So it started with a paper round and a cheap portable cassette player.....

I collected my first pay at the end of the week and headed into the town to buy some music….. the recently released ”A Broken Frame” by Depeche Mode was the first album I ever bought myself on cassette. As each week passed, another album was collected. The delivery of newspapers was a means to an end to feed my hunger for new sounds, and as each week passed, I gained myself another fix

It started with the shiny electro pop sounds of the early 80’s, but I was always seeking something deeper, darker, more exclusive, less……..mainstream

You could detect it in the underbelly of their darker moments…. The potential of where a band might end up. It’s evident on the opening track of A Broken Frame: “Leave in Silence” , yet nowhere to be seen on their previous album “Speak and Spell”. Clearly DM had dodged a bullet when Vince Clark left the band to form Yazoo

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Spotify Wrapped 2023 declared me to be a “Musical Shapeshifter” (one who finds a love, plays it to death then moves on to the next one). I love this, and because it’s true, I was able to dig though my old record crates (and find some titles I was no longer in love with) to kick start a “Pre-Loved” section. With the help and generosity of Zoe and her brother Jason, we now had some stock to sell 203 records to be precise

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I sat back and waited patiently for the already ordered records to appear the following week......

I waited and waited. Nothing arrived. Those magical discs of vinyl were proving hard to get my hands upon. Emails were exchanged. Phone calls were made. Online platforms were visited, orders chased

After 3 days of trading, the shiny new distribution centre had closed its doors. They CANCELLED all orders placed. Finally they admitted their move was bigger than they’d anticipated. They took on 200 extra temporary staff to unload the 27 shipping containers that were sat full in their carpark…..Emails were received documenting which 100 titles were available to order this week (from a catalogue of several thousand! (I only contemplated buying 1 title from that email, so just didn’t bother)

An internet search, a message exchange and a couple of emails later, and my current favourite author (Graham Jones of Proper Music) came to the rescue with an eclectic mix of records that would at last give us some shiny new titles to put on display. Graham is a stalwart of the record sales industry in the UK, and the author of two books “Last Shop Standing” (Whatever Happened to Record Shops?) and “The Vinyl Revival” (And The Shops That Made it Happen)

At the end of September, Utopia finally announced that they were ready to open their order department for business. Seven weeks after closing their order department, and just six painfully long record depleted weeks after we’d planned on opening a record store