I didn’t go to my local independent record shop today. I did go last week and the week before that. It was great – full of new releases on a variety of formats and friendly knowledgable staff who were happy to while away an hour chatting to a strange little man about dubstep,death metal,obscure rockabilly records and cover versions of Bob Dylan songs in Bengali.
I looked through the racks of CD’s and LP’s and 7″ singles, my eye occasionally falling across something with an odd looking sleeve or a name I vaguely remember seeing on a blogpost or in the NME. They’d even taken the time to put little handwritten messages on some of the records to help me choose:
“Moody and off-kilter electronics with a synth-pop pulse and bent-out-of-shape vocals.”
“Sweeping drone-ambient with sound sources drawn solely from a self-built analogue synthesizer….”
“rock-solid combination of garage / surf / rockabilly / blues /punk. Check this out if you’re into the Cramps or Tav Falco.”
I spent a leisurely couple of hours in the sparsely populated shop (it’s not a fucking STORE, it’s in fucking LEEDS) and having happily forked over 30 quid for a selection of things most of which I’d never heard off two hours earlier I left the shop replete with that slightly queasy combination of guilt at spending too much money and excitement at the prospect of new tunes that I always get when leaving a record shop and skipped home.
It never occurred to me what colour vinyl the three 7″ singles I’d bought might be or what quantity the CD’s I’d bought had been produced in.