Record Store Day 2015: How Britain’s Most Rock ‘n’ Roll Street Is Thriving Against The Odds

Soho is dying, say the headlines. But while gentrification flattens the famed London district’s bohemian side. The record shops left on collectors’ paradise Berwick Street are thriving. Phil Hebblethwaite meets their optimistic proprietors…

In 2008, Sister Ray, perhaps the best-known record shop on what used to be called the “golden mile of vinyl” – Berwick Street in London’s Soho – fell into administration. It was rescued, but the very idea that Sister Ray could almost fail seemed to shake other shops in the area. Two years later, Vinyl Junkies on the southern, market end of the street closed, with its proprietor John-Paul Cuesta-Vayon telling The Independent: “Maintaining a business here has become impossible. The overheads are massive. Rent now costs around £35K a year, business rates are spiralling and the constant roadworks and congestion charges are driving visitors away.”

More bad news was to come. In 2013, JB’s on nearby Hanway Street shut. Later that year, Tim Derbyshire – exactly the kind of Soho character everyone wants to believe is extinct – listed his shop, On The Beat, also on Hanway Street, on eBay for £300,000, only to be bombarded with trolls offering a pittance for a business he’d run with love since 1979. He closed it soon after. Back on Berwick Street, meanwhile, things looked to be going awry again too: Sister Ray moved from the open-plan premises it occupied at numbers 34-35 to a different, smaller address across the street. Then in March, dance-music specialist BM Soho shut up shop and, next month, the Music and Video Exchange will close – hopefully temporarily – as develops spend the next year and a half building a hotel above it.

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Is the Berwick Street area – so associated with record shops that Oasis used a photograph of the street for the cover of ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?’ – doomed? You’d imagine it was, but when I call Sounds Of The Universe, just off Berwick Street, and ask manager Nicole McKenzie whether she’s feeling optimistic about running her shop in the current climate, she replies, “One hundred per cent. It’s an old story that record shops are going downhill. We’ve been doing well for quite a number of years, and from what I hear of other shops in Soho, they’re also doing well.”

Simon Rigg, who runs nearby Phonica, agrees and so does Sister Ray’s Phil Barton, who bought his business out of administration with the help of family and friends and says he moved premises simply because he couldn’t come to an agreement with his old landlord. The new shop, he adds, has exactly the same amount of stock, thank you very much; it’s just “better organised”. As for BM Soho: no-one seems to know what happened. They closed because of a “separate issue” is all anyone will offer and NME’s emails to the managers remain unanswered.

When Graham Jones decided to write a book about record stores, published in 2009, he called it Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened To Record Shops? Now on its sixth edition, new chapters have been added and the subtitle has been changed to The Rise, Fall And Rebirth Of The Independent Record Shop, the same subtitle he used for a tie-in documentary, which became the official Record Store Day film in 2013.

“It’s staggering how things have changed,” he says. “When Last Shop Standin came out six years ago, there were 269 independent record stores in the UK selling new product. We now have 339.”

Asked what’s changed, he says: “The catalyst has been Record Store Day. It got people going back into record stores, and perhaps more importantly, it brought positive publicity to them. Pre-2009, all the publicity was negative – wholly centred around record shops closing down.”

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Jones also points to something he thought would never happen – young people getting into vinyl, which he believes is a significant contributing factor to LP sales cracking the million mark last year for the first time in 18 years. Regarding the so-called vinyl boom, Sister Ray’s Phil Barton says, “Vinyl still accounts for a fraction of all music sales, but for independent record stores it’s very significant – it’s a huge amount of what they sell. If there wasn’t this upsurge, all the shops would still be struggling. We also sell second-hand records; they’re not accounted for in the figures on vinyl sales, but they’re a very important part of our business.”

There have been changes, too, in what record shops offer and how they treat their customers. Jones believes there’s been a natural cull of the kind of unfriendly, elitist places like the one portrayed in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity and that the modern, successful record shop is more than just a music retailer. “The difference between now and 10 years ago is that virtually every record shop puts on local bands, or bands that are touring, and so many of them serve coffee and food – they’re meeting places. Also, if you look at a map of where record shops across the country are opening, you’ll find they’re either in smaller towns, or if they’re in cities; they’re not on the high street – they’re off the beaten track, where they can make more noise and rents and rates are cheaper. In some cases, the property is cheap enough for the people running the shops to buy the building.”
In Soho, Phonica own their premise and are part of a larger company called The Vinyl Factory, which includes a venue, label and online music magazine Fact. Sounds Of The Universe is also home to celebrated reissue label Soul Jazz, and while diversifying certainly helps record shops to stay open, it doesn’t entirely explain why the Berwick Street shops, the massive majority of which rent – and pay huge rents and rates – are thriving. The area, after all, is meant to be in the midst of mass, irreversible gentrification, with the recent closures of two much-loved venues, Madame Jojos on Brewer Street and Denmark Street’s 12 Bar Club, causing not just debate, but protest.

