Wednesday 3rd February

I discovered my first second hand record shop in Carnaby Street of all places, or actually a side road just off it.  This was in the early Seventies, I was working the other side of Regent Street in Hanover Street and was exploring the West End in my lunch breaks.  I was also listening to all sorts of new music and reading Time Out and City Limits and hearing about all sorts of new Bands and Artists.  But I was quite poor at the time and couldn’t afford to buy a fraction of the records I heard about.  And this shop became a Mecca for me.  I would spend a pound buying a couple of second hand records of Artists I had just read about, take them home and tape them on my new cassette recorder, diligently writing out all the titles and reading the words as the record played.  Then I would rewind and make sure I had a good copy; it was actually quite tricky as you had to lower the stylus at exactly the right spot and then release the pause button and make sure you didn’t miss the first few seconds of track one, all too often I would miss the end of side one too and have to rewind the cassette ready to record side two.

A few days later I would return with the records I had taped and would get about half what I had paid as a credit against my next purchase.  So, in a few years I was building up a large tape collection at a fraction of the cost of buying brand new Albums from HMV, not that I didn’t buy any new records, I was still buying my very favourite Artists as new L.P.s.   Then in the mid-eighties I started buying CDs, and despite reports of indestructibility these were easily scratched, so I used to tape these too and play the cassettes.  I kept visiting second hand record shops but was now buying CD singles of new bands and also quite a few of my favourites; in those days with four tracks on a CD single bands would often release rarities or live tracks or strange remixes on their CD singles.  Many second hand shops would sell these for less than a pound, and I would build up cassette tapes of CD singles by the same artist.

Nowadays I am slowly re-buying on CD many of those records I bought and taped and resold again as I slowly listen to my old cassette tapes.  I very rarely go to second hand record shops these days though, but even in Charity shops I often flick through the CDs and occasionally and very rarely I find a gem I had been seeking out for ages.