Black Friday sounds like it should be a day to fear like Friday the 13th. In fact, the Friday following the official Thanksgiving holiday in the States is generally conceded as an extra day off work and is usually the busiest shopping day of the year.

This year, the day has also been nominated as Record Store Day (RDS). The actual RDS is the third Saturday of every April but this extra date has been added probably not with any real expectations of a boom in customers but more as an additional reminder that record stores still exist and are worth preserving. They serve a valuable social function that cannot be met by blogs, mail order sites and P2P file sharing.

To mark the day this post commemorates some of the record stores that have been important to me, listed in chronological sequence rather than in order of merit.

BRADSHAWS, LICHFIELD – An electrical supplies shop that in still going strong. Back in the late 60s (when I was a lad)it also sold a small number of vinyl singles and LPs. None of these were on display, you had to ask at the counter and they were magically retrieved from the back store.  This is where I started my record collection with the TV theme tunes to Thunderbirds and Batman.

VIRGIN RECORDS, BIRMINGHAM – I’m old enough to remember Virgin before Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells allowed them to expand to megastore proportions. The original shop was full of hippies camping for the day with headphones clamped to their unwashed heads. The bigger shop is where I got all my punk and post-punk goodies.

ROUGH TRADE, LONDON – in a recent TV documentary, Steve Montgomery (one of the store’s original staff) said that “for a brief moment in time Rough Trade encapsulated everything that was right about the human race”.  Founded in 1976, the store started with high ideals that have had to be modified over time but Geoff Travis’ vision is still just about intact even though they are playing the game in a different way. My first encounter was at their original shop in Portobello and, nowadays, no visit to London is complete without visiting their new store in Brick Lane.

SMALL WONDER RECORDS, WALTHAMSTOW, LONDON E17 –  Sadly no more but this single fronted store was a regular haunt when I lived nearby. I bought a 12″ copy of Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead (on Small Wonder Records) from here.

THE ENGLISH WEATHER, CROUCH END, LONDON N8 – a goldmine of precious vinyl in its day. It was run by a friendly hippy guy (Steve Burgess) who would help customers by adding little handwritten notes to the record sleeves. A sign in the shop read ‘Kill ugly pop’  and you could be confident that he would only stock music he believed in.The name of the shop caused some confusion and Burgess had to constantly deal with phone enquiries asking for the latest weather forecast!

JACKPOT RECORDS, PORTLAND, OREGON – Portland is the nearest thing to heaven for lovers of record stores. Jackpot is just one of many fantastic shops dotted around the town.

CASA DEL DISCO, FAENZA, ITALY –  A previous blog entry of mine explained why this shop is so precious.

What are your favourite record stores, past or present?