Bowie on Selling Vinyl

[sidewinder]

Interesting little article on Bowie's early days working in a Bromley vinyl store here - run by a jazz-head.

Mention too of his sax lessons with Ronnie Ross - tooter alert !

Bowie On Vinyl

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

can u please post the text of this, this site, as many newspaper sites do, crashes my computer

[jazzbo]

So, aged 13, maybe 14, I got my first real big break. Saturday mornings and sometimes Wednesday after school I would dress to impress and style my hair just right before making my way to Bromley South.

It was at Furlongs that I got my first real taste of how things could be. Furlongs was owned and run by a man in his forties who was the perpetual jazzer/college type. New Orleans was his thing.

Furlongs was the record shop. For absolute integrity and a huge stock of jazz, R&B and pure blues, there was nowhere else like it until you reached London itself.

It was here that the power of recorded music struck home. I don’t mean it was where I discovered music (I had already discovered that power through Little Richard and Elvis) — no, it was more how those bits of black plastic could affect other people’s behaviour.

Getting a job behind the counter at Vic’s place, albeit part-time, was enough to boost my cred a hundredfold. It had an effect on the girls — an effect I liked — and, erm, another effect on the boys. Quite a different effect.

A record shop was just about the coolest place one could hang out in back then — perhaps not quite as cool as a coffee bar or the burger-selling innovation known as the Wimpy Bar, but it ran a very close second. People who were “aware” were attracted to record shops.

New releases were the high-light of the week and they usually came out on a Friday. This was not always convenient for me as I wanted to be the first to discover the good stuff. Saturday morning was sometimes too late, but often it wasn’t.

There really was no bigger thrill than telling somebody who needed impressing, “You really have to hear this”, as I pulled out the latest by Nervous Norvis. I quickly realised that to recommend was an intoxicating power and it’s something that gives me a true buzz to this day.

Of course, I could only recommend when I could commandeer the shop’s state-of-the-art turntable. Vic liked to listen to his jazz — Kid Ory and Joe “King” Oliver were big favourites — and he wasn’t particularly bothered if you didn’t much care for it.

We didn’t have listening booths at Furlongs, which was a shame. I spent many a special moment sharing a booth with some sweet young thing in bigger record stores, though this kind of communal listening wasn’t encouraged by shop owners, especially if you weren’t buying. No, sharing a booth was as frowned upon in some quarters as petting at swimming pools. At Furlongs what you played was heard by the entire shop.

I think Vic was more tolerant of me than other kids my age. He probably appreciated my enthusiasm for some of the stuff he played me when the shop was a bit quiet, an enthusiasm that was genuine for the most part.

And I think he was impressed that I had managed to blag a few saxophone lessons from the now late British jazz saxophonist Ronnie Ross, who blew a mean baritone, although trumpet was more Vic’s kind of instrument. As I say, New Orleans was his thing.

Working in a record shop was pretty much a labour of love. It’s more a vocation than a normal job, and I think that holds true today. I’m not comparing it to nursing, but it has to be up there with teaching. My good taste earned the respect of serious music listeners many years older than me.

I earned enough bread to ensure that I was able to buy most of the records I wanted. Around the time I was at Furlongs, 78rpm singles were making way for 45s, a far more convenient format. For a brief while 78s were released by Pye on the same bendy vinyl that was used to manufacture the 45s. I still have a copy of Lonnie Donnegan’s Love is Strange on this format. For a time, some artists would continue to release their records on both formats — 45s were the new thing that seemed to be aimed at my generation; 78s were cumbersome and fragile and, like much of the music contained within their grooves, were beginning to feel a bit redundant to me.

The worst of the bad times for 78s was, of course, damage. It took only the tiniest bump on the bus and the discs would crack. But even worse was meltability. I took some of my best-loved and most played over to the house of one of my best friends, Geof. Looking for a good place to keep them safe, Geof thought the backroom piano was ideal. You know, the piano that is in direct sunlight from the back room window? An hour or so later where once lay a goodly selection of Presley, Domino and Berry now crept a waxy cradle for a bunch of bananas or apples. And 78s not only melt, they also warp.

The 45s were young and fresh, far more manageable and relatively indestructible — claims that would later be repeated for the CD — and which reached their logical conclusion with the MP3.

The very early Sixties was a strange time for British music. There wasn’t much home-grown to write home about. Johnny Kidd threw out a couple of what seemed good ’uns at the time, as did the Shadows, and Fifties skiffle had been a decent enough diversion for the time being.

But I didn’t have to wait too much longer for my imagination to be properly reignited. My hair was growing and good things were waiting just around the corner and down the road a piece.

David Bowie is a regular contributor to the Nokia Music Recommender service. For more exclusive editorial content and to download tracks recommended by independent record stores around the world go to www.musicrecommenders.com

In March I will mostly be listening to...

1 Honeytrap: Mussolini’s Son

2 Charlie Alex March : Francisca’s Theme

3 Tap Tap: 100,000 Thoughts

4 Love Is All: Turn the Radio Off

5 El Perro Del Mar: God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)

6 Charlotte Hatherley: Behave

7 Tiny Masters of Today: Stickin’ It to the Man

8 Fanfarlo: You Are One of the Few Outsiders Who Really Understands Us

9 Cold War Kids: Hang Me Up to Dry (as featured on the 'State of Independence' CD free with this week's Sunday Times)

10 Max Richter: Autumn Music 1

David Bowie