Dedication's What You Need

When I was 16 I decided that I should buy records whenever possible instead of cassettes or CDs (for younger readers, records are large black CDs that you play with a needle and break if you even look at them funny). Way back in the early 90s, vinyl was still relatively easy to get your hands on and I quite often rode my penny farthing to the local record shop to pick up some new releases.

Squalid Sounds, as I have mentioned in earlier blogs, was a regular haunt. They didn't have that much vinyl, so it was necessary to find other outlets. A stall on Darlington Market twice a week had an absolute ton of records, all of them second hand. Some great stuff was bought there, but proper record collectors (stuck-up arseholes) would have been horrified to see the state of some of the sleeves with tears, holes and even (horror of horrors) coffee stains.
A really popular place in Darlington for me and my friend Mike Death was Aardvark Records, which was curiously situated on a parade of shops on a housing estate on the outskirts of the town. The guy who ran it had an immense beard and looked like he never washed, but he was a great bloke who would also buy pretty much any unwanted records you wanted to offload. I say 'pretty much any', but he wouldn't touch Mike's Europe album with a shitty stick. That ended up getting smashed up in my bedroom after we'd used it as a frisbee (alcohol may have been in the picture that day). He had by far the biggest selection of metal albums I'd ever seen, but sadly he went out of business before I was 18. This shouldn't have come as a shock to me as I'd never seen another customer in the place.
There were a ton of places in other towns we used to travel to for record purchasing - regular pilgrimages were made to shops in Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Leeds - but the most popular was a place in even-crappier-little-town-than-Darlington, Bishop Auckland. I don't remember what the shop was called, but I spent hundreds of pounds there over the course of 4 or 5 years. I was such a regular customer that the owner even gave me an album he deemed "too offensive" to display (it was by Unsane and had a picture of a recently decapitated man on the cover). I imagine he went out of business eventually, too.
About 5 years ago, my mother badgered me to move my records from her flat, so I sold everything to a couple of record shops in Newcastle for about £200 (funnily enough, some of the records were originally bought in one of them). I could have got more for them selling them individually on eBay, but that's my own stupidity. At least I'd bought everything I really couldn't live without on CD by this point (I've since sold all those as well). Nowadays the only record shops I visit are iTunes (rip-off merchants) and eMusic (less-of-a-rip-off merchants).