What's in Store?

"Do I hear 25 quid?"

I very rarely mention Record Store Day around here; maybe it's something to do with the very fact that we now refer to them as stores; I was brought up with (and, for a time, virtually lived in) record shops. Quite when we changed the lexicon (and why) is unclear. Am I being petty/churlish? Probably. Can I move on and not let it spoil the rest of my life? Of course.

But while I'm here, and while RSD19 is still, for some anyway, fresh in the mind, another thing that annoys the hell out of me - folk queuing thru the night to enter the store at 9:00 a.m. and buy a single by, let's say Generation X, for a fiver (red vinyl, picture sleeve) and, by eleven bells, are selling it on ebay for a score. Probably the same charlatans who buy four tickets for a gig, keep two and sell the other pair on the secondary market. We are the secondary market and everyone is now a tout - since venues stopped selling their own tickets exclusively and it all went online.

I don't know what Tony James (bass player with Gen X - pictured above) would have to say about it. Though he's probably too busy preparing for the re-release of the band's eponymous album - first released in the Summer of 1978. Back when the hair atop his head was all very much his own.

Generation X - Your Generation (1977)

The day after the Lord Mayor's Show

Like the puppy given as a present on Christmas Day, your record store needs you to be there for it the other 364 days in the year; just because the lines started forming in the early hours of Saturday morning and resembled war time ration queuing by opening time, I'm guessing that, once inside, you could swing a few cats around today.

For the record, I pitched up at Jumbo Records in downtown Leeds. Dodgy, everyone's favourite comeback kids, played an exquisite 40 minute sent on the top deck of an identikit shopping centre; a perfect warm up for next week's gig at The Lexington in London's swinging Islington.

They were well received, even though the slack-jaws on the escalators wired to their i-Pods couldn't work out why anyone would want to take an hour out of their day and watch (free) live music.

I shelled out for a copy of Stand Upright In A Cool Place on which Matthew, Andy and Nigel were good enough to scrawl their monikers. An enjoyable afternoon was had by all.