Vinyl For The Masses

In the period covered by this blog there were no MP3s, digital downloads or filesharing. And CDs? Even in the late 1980s they were a rare and expensive sight in Jersey. Vinyl was the standard format, and its purchase was very much a part of the regular Saturday shopping ritual for the island's younger generation.

To fulfil this need to purchase music there were a number of record shops in St. Helier. Some were busier than others, some were cooler than others, all of them are now gone;   

Boots, Queen Street.

Still a department store today, Boots used to have a music section on their first floor with probably the second largest selection of albums on the island. At its peak it took up around a third of the total upstairs floorspace.

When you stepped through the door at the top of the stairs you were immediately faced with five or six parallel rows of shelving, mostly vinyl, stretching two thirds of the width of the shopfloor. One row was for cassette albums, another for blank cassettes and assorted recording accessories, the rest for vinyl albums.

Facing the door, stretched along the far wall, was the counter, behind which was suspended a large board showing that week's singles chart. Boots used their own chart rather than the official national chart, which I never understood because Boots chart virtually mirrored the official chart anyway. There were some singles in racks on the counter, with the rest stored behind the counter. Next to the counter, taking up the left hand corner of the room, was an assortment of record players, radios and cassette players.

The non-chart vinyl album selection in Boots, although large, was quite middle-of-the-road. Lots of 1970s LPs in the style of John Denver and Joan Armatrading. In comparison their non-chart cassette album selection consisted largely of modern and recent releases.

Boots began to be reduced their music section in size during the 1990s. When I last saw it in the latter part of that decade it had shrunk to occupy just a tiny corner to the right hand side of the door, an area literally no more than maybe 20 feet square, consisting of one small shelving space of CDs, an even smaller space for blank tapes, and the rest was computer games.


Woolworths, Queen Street.
 
Just a couple of minutes walk along the precinct from Boots was Woolworths. A large area of their ground floor was taken up by the music department, the islands' biggest and most popular.

If you walked through the Halkett Place entrance a small counter faced you on the far wall, roughly where the escalators are now located (there was no public upper floor at the time). Multiple rows of shelving of vinyl albums were to the left of this, taking up almost a third of the floorspace of that side of the room. The 7" singles were on shelving immediately to the left of the counter, with the 12" singles running further along the wall next to them, beyond which were the blank cassettes and accessories.

Woolworth's non-chart album selection was a good mix of modern/recent releases and older albums which (unlike Boots' back catalogue) came from the more relevant and energetic end of the 1970s, Classic Rock and early Punk. They also had a large selection of similarly diverse non-chart cassettes.
 
Woolworths was certainly the busiest of the island's record retailers. They were also the first in the island I recall entirely replacing their vinyl stock with CDs.

The early 1990s saw Woolworths music department reduced radically in size and relocated to a different section of the shop, in this case moving next to the right-hand window at the Halket Place entrance. Initially the music section took up most of  that corner of the shop, from the front window to the rear of the room,  but within a handful of years had been trimmed down to a single row of shelving for CDs, with a heavy focus upon budget-priced compilations.
 
In those final few years the music department seemed to exist almost as an afterthought, an audio equivalent of those shelves by supermarket tills which hold magazines and sweets in the hope of squeezing some casual cash from you at the last minute before you exit the shop.

Woolworths is now gone. The building is today occupied by New Look, a clothing retailer.

 
 Lady Jane, Queen Street.

The site of this shop has long since been demolished, replaced by the building which today houses the clothing retailer Next. The earlier building had a wide enclosed passageway leading from King Street through to Hilgrove Street. This was a shopping arcade with retail units on either side of the passage. A set of stairs led to a basement level where Lady Jane could be found, this would roughly have been where the lift is today located in Next.

The shop itself was relatively small, probably about half the size of the newsagents which faces the current building. Most of their stock was albums. I don't remember them stocking singles and they had very few cassettes. 

It was one of those record shops which attracted bored kids like bees to honey. At weekends during the early 1980s there were always groups of them (usually Skinheads or Mods) hanging around in the passageway outside or loitering on the stairs. The music often used to boom from the shop so loudly that it could be heard by passers-by in Queen Street, causing the Police to periodically warn them to turn it down. Lady Jane was the kind of shop where anybody over the age of 25 would feel out of place.

