New Folk at Rough Trade
One of my ‘must dos’ of my recent trip to London was to visit the new Rough Trade East flagship record store off Brick Lane, a stone’s throw from the City square mile. Rough Trade were forced to close the basement store in the heart of Covent Garden due a hike in rental charges and this new shop is an ‘up yours’ to any logical economic assessment of the future of CD sales – down 10% in the first half of 2007 and continuing to slide as digital sales and file sharing escalates. In the longer term, Rough Trade’s existence as a physical entity looks to be highly fragile but for the moment it’s good to browse and look for new discoveries just like in the old days!
Rough Trade has a special place in my heart – I remember making a pilgrimage to their store off Portobello Road during the heady days of Punk and soaking up an atmosphere a world apart from standard high street outlets. Something of that cutting edge character still remains intact. The day before I went to Ray’s Jazz Shop in Foyles to see if their Avant-Garde radar and ‘independent’ credentials had extended into the realm of Free-Folk (it already has large sections devoted to old time Folk & world music). I found a paltry three CDs behind a hand written label stating ‘Avant / Free folk’ . Admittedly, this is more than you get in the ubiquitous Borders or Virgin’s Zavvi shops that have sprung up to fill the gap left by the demise of Fopp and Tower records.
In contrast, Rough Trade proves its contemporary credentials with a handsome ‘New Folk /Psyche’ section. I asked the guy who served me how these were selling – he told me that it was one of their most popular sections although he admitted “to be honest most of what’s there isn’t folk at all”. It’s certainly a strange mix where Brit-Folk’s current acoustic pin-up boy Seth Lakeman gets to rub shoulders with the weird/ wonderful artists of the Finnish underground and tribal/primal excursions of The Sunburned Hand of the Man. The more plugged in freak out sounds (Acid Mothers Temple / Yellow Swans etc) find a home in ‘Metal’ – if I was in charge of the shop I’d tuck Seth up in contemporary Folk section and celebrate the rest under a ‘New Weird’ banner to avoid using the F-word entirely.