Phil Barton has a morbid fascination with keeping a list of all the Soho record shops that have shut since Sister Ray opened 27 years ago (more than 20, by his calculation) and the fact that there are only five left – Sister Ray, Phonica, Sounds Of The Universe, Reckless, and classical retailer Harold Moores – is a major reason why they are surviving.

“I wouldn’t say vinyl sales are as healthy as the BPI [British Phonographic Industry] makes out, but there are far fewer shops in Soho these days, which benefits the ones left,” says Phonica’s Simon Rigg. “For us in the Berwick Street area, we’re probably doing better because HMV on Oxford Street closed, but what’s also important is that all the shops round here have their niche, and with that comes a customer base.”

He adds that one land owner in particular, Shaftesbury PLC, “seem to recognise that record shops are part of the culture of Berwick Street,” adding: “The impression I get is that they don’t put their rents up by excessive amounts like other private landlords in the area do.”

Shaftesbury PLC is a £2.6bn company that owns 14 acres of land across London’s West End, on which they have 582 shops, restaurants and cafés, 491 residential addresses and 415,000 square feet of office space. “We had a vacant shop that we put Sister Ray into, and in that respect, we want to maintain the music shop heritage of the area,” says Simon Quayle, an executive director at Shaftesbury. “Of course they pay market rent, as anybody else would for a retail unit, but we do think about who we offer our properties to. Berwick Street also has a heritage of fabric and clothes-making shops, and we’ve recently put three fabric stores in. We could just fill these vacancies with fashion businesses and coffee shops, but we don’t feel that that’s the right thing to do. It’s always about getting the balance right; we don’t much like having big chains on the street, and that goes for all our holdings across the West End.”

Shaftesbury PLC also fund the Berwick Street Festival, which takes place on Record Store Day and this year and will feature live performances from John Cooper Clarke, Young Knives, DJ Yoda and others. “The festival is about promoting the record stores in the area,” says Sophie Oller from Sister (no relation to Sister Ray), who run the event of the day. “There was a boom of shops in the early ’90s and we’ve lost many, so the festival is about celebrating the culture of record stores and drawing attention to the ones left.”

“A lot of people have moved out, not just record stores,” says Sounds Of The Universe’s Nicole McKenzie when asked if gentrification is killing Soho. “And it’s not a sudden thing – I’ve worked here for 10 years and things have been gradually changing, as they have everywhere else in London.”

Phil Barton says, “It’s a lot safer here than it was, and it’s less smelly. But I am worried about the current rate of change. It seems like every building is being knocked down and replaced. Pockets of London – not just Soho – should come under some kind of planning regulation. You can’t blame the developers for making money, because that’s what they’re in business for, but you can look at the planning laws and realise that Berwick Street, Denmark Street and many other places are special and worth preserving.”

He adds that running a record shop in Soho is hard for countless reasons, but chief among them is getting stock in to sell. “Nearly all vinyl gets pressed abroad because the plants in the UK closed years ago,” he says. “We’d be 25 per cent busier if we could get hold of enough records to meet demand.” He admits that Record Store Day exacerbates the problem, and it’s become the key criticism of the day, with even the event’s UK organiser Spencer Hickman telling The Quietus last year: “It puts a huge strain on the industry and it probably puts that strain on the part of the industry that has the least amount of money.”

But stand back from the issue and it seems almost implausible to imagine – a vinyl market in 2015 where demand outstrips supply. Can it last? Last Shop Standing author Graham Jones has his concerns. “I saw an advert in The Sunday Times recently for a building society with a man standing in front of an LP collection – it’s crazy. It does worry me that vinyl won’t remain as popular as it is at the moment, but you have to remember that the shops that have survived – the 10 per cent or thereabouts – are very well established and well run. I see a long-term future for them.”

All markets need new businesses, though, and – for now – opportunities are rife. Fancy, for example, becoming part of the Berwick Street boom? Shaftesbury PLC’s Simon Quayle wants to hear from you. “If there are people out there interested in opening a record store in the area, we’d like to talk to them,” he says. “But there isn’t anybody who wants to at the moment, as far as we’re aware.”

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