Record shops
Three local shrines to music inside the M25
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In an age when most people listen to music over the internet without owning it, it’s bordering on absurd that there are still places to buy records, cassettes and compact discs. But they live on, and it makes me happy that so many of them are in London.
I like newer record shops, but I prefer this city’s older, more disorderly music repositories. For a while now, my favourite place to buy second-hand records has been Alan’s Records in East Finchley: a room permanently filled beyond capacity and run for decades by the same local legend, whose business has only become more important by refusing to change.
Alan’s is also just a great shop. He sells records you can’t find elsewhere. His stock costs less than it should. And his collection acts as an extension of a proprietor who has spent his life curating it. His is a true neighbourhood business, indivisible from the road it’s on, but a destination too.
One day, I will write or commission the most comprehensive list of London record shops ever published. For now, I want to draw attention to three other community record shops that I’ve heard DJs and collectors in this city talk about.
These businesses operate in the margins, which I think is partly why they’ve managed to stay unique for so long. They remind me of Alan’s – as weird, deeply local, uncompromising places to buy music – but by the same token, each one has its own personality.
Crazy Beat Records
Upminster is in the London borough of Havering, but it has the hallmarks of places beyond the M25. Like the Berkshire tourist town I grew up in, it has a Pizza Express, a Caffè Nero, a parish church, working public loos and a department store with a toy shop on the top floor. If I hadn’t come to Upminster to buy records, they would have been the last thing I expected to find.
I first heard about Crazy Beat in an interview with the DJ and producer Joy Orbison, which was published in Japanese and which I read using Google Translate. “Lately I’ve been thinking that the best record shops are in the suburbs, not in central London,” he told FNMNL. “For example, Crazy Beat Records in Upminster… It’s a collection of records that used to belong to people who were DJs.” After reading this, I thought Crazy Beat might be intimidating, or just for the heads, but when I went last week, it couldn’t have been more welcoming and unpretentious.
When I arrived, the shop speakers were playing “Wait a Minute!” by Willow Smith, followed by other radio-friendly songs by artists like Arctic Monkeys. By the front door, I noticed cuttings from a nine-year-old Romford Recorder article, next to a photo of a local football team sponsored by Crazy Beat and a sleeve for a medley of waltzes that came out in 1957. As I combed through releases by reggae labels like Jet Star and Ballistic Records, before encountering everything from Grateful Dead to MC Skibadee to Lauryn Hill, this shop’s philosophy became clear to me.
When I went to pay for a copy of Autumn Leaves by Bill Evans, I asked the guy behind the counter about his place of work. He told me that the shop had been around for almost 40 years and used to be more about genres like jazz and reggae. He said that over the years, different staff with different tastes had started to make their mark on the shopfloor, introducing new specialisms and giving each section its rich, hand-picked feel.
I told him I’d come here mainly after hearing about its classic house and UK garage selection, and he said those genres were among the shop’s biggest sellers these days. As backroom staff shuffled around behind him, he said Crazy Beat had over 100,000 items for sale on Discogs, and that the stock online is distinct from what they sell in-store. (In Upminster, you can browse over 10,000 CDs and records that aren’t available on Crazy Beat’s Discogs.) I asked him if the founder still worked there. “Yeah,” he said. “We can’t get him out of his chair.”
While I was browsing, I noticed a younger woman at a computer and a middle-aged guy in a plaid shirt and a cap with a large stack of records, working through them at a listening station. I thought they were collectors at first, but after they stepped behind the counter, I realised they were cataloguing material. Crazy Beat is a beautifully well-oiled machine, and I imagine its extensive online shop is a big part of why its physical one can exist today.
87 Corbets Tey Rd, Upminster RM14 2AH