‘Our children will know who we were by our vinyl’: the magic and mayhem of running a record shop
A s a teenager in Leeds in the 1980s, the centre of my universe wasJumbo Records. I bought all my New Order and Smiths singles there. The tiny unit in the Merrion Centre shopping precinct even hosted one of my earliest conversations with a pop star, when Billy Bragg played an in-store gig with loudspeakers on his shoulders. My week was geared around listening to John Peel, reading NME, watching Top of the Pops and heading to Jumbo on a Saturday to pick up the latest vinyl treasure.
“Saturday was like Record Store Day is now, but every week,” remembers Choque Hosein, who worked in Jumbo then. “People queued up for us to open and then they’d be four deep at the counter. One of the most memorable moments was when Blue Monday came out. We were just handing them over the counter in Jumbo bags, one after another. It was the same when Frankie Goes to Hollywood released Relax.”
Today’s Jumbo – which sells everything from rock and pop to dub, electronica and Americana – has a much bigger space in the Merrion than it did back then, but vinyl, CDs and posters still occupy every inch of space. For the run-up to Record Store Day (RSD), I have come back to spend a couple of days working here – filing records, manning the till and talking to staff and customers – to find out what role record shops play now and why they’re proving so resilient.
Despite challenges such as the convenience of Amazon and streaming and an often gloomy narrative around bricks-and-mortar shops, vinyl is selling more now than it has since 1990. There are 426 independent record stores in the UK compared with a record low of 293 in 2012. Eleven are in the Leeds area, although customers aren’t often four deep at the counter. “It is different and you don’t always get
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