 If I remember rightly, they were the last St. Helier music shop to remain with shelves full of vinyl albums when every other retailer had switched over to CDs. They shut down during the middle of the 1990s, a few years after which the building was demolished.


Alternative Three, Burrard Street.
 
Ostensibly this was an "alternative" clothing shop, with rows and rows of Punk, Metal and Skinhead T-shirts, studded belts, biker jackets etc. At the very rear of the shop there was what was almost a passage stretching off to the left hand side, only wide enough for a couple of people to stand shoulder to shoulder. This was painted completely black and dimly lit, and probably not much more than 20 feet long.

Either side of this passage were racks of albums by punky-indie bands like Alien Sex Fiend, Peter And The Test Tube Babies and The Southern Death Cult. There was also a small selection of bootlegs of the more mainstream Punk and Rock acts, for which they used to charge an average of £20 per LP. That probably doesn't sound too pricey these days given the cost of some CDs, but bear in mind during the late 1980s a regular chart album would on average retail for below £5.00.

At the weekend Alternative Three was intimidating to enter unless you were one of the Punk crowd. I'm talking old school Punk, heavy boots, bondage trousers, skuzzy leathers, studded wristbands and spikey hair. The kind that frighten small children and old people.

In common with most of the other retailers listed here Alternative Three went out of business in the 1990s. I suppose their target customer base was so limited that when Jersey's alternative youth culture began to fade away, so did the shop's income. They were too locked into the "counter-culture" trend and failed to move with the times.

The bulding is now occupied by Carpets For You, but uniquely amongst the other independant record dealers listed here the front of the shop has not physically altered since its music retail days


Unknown Number 1, corner of Hilgrove Strett and Bath Street.

Just next to the corner of Hilgrove Street and Bath Street was another record shop, the name of which I can't remember. Today the site is occupied by a modern building, a branch of Mcdonalds, but back in the 1980s the site was taken up by a couple of Georgian or Victorian buildings. A Wedding shop made the corner where the two roads meet, next door to which was the record shop. 

The door of the record shop was approximately where Mcdonalds entrance is today. You couldn't see into the shop through the windows, which always seemed to have Jazz or Classical albums in their display. A couple of steps led from the street to the door.

I suppose width-ways the shop took up roughly half the floorspace of Mcdonalds ground floor. The till was slightly off to the left of the rear wall facing the front door, and would have been somewhere inside what today is the kitchen of Mcdonalds.

I remember this shop as being very dark inside, but in a distinctly old fashioned way, not a trendy "underground" way. There was no colourful modern promotional material displayed or loud music played, it was very staid, very reserved. Their focus seemed to be upon the much older generation.

Three or four rows of long shelves of albums stretched from the front of the shop towards the small till, which was at the rear of the shop facing the door.  The stock was mostly classical music. They did sell 12" chart singles (in a small A - Z section next to the right hand side of the door), but I don't remember them stocking the 7" variety.
 
I have no idea when exactly they closed down but I'd guess it was the very early 1990 when CDs starting taking off, as that's a format I never recall them stocking.

Some time around the start of that decade the shop closed, and some time around the middle the building was demolished and replaced by Mcdonalds.


Unknown Number 2, Halkett Place.

The second record shop the name of which I cannot recall was a couple of minutes walk away from the previous shop, where Halkett Place meets Beresford Street. It was above what today is Joe Jennings (which at the time was an electrical shop) in what is currently the Elan Hair Studio.

At that time the entrance to the electrical shop was set back from the road by about 15 feet, alcove-style, side-on to the street. Access to the record shop was through a small door next to this, facing the street, up a cramped and twisty set of stairs barely wide enough for one person.
 
This was a very small shop carrying a limited selection, and it was an odd selection at that. They stocked a lot of 12" import singles which would have been a premium price in any other European record store, double or even triple the cost of a standard issue 12" single. This shop somehow managed to price them at only slightly more than Woolworths charged for a regular 12" chart single. Some of what they sold as normal stock was quite rare, as I later discovered when Ebay came along!

