Friday 2 December 2022

"Excuse me - do you sell records here?"

 By way of light relief as these dismal Winter days close in on us I’d like to take you to a time and place – a very specific time and place.  It's 1987 and it’s an independent record shop - sound good?  Maybe you’re imagining a rather poky but inviting establishment in a creaky old building - dimly lit with its walls papered in cool, eye-catching posters, a slight, oddly alluring smell of damp emanating from its alcoves, and every available space filled with racks of promising vinyl delights through which you could rummage for hours…

I’m so sorry to disappoint you.  Those were the kind of record shops I’d like to visit but the one I actually worked in during the mid-'80s was somewhat different.  Imagine instead a fairly open area, I suppose it would be called a ‘retail unit’, on the first floor of a busy modern shopping centre.  Harshly lit and with its high walls painted bright green, it was sited next to the pedestrian entrance of a multi-storey car park and right opposite the public toilets.  Ooh, a prime location!  But, for all the less than joyous aspects of working there, it was for the most part an interesting, quite enviable job and the staff were great.  We were great to each other and we were great to all the lovely, enthusiastic, friendly, genuine customers with their hunger for Creation label singles and obscure reissues, etc., who thankfully outnumbered a fair few rude and difficult arseholes we also had to serve (or occasionally kick out).  It was hard to be great to them.  But what none of them, not the nice ones nor the nasty ones, ever knew, was that we also kept notes of some of the items our customers asked for. 

Honestly, you need some little amusing highlights when you’ve been on your feet all day in a petrol-infused draught handing over copies of the latest Phil Collins album to a seemingly endless queue on a busy Saturday, so please forgive us.  Really, we weren’t being scornful or sniggering or unkind. We just… well…we just needed a few quiet laughs away from the demands at the counter. (I'm sure this goes on in more shops than we'd care to imagine.)  So we started keeping a list of the most delightful requests, a list that ended up running into several pages.  The thing with these requests was that they weren’t quite right – they were the misheard song titles, confused artist names, wrongly remembered albums (amid other enquiries about TDK chromosome tapes and replacements for faulty "kinky" records.)   As I always loved drawing it was just impossible to resist putting together a few visuals too so, a short while before I left my job there back in 1987, I picked out some of my favourites and compiled them into an A5 booklet with some silly little accompanying illustrations, and named it, ‘Excuse Me – Do You Sell Records Here?’  Incredibly, that had been a genuine question too.

35 years later and, amazingly, I’ve still got the booklet. So, if you'd like to, please travel back with me to the mid-1980s and take up your position as a sales assistant in that record shop, and see what you would make of some of these requests.  Here are some of those depictions with only the mistaken titles/names a customer actually used when asking for them.  Please feel free to suggest what they should be  - they're hopefully not too hard!

















18 comments:

  1. Oh, this is brilliant. Predictably I rather like Hatfield Hollow, whilst there is something of Viz about Ashford & Simpson and, especially, Mr Mister. Wilma Houston is very good too.

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    1. I thought you might appreciate 'Hatfield Hollow', which does at least sound feasible! Please don't pay too much attention to the crappy little pics but it's the customers I have to thank for the inadvertent inspiration. I mean, who could think that that Ashford & Simpson song was called 'Soiled'? - and yet someone really did. Soiled, soiled as a rock.

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    2. Oh, I think the pics are great. Broken Heads is terrific.

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    3. Ah thanks Martin. Any idea who they are? ;-)

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  2. This is just what I needed at the end of a stressful week - you are so clever, and these are just so funny.

    Think my fave is Jammy Bee Hive but love them all. Lots of bottoms! I think this is an idea that could be published - perfect as a Christmas stocking filler for those of us of a certain age.

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    1. Oh thanks for your kind words, Alyson - glad to have brought some light relief and very sorry to hear you've had another stressful week. Hope you can relax a bit now it's the weekend.
      Sometimes working there was like being a detective - e.g. deciphering 'Jammy Bee Hive' into 'Yah Mo B There'. And I don't know why I always drew naked bottoms, they could just have easily been clothed but that never crossed my mind for some reason...
      Ooh, nice idea about a stocking filler pressie, might need to collaborate with a few other ex record shop staff!

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  3. Saturday morning made! Thank you, C.

    John Medd

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    1. Ah thanks John - really we have the great record-buying public to thank for it! But glad to have been able to pass it on :-)

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  4. Haha! These are tremendous C. Brilliant Toes nearly made me spit my coffee all over the screen!
    I should start a similar list for off the wall comments made in the aisles of a 21st century supermarket. A recent example was a customer, whose opening line to me as I replenished the crumpets was '...excuse me, do you work here, or are you just putting stuff on shelves...?'

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    1. Ha, excellent! There's clearly a plague of rogue shelf-fillers out there, you just can't be too careful these days. At least the general public can always be relied upon to provide some free entertainment from time to time; I do of course include myself in there, god knows what daft things I may have said or asked for...

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  5. Oh, I love this post so much! Great recollections of your days working in the record shop and the illustrations are brilliant and made me laugh out loud (shocking the dozing cat in the process).

    I spent a few years working in a call centre and a bunch of us would relieve the boredom by doodling on the printed call schedules and daring each other to insert the strangest, most incongruous word into the largely scripted conversations. A horrible job at the time but all I remember now is the fun and laughter we had getting through each day!

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    1. Ah, thanks Khayem, glad to have given you a laugh!
      I love the idea of inserting some unexpected words into a scripted call centre conversation. It must be hard working in one of those places, you have to get your kicks where you can... glad to know you could help the day go faster in such an inventive way. Now also wondering if I've ever been on the receiving end of that kind of call - the only thing I can remember is once answering an opinion poll type call and, amid all the serious and predictable questions, the caller suddenly asked me what my shoe size was!

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  6. Oh, C, that is fantastic. I would have bought a copy and sent you a fan letter demanding more, back when I was producing my own little photocopied comics and zines. (Yours looks better than anything I did!) How wonderful. The guys in Hi Fidelity would have loved this too.

    Thanks for sharing.

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    1. Oh thanks, Rol - I would certainly have been chuffed to get a fan letter from you! But I only made enough copies for staff in a few branches (and a sneaky one that went to nice girl who worked for the other side - i.e. Our Price). I love that you were producing your own comics and zines back then too - judging by your more recent output I have no doubt they'd have been superb. Any chance of seeing some snippets? No idea how we found the time to be so painstakingly creative back then. Oh yes I do - no internet.

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