A Record Store Day special! 8 great shops, and the stories they tell

iTunes and Spotify began my son James's music obsession – but these record emporiums took it somewhere else again

A quick opener: Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in 10 Songs is out now.
”A fascinating story into another way of knowing music and a testament to unconditional love. Brilliant.” Johnny Marr
“Harris writes about music with wit, clarity and a welcome lack of pretension . . . through his and James's shared love of music, his initial doomy grief gives way to a constellation of admiration, fear, humour, awe and, of course, love. I wept several times.” Tim Clare, The Guardian
Order the book here

Anyway…

As many music addicts well know, today is Record Store Day, that annual jamboree of thrillingly unnecessary consumerism that may have its downsides (e.g eBay Vampires who only blink into the light on this one date), but that survives as a symbol of the renaissance of vinyl, and an opportunity to get excited about sometimes absurdly arcane objects: I’ll be down at my local shop in due course, looking for a 1,000-edition “etched” record by the ‘80s one-offs Boys Wonder.

Anyway. Record shops are a small but significant subtext in Maybe I’m Amazed. This is partly because, unlike older people like me, my son James is part of a generation that experienced digital and analogue music in that order: iTunes and Spotify ignited his fascination, and then the rebirth of record stores miraculously brought everything into the real world. For us, part of the story also involved the fact that by some strange miracle, our hometown had a thriving record store long before they came back into fashion: Raves From The Grave in Frome (more of which below), which masterfully walked the line between being a Mom’n’Pop shop where people came to buy DVDs of Heartbeat, and a vinyl-specialist emporium beloved of Heads and collectors.

Me and James go there – and to other shops – at least twice a week. His last buys, earlier this week, were pre-loved copies of Captain Beefheart’s The Spotlight Kid and Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. So, in honour of RSD, these are the shops where several parts of the Maybe I’m Amazed story - and one or two other tales – happened, with apologies for West Country bias…

Raves From The Grave, Frome
We moved to Somerset in 2009, and this amazing business was already here, in more cramped premises than its current home. If you’ve read Maybe I’m Amazed, you’ll know that a magically serendipitous role in the story goes to the former Mott The Hoople chief Ian Hunter, and so it proved once again: the first thing I bought from Raves was a CD of his Best Of collection Once Bitten Twice Shy, which was duly loaded into iTunes; the title track then became one of James’s formative musical obsessions, and was signed by Hunter when we met him, in gold pen.
Having moved from a setting that made it feel like a surreal cave, the shop now operates across two floors. It’s a completely magical place, whose upstairs second-hand racks are a particular source of fascination and joy: true to form, among James’s most recent buys were original LP copies of Hunter’s albums You’re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic and All Of The Good Ones Are Taken. Just to confirm Hunter’s supernatural kind of happenstance, Richard, the owner, is another of his disciples.

Piccadilly Records, Manchester
A monarchical shop, so pre-eminent that it sometimes brings artists to national attention (e.g Jane Weaver). It has a very long history: old people from the North West may recall the ticket outlet under its former setting on Piccadilly Plaza (I bought my tickets for The Smiths’ 1986 show at Salford University there, and then checked my wallet every 30 seconds on the way home, in deep fear that I might have somehow mislaid them). The book recalls James’s habit of taking records from racks and then loudly reciting their stories, via one key example: “That’s The Clash’s sophomore album Give ’Em Enough Rope, released in November 1978 on CBS records.” Much to the staff’s amazement, that happened here, when he was 10. Obviously, we then bought it.

Drift, Totnes
Probably the best example of how to create the perfect modern record store: welcoming, expert, beautifully designed and furnished, and full of a sense that it’s more than a shop - witness Sea Change, the weekend festival that was last staged in 2023. On our last visit, James bought Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity; I picked Lucy Dacus’s Historian. He won, I think.

Friendly Records, Bristol
In the quintessentially Bristolian neighbourhood of Bedminster. Go on a Saturday afternoon, when it tends to be full of people, and gives off the feeling of somewhere you go not just to buy stuff, but hang out, in the hope of revelations and tips. Friendly mostly sells vintage records that are lovingly racked, annotated and packaged, but it also turns its customers on to new things: if it wasn’t for owner Tom, for example, I wouldn’t know about Portishead founder Geoff Barrow’s brilliant project Beak>. Also, their self-branded T-shirts are brilliant.

Rough Trade East, London, and Rough Trade, Bristol
Another moment from the book: “I only play James the title track of Clear Spot by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band once. Its mixture of discordant guitar, growling vocals and knock-kneed drumming, I suspect, might strike him as curious and funny, like a big, monster-centred production number from Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. But it has pretty much the reverse effect: within a few seconds, his face is suddenly filled with an expression of absolute panic, he screams in protest, and I instantly know I have to to turn it off and never put it on again.” I can now happily report that James now really likes Clear Spot - not just the title track, but such songs as My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains, Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles, and Low Yo Yo Stuff. The breach was healed on Spotify, and he then used his Christmas money to buy Clear Spot from Rough Trade East, which is a spellbinding space – as is the Bristol branch, where James was recently thrilled to find - and, really, the fringes of Hipster Capitalism are really quite something – a Joe Strummer action figure. A Joe Strummer action figure.

Vinyl Van, Dorchester and Sound Knowledge, Marlborough
Two different stories that shine light on record shops’ rebirth. Vinyl Van is one of those places that now enlivens trips around many English towns: a new(ish) record shop full of a mixture of new and used vinyl, which is so sumptuous and full of love and expertise that you feel obliged to buy something. Sound Knowledge, meanwhile, tells another story. In 2003, the Observer commissioned me to write a eulogy for the Record Store, which – thanks to Napster, and the fashionable idea that music was now expected to be free – seemed to be inexorably on its way out. I wrote about this shop because it had always seemed to boldly defy the odds. Its owner, Roger, rhapsodised about the records he was recommending to his customers: “Joe Strummer's posthumously released Streetcore, Gillian Welch's Soul Journey and an album by an obscure French ambient enterprise called Zorg.”
I also interviewed that human byword for record shops Nick Hornby. “There are a lot of people who will never pay for music ever again,” he told me. “Why would you?”
James was three years away from being born at that point, and I would imagine he won’t be the only person of his age dutifully joining today’s queues, carefully flicking through the racks, and experiencing that quiet and deep euphoria that record-shopping always delivers.

Current listening!
Album: Live At Carnegie Hall by Bill Withers, 1973 (from Rough Trade, Bristol)
Track: Is Metal by Jane Weaver, 2024 (she played Bath Komedia on Wednesday, and was brilliant)