I don't remember much about the layout of the shop other than it had the 12" singles at the top of the stairs by the window. I can't even remember what year they went out of business, but I'd hazard a guess it was the tail end of the 1980s.


The Music and Video Exchange, La Motte Street.

From the middle of the 1980s until the beginning of the 21st Century this was the island's only used music retailer, and as such offered an incredibly extensive and varied selection of albums and singles from all genres and decades. It was also probably the largest in terms of square footage of the independant music retailers.

The shop was entered through a door which was set slightly back from the road, side-on to la Motte Street. On the left as you entered were a selection of albums running beside the window. Between the door and wall was a section of 1960s singles, and along the wall itself were 1970s singles. To the right of the latter was a long counter which caused something of a bottle-neck in the middle of the shop. Opposite the counter was wall shelving holding a mixture of computer games and portable stereo/hi-fi type equipment. Sometimes there would be musical instruments or amplifiers for sale.

After passing the counter the rear of the shop opened out into a full-sized room. On the wall directly to the right-hand side of the till was a small selection of cassette albums, the rest of the room was devoted entirely to vinyl albums, stored in A-Z fashion in shelving running the entirety of each wall and taking up the centre of the room.

If you collected older vinyl and didn't mind a few scratches it  was often possible to pick up for something like 50 pence an album which new elsewhere would have cost you a few pounds.

The big negative side of The Music and Video Exchange was their price stickers, which seemed to be almost superglued onto the album sleeves. It was impossible to remove them without tearing or damaging the cover. I can only assume they used such destructive and stubborn stickering as a way of knowing when they were being sold back their old stock, because it did the customer no favours.

When purchashing used music they tended to offer quite unimpressive prices for vinyl (usually pennies unless you had something rare) and a better rate for exchange. When CDs were selling on the island for an average of £10 new, this shop was offering an average of £1 per disc as a buyer, selling them on average for £5 to £7.

The Music and Video Exchange had an exceptionally good run, but ultimately it went the way of other local vinyl retailers. They failed to latch on to the used CD market in place of vinyl, and the vinyl which made up the bulk of their stock was of zero interest to the majority of the public - or to the shops' previous vinyl-era customer-base, most of whom had gone digital. The shop closed in the very early 2000's. Two smaller seperate shops currently occupy the space.


The timeframe of the closure of some of these shops would certainly seem to reflect upon how the arrival of the CD impacted the local music retail market. Some of the smaller businesses closed down as CDs took hold because clearly they couldn't afford to "reboot" themselves and compete with the buying power of Boots and Woolworths for the new format. Ironically the latter pair themselves eventually suffered as a new breed of independants opened up devoted entirely to selling CDs, the snappily named Compact Disc Center, the even more snappily named CD Centre (later to be cheesily renamed Invibes), and a place in Sand Street who's name I'm not sure of (possibly the supremely unmusical sounding Beasants?).

As time marched on and pushed us deeper into the age of digital downloads and online buying, all of those independant CD retailers have faded into memory exactly like their vinyl predecessors. Some of the bigger names have collapsed too. WH Smith and HMV, who arrived as CD retailers at the tail end of the 1990s, are continuing to soldier on, but for how much longer one can only guess.

And when Jersey's final CD retailer is gone, what's going to take their place on the streets of St. Helier in a future of music retail which is increasingly heading into an exclusively downloadable direction?

Nothing.



Footnote; Honorable Mentions

A few of St. Helier's record shops from before my time. If you know of any more please add a comment with the info, thanks.

F. Foot

Opened some time around the turn of the last century, Foot's was located in Dumaresq Street, on the corner where the small lane leads up to Charing Cross. Although the shop closed down before many of today's islanders were born, its remains well known due to the fading old-style HMV mural decorating the side wall.

Foot's stocked gramphones, musical instruments and records (which on the evidence of some vintage promotional material I've seen included Jazz and Big Band music).

Sound Engineering 

I know only of the existence of this shop from a photograph taken in the early 1973. The building was located at either 379 or 373 Bath Street, now demolished, two doors down from where the corner meets Phillips Street (where today one of the RBS banking buildings stands). In the photograph a window display can be seen advertising chart singles.