A few stories from my record shop days in the seventies, carried over from an older blog:
In the early 70's I worked in the Oxford Street branch Harlequin Records, then a big record shop chain. In this particular store the display sleeves actually contained the records, and were a target for
shoplifters. One day our senior floorwalker apprehended a man and shook the
front of his buttoned-up overcoat, causing an avalanche of Max Bygraves
"Singalonga" albums to crash to the ground. Our junior floorwalker
was amusingly named Miles Davies (with an e) thanks to his father, a trumpeter
of considerably lesser renown than the jazz great. At close of business on
Saturday the owner would visit to cash up. Too impatient to count each coin,
he'd stick his forefinger into the change tray, gaze into the
middle-distance, then confidently announce "three pounds eighty-two"
or some such made up figure.
During my time at Harlequin Records I was a bit taken with
the word “progressive” as it was then used in relation to music. I probably thought it made me sound intelligent. I'd drop the
word into conversations whenever I could. When we decided it was time to
re-shuffle our displays and come up with new browser headings I lobbied for a section entitled “Progressive Solo Artists”. My wish was
granted, but not without fierce opposition from one particular colleague who
cross-examined me over a number of days about which artists I believed
qualified or failed to qualify for that description. He’d collar me on the shop
floor and sneeringly ask “what about Ralph McTell then ? Solo artist or progressive solo artist ?” or “Johnny
Mathis, he's not progressive is he, Roy ?” Some time later we received a
large consignment of "unofficial" live recordings and I was given the
job of sorting them. The colleague told me to keep an eye out for a particular
recording by the band Spirit, who he knew were favourites of mine. He’d heard from a
reliable source that there was one copy in the shipment. I never found it.
Harlequin Records in Oxford Street was a long and narrow store. A cassette counter was located by the entrance where a
Liverpudlian lady named Linda worked. The rest of us were stationed at the
record counter at the far end of the shop. There we would play the rock music
of the day over the store's speaker system. Linda, whose musical tastes
inclined towards the sugary and middle-of-the-road, would call on the internal phone to
complain about the endless barrage of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin she was being
subjected to, and demand Bread or Burt Bacharach. If we ignored her requests,
which we sometimes purposely did, the calls would become more frequent and
angry, the accent more Scouse, the content more profane: "Play Something
F***ing Soft !"
I mainly worked for Harlequin Records in Oxford Street but
was occasionally loaned out to other branches. I did a long stint in the Dean
Street branch, which specialised in soundtracks from films and shows. The shop
was run by Peter and his assistant Derek. Peter wore a badge that read “how
dare you assume I am heterosexual”. Derek was moody, easy to offend and very
camp. The two of them played Dorothy Squires
and Marilyn Monroe records. Completing the staff was a rather volatile "resting" actor named Reese. He’d play Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Band on the Run at
very high volume, switching in a second from muttering gloomily about his doomed efforts to obtain an Equity card, to jumping on the counter and
delivering a dramatic monologue from some play he’d performed in. He’d smoke
marijuana in the back room and become very unpredictable indeed. Once, some
unstoppable dramatic urge drove him to open the till and throw all the bank
notes in the air with wild abandon. However out of control he became
Peter and Derek looked upon him with absolute adoration.
My career in record shops lasted seven years. It ended in a
South African owned shop called Les Disques, located in an arcade that also
housed a tourist attraction called The London Experience. It was explained to
me that the original name Les Discotheque was shortened to Les Disques by its
first owner, a man called Les. The shop was open until eleven at night
and we were expected to work extremely long hours. Because of the location I
rarely saw daylight. Record shops displayed empty sleeves to the public and
filed the vinyl discs behind the counter in what I'd always known as
master bags. Les Disques, ironically for a South African firm, called these
“whites”. A period of sales dominated by the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever
ended when The Sex Pistols burst on the scene. I devoted a window display to
their new album, until our boss instructed me by telephone to remove it. There
had been complaints, he told me in a voice of suppressed rage, that we were
displaying something called “Niver Mund the Bow Locks”.
