashed by 85% the day I got that job.

Another odd thing that was now part of my daily life was having a new dad. The manager, the aforementioned Mr C, took great delight in telling all of his customers that I was his son. This was feasible as I looked like a mini version of him, unbelievably so. I wish he’d told me. I had many odd conversations with people asking where my ‘Dad’ was when he had nipped out. I’d reply that he was where he usually was, at work, and why did they care? Did they know him? Yes, they said, they frequently bought records from him. I had no idea my dad was clearing out his Roy Orbison LPs when he should have been sorting mail.

Everyone thought Mr C was great. He was funny, popular and mischeivous, as well as being highly respected and famous on the Northern Soul scene as a DJ. This didn’t impress me. I thought northern soul was people from Barnsley listening to Hot Chocolate cassettes. But we rubbed along nicely…for a while.

The proprietor, on the other hand, seemed to hate me.  This wasn’t going to be as cushy as I’d thought. I was pretty sure that the job would be fun and serve me well for a little while though.

2007 – I’m looking at the bus spotters as I type this,but they have digital cameras now. A man walks past gleefully clutching a model Lancaster bomber under his arm. Not much has changed except that I now know what King Crimson are like…largely crap as it turns out.

Lively decor, neon lights, personal internet linked touch screen listening posts, staff just out of school with their arses hanging out of over-sized trousers who’ve never heard of Fairport Convention and can’t spell properly…none of that here.

Welcome to the centre of my tiny universe – the world of the second hand record shop. Or the ‘best job in the world’ (TM) according to people that have proper jobs and think that listening to music all day whilst wondering where your life is going is a great way to spend one’s existence. Oh, and the pay is poor too.

 Some of you, the ones that still venture out into the real world to experience things like talking, shopping, people and reality, may have been in a second hand record shop (yes you can call it a store my American friends) at some point. If you did this on purpose you are more than likely to be a male -quite often caring more about original spiral ‘Vertigo’ labels than your own personal hygiene, unable to chat up women but wax lyrical about ‘Beatles’ matrix numbers on the run out groove, or you may be female – in which case you will invariably have been standing in the corner of said shop, arms folded, tutting loudly and urging your boyfriend/husband to hurry up even though he’s been following you around ‘Top Shop’ for four hours and missed the football (no, Americans, you may not call it soccer) to go on a shopping trip where he has to try and muster enthusiasm about the fifteenth skirt you’ve tried on before you say ‘I’m not sure, what do you think?’ Only to ignore the increasingly strained response anyway and drag the poor sap to ‘Claire’s Essentials’ to watch you agonise over bangles and beads.

These dusty hives of the worryingly obssesive were a common sight in Britain’s seedy, litter strewn back streets for many years from the 1970s onwards. Only a handful remain due to the evil internet;brain washing people into doing things that sound like medieval torture methods like ’streaming’, ‘ripping’ and ‘burning’.

This blog has these purposes: to enable me to share the unique experiences of being employed in one of the most unique independent shops in existence (namely laughing at nutters), to give me something to do now that customers don’t really come in anymore and to warn you of the dangers of anorak-ism and having no drive to better oneself.

Here you will meet an array of colourful characters, whose stories will make you laugh, cry, feel palpable anxiety, worry you and convince you that buying CDs on Amazon is a lot safer than vying for space next to a smelly Cliff Richard fan in your local dank pit of a record shop. So be prepared to meet the likes of Ghost Man, Manx, Cosmic, Spitter, and the-man-that-look-like-Doc-from ‘Back to the Future’, Kevin Eyebrow and many more. WARNING:these tales will contain bad language, bodily fluids, cynicism and scenes of extreme geekiness.

I hope you enjoy it just as much as I endure it. If you like what you read, maybe you can run the shop for a day while I nip off fishing.