Old Dundee Record Shops

Where do we buy music from these days? I can't think of any independent record stores that are around now but at one time record shops were run by local enthusiasts and, when I was aged about 19 or 20 I used to dream of having my own shop, selling quality music with the big advantage that I could listen to music all day long and get paid for it.

Alas, national brands, supermarkets and downloading have all but kicked the little record shop into touch, save for Groucho's which relies on a second-hand market which is thriving in these days of poverty.

Records (that's vinyl to the uninitiated) and record shops used to be like unexplored gold mines just waiting for their treasures to be discovered. The city centre was like a treasure map of record shops. Chalmers & Joy was a little shop the corner of Gellatly Street and Seagate. When you bought an album it would be put in a pink bag with the lettering, "Another Record From Chalmers & Joy". I also remember it had an upstairs bit where all the albums were housed and a large selection of posters could be bought too.

The first album I bought when I started getting into music seriously was "Exotic Birds and Fruit" by Procol Harum. I have no idea why I chose this particular album, as it was not an obvious choice and I hadn't heard songs from it before buying it. I know I did like "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and subsequently bought several other albums by this band so maybe it had something to do with that. I bought this album form John Menzies department store which at that time was at the end of the Murraygate and you entered on the corner in what is now the body shop. They had a large record department upstairs and this would be one stop on my tour of the record shops, and a shortage of cash meant that this was more often than not for browsing purposes rather than buying. I was only 14 at the time so I was getting into buying albums by respected artists at quite an early age and this habit (or musical snobbishness perhaps) has persisted to the present day.

Another shop I visited regularly was Comet in West Henderson's Wynd. Now I don't recall many people talking about this but at one time, Comet had a huge array of hi-fi separates and a record department that sold albums at a significant discount. I can't remember the prices exactly but if an album was costing say £2.99 in John Menzies etc. then at Comet, the same album was selling for £2.49. Not only was this a significant saving to a teenager on a budget, but the big attraction was that Comet was open till 8pm in the evening. It meant that I could indulge my love of music, and drool over the hi-fi equipment on display after school mid-week.

As a young teenager of 14 I was getting I think about £1.50 pocket money a week. I can remember I was on about 40p a week and my grandfather put it up by what seemed like an enormous amount. It thus meant that I could indulge my love of music at Groucho's in the Perth Road to the tune of a second-hand album every week or so. This was usually in cassette form because, a. I didn't have a decent stereo, b. second-hand cassettes were less likely to be damaged whereas second-hand vinyl was often scratched and noisy. The other BIG attraction about Groucho's was that they did custom-made badges. You brought in a little picture and they put it into a badge with a clear cover. For a while everybody seemed to be getting badges made there. Being Mr. Individual I never went for the obvious bands (apart from The Who) and I was to be found with my Steve Hillage and Tubular Bells badges proudly displayed on my Wrangler jacket.

Groucho's has largely become an institution, having opened its first shop on the Perth Road in 1976 (roughly where The Parrot Cafe is now) it moved to the Overgate Centre just along from The Angus Hotel and in 1999 moved to the Nethergate where it is still trading. The vinyl and cassettes have been replaced by CDs and it now has branched out into concert ticket sales, but Groucho's remains an iconic figure in the local record scene.

When I started playing the guitar (at 17) and getting into "authentic" music there was a shop at the bottom of Commercial Street (now a tattoo and piercing place) run by a guy called Rob Adams called BG Forbes. This shop sold lots of jazz and jazz rock music that was stocked by nobody else in the city. Rob, as well as being a shopkeeper, was also a bass player and now works as a music journalist for The Herald.

A bit further back in time was Cathie McCabe's record shop in Reform Street. It was not a shop I went into often as it sold a lot of Scottish music. My main memory is that my gran knew Cathy as apparently they used to work together when my gran worked in a shop in the old Wellgate.

It would be difficult to comment on Dundee Record Shops without mentioning I & N Records at the top of Crichton Street. This place was a bit more mainstream than specialist. My most vivid memory of this shop, from 1979, was not a pleasant one. At that time I had a Saturday job at William Low (Willie Low's) in the Overgate and the manager there asked me to go and purchase copy of Lena Martell's "One Day At A Time." Not what any budding 17 year old rock guitarist wants to be seen doing.