Smelling the records at Streetlight. Memories of buying records on a Saturday morning

My parents used to get to the weekly shopping every Saturday morning, they liked to catch the shops before they got busy. Around 1973 I got 50p pocket money a week, and that was just enough to buy a single. Having just been entrusted with the huge responsibility of being able to spend 50p of my own money each week, the only thing I ever wanted to buy was records.

When I started buying records on a Saturday morning, they looked like the one above. I remember they went up to 53p a week due to the high 1970's inflation rates and I had to wait two weeks before getting one single, very annoying. So Saturday morning shopping time began to be associated with record buying around 1973 and it continued to be so, for a large number of years. I'd buy the record in the morning, gaze at it in the car on the way home, then rush upstairs to play it when I got home.

I love the 1970's record sleeves. I searched high and low through images on the internet of my favorite cover. It was the RCA paper cover that they had before they started using the one above. I remember it was very psychedelic, actually probably a little out of date by the time the early-mid 1970's came along, so I guess that's why they replaced it with this swirly design. But I loved the earlier one. I associate it with the incredible excitement of buying my first single, which was "Teenage Rampage" by "The Sweet". "Teenage Rampage" indeed, I was only 6! I dropped it just before I bought it, I can still picture it rolling on the floor, so it always had a crack in it that I had to smooth out before I played it. I can still hear in my mind, the beginning of Teenage Rampage with the little "click" that the crack in the record caused.

I used to buy my singles in Boots in Inverness. This is me outside of Boots in Inverness the last time I was in the city, although the photo is a bit of a cheat, the original was pulled down at the end of the 1970's. This is the new Boots which is part of the indoor shopping centre that was built on top of the old one.

Record Rendevous was just down the road from Boots, in Castle Street Inverness. I don't remember buying much here in the '70's, apart from "Whispering Grass" by "Don Estelle and Windsor Davis". Not as cool as "Teenage Rampage" ("I will not have gossip in this Jungle...."). I remember pronouncing "Record Rendevous" exactly as it was spelt, I had no idea it was a French word. There were always loads of Gaelic and Scottish country dancing records there. I remember being told that the local Gaelic community used to hang around there, I never saw them. This is poor old "Record Rendevous", obviously in it's last days in 2006. I'm glad I caught it on camera just before it went for good.


For reasons I'm not really sure about, I bought less records in the late 1970's and very early 1980's, I was probably too obsessed with science fiction at that time. But as the early '80's rolled on, the shop above became my Saturday morning ritual. I just found out actually that one of the guys in one of the bands I featured in www.kirkcaldybands.com, the Receiving End, worked here. This is Sleeves record store in kirkcaldy. I think it was called "Bruces Records" before it was called "Sleeves", I remember the bin outside still said "Bruces Bin". It was part of a little chain of record shops. I think there were three of them, I remember another was in Falkirk, I can't remember where the third one was. Towards the end of my school days, carrying around a bag with a vinyl album in it in a Sleeves bag, was almost compulsory, if you wanted to be cool. I remember being told off my one of my peers for carrying around a record in Boots bag, seems the Boots habit hadn't quite died.

Towards the middle of the 1980's I remember getting as much as 5 pounds pocket money a week, so one, or maybe depending how cheap they were, two records a week was possible. And as I could now afford albums, I didn't have to listen to the same thing over and over again on a Saturday afternoon. I bought loads of records here. I used to go in and browse and dream that one day I'd have enough money to buy as many records as I wanted. Although looking back I'm glad in a way that I didn't. Some of my musical taste is the same now as it was in the 1980's, some is very different. I'm not sure I really needed to spend money buying every Barclay James Harvest and Moody Blues records.

The ritual was pretty much the same though. Buy the record (always now an album) on a Saturday morning and listen to it on a Saturday afternoon. I don't have my 1980's diaries here, but I recall a diary entry made around May 1984 that said "bought and listened to for most of the day, Pavlov's Dog's "At the sound of the bell"". Now that's one I still listen to.

The above moody black and white shot was taken for the "Kirkcaldy Gallery" page of the original Kirkcaldy Bands website. It was taken in 2000.

Sadly, when I walked down from the train station towards the High Street in May 2004, I noticed Sleeves was empty and looked like it would soon be no more. So I took this shot with my then camera phone. It's obvious why I needed a new camera phone!


My first paying job in September 1986 was in an office block in a place called "Apex House", Leith Walk, Edinburgh. Opposite and up the road slightly was "Vinyl Villains" one of Edinburgh's premier second hand record stores. I think my first pay check was around 200 pounds. When I got it I went straight over to Vinyl Villans and bought 70 pounds worth of records. Thirteen years on from buying my first record, I obviously still thought money was just for buying records with. Vinyl Vllains was great, I hope it's still there. I bought tons of records there. Because it was a second hand place you were never sure what you were going to find there. I remember the excitement as I used to find, what was then, rare Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator albums. One seemed so rare to me that I remember asking the guy to go and hide it behind the counter so that no one bought it when I went off to get money to buy it.


As the '80's turned into the '90's I still bought records, although I switched manly to CDs in the '90's. I still frequented music stores, mainly HMV and Virgin in Edinburgh's Princes St and HMV in Swindon's Regent St.

I got into online music buying very early. One of the constant frustrations of having musical taste that is not the average, was the lack of availability of material I liked in the regular music stores. So, having discovered "CD Now" which was one of the earliest on line stores and realising that you could just search for anything you wanted, I pretty much gave up on record stores after that, especially as the '2000's got going and I saw how amazingly cheap second hand CDs were on eBay and Amazon. The above pic is actually eBay's corporate headquarters, which is just down the road.

One of the huge problems of being a music fan in the '70's, '80's and '90's was the comparatively huge cost of music. No wonder illegal downloading for free got so popular. But with all these second hand CD's around, it seemed a lifetime away from being only able to afford one single every two weeks because they had gone up to 53p.

Having watched "24 hour party people" on the plane over to the UK last time I was there, and with the Ian Curtis biopic due out, I wanted to buy some Joy Division music. I was just about to reach for the iBook to buy them from Amazon, when I decided that I wanted to hear them today.

So then a radical idea struck me, why not go to a record store? And how more appropriate, I could buy then on a Saturday morning 34 years after I had first done this, and listen to them on a Saturday afternoon. So this is where I was today, Streetlight Records in Bascom Avenue in San Jose.

I remember first seeing that in America they put the CDs in these funny plastic holders to stack them in the racks in the stores on our many rummages through the record stores of Manhattan when we were in New York in 1990. I still have no idea why they do that.

Streetlight of course has tons of vinyl. I don't even have a record player at the moment, it's in storage in Edinburgh, so I didn't buy any. But they look great in the rack, much better than the CDs. I even picked up a second hand record and smelled it, took me right back to Vinyl Villains in 1986, somehow the old cardboard of the record covers smells great to me. Must be nostalgia.

I always used to straight to the "V" section in record stores, being a huge Van der Graaf Generator, Violent Femmes and Velvet Underground fan. I used to have to push past all the Eddie Van Halen to find the decent stuff.

Like often, and this is why I went so overboard on on line buying when I could, there was not even a Van der Graaf Generator section, but there was one old friend here today.




I didn't even know that they made vinyl records any more, other than the sort that DJ's use for "scratching", if that's the right hip term. So I was amazed to see this. I wish I had a record player now. This will probably explain where Marketa's songs are that are in the Movie but not "Swell Season".

So having bought the three Joy Division and one Ramones CD in Streetlight records this morning I have spent all this afternoon listening to what I bought this morning. Just like before, it's yesterday once more.