The World’s Smallest Record Shop only exists on one or two days a year.
It has no permanent sign, and even when it’s open, you have to look carefully to spot it. Most of the time it just looks like an ordinary North London house. There’s a short flight of steps up to the front door, and beneath these, three steps lead down to another door under the staircase, giving acces to the lower level that in many houses of this design is a separate basement flat – but not this one.
In this house, the lower level is a recording studio. And on Record Store Day, the space just behind the door – the tiny lobby before the entrance to the studio – is the official shop of Ample Play Records.
Ample Play is run by Tjinder Singh and his wife Marie Rémy. In the 1990s Tjinder found fame with the band Cornershop, playing a unique blend of Indian and Indie beats. Fatboy Slim’s remix of their hit Brimful of Asha spent a while at number one in 1998.
Cornershop are still recording music in Tjinder’s basement. But on top of that, Ample Play signs young new bands from across a broad spectrum both musically and geographically. Last time I visited the World’s Smallest Record Shop, I stocked up on a couple of albums from Sudden Death of Stars – a French psychedelic band who take a wire wool scrubbing brush to my musical preferences and remind me how I felt when I saw bands in low-ceilinged clubs in my teens.
Having been through the mill themselves, Tjinder and Marie provide nurture and care for the bands they manage, pointing out the traps that are obvious once you’ve already sprung them, giving advice learned the hard way.
Talking to Tjinder and Marie, I quickly realise that the DIY indie network, the cottage industry of labels, distributors, shops and marketers which I thought had disappeared when the biggest stars of indie became mainstream in the 1990s, is still as vibrant as it ever was, if not moreso. People record, design, market and distribute records often in their spare time. Social media and YouTube channels enhance the role of the few DJs who follow in John Peel’s footsteps. Festivals are more popular than ever, giving any band the chance to break through to a bigger audience overnight.
Record Store Day is a perfect example of this independent spirit. In 2007, 700 independent record stores in the US, quickly followed by the UK. The eighth UK Records Store Day happens on 18th April, and sees special releases on vinyl and CD, and live appearances by bands in record stores across the country.
As vinyl sales hit an eighteen year-high, it’s clear that, just as in beer, while the mainstream may be moving towards homogenised, corporate blandness, the reaction against it at grassroots level is dramatic and thriving.
Social media and technology have created one global marketplace where the big players can consolidate and grow ever larger, where bands can go from obscurity to being name checked by prime ministers within weeks. Friends in the music industry never tire of telling me that all the arguments we’re now having about the meaning of craft beer are almost word-for-word identical to the debate about ‘real indie’ versus the mass-produced, corporately-backed ‘landfill indie’ of a decade ago.
If you grew up as a non-digital native, it can sometimes seem as if the magic – gone, the sense of discovery, the feeling that you’re in on a secret – has gone. If you grew up getting your tips from the music press, you’re no doubt disillusioned that even the like of NME and Q read more like Smash Hits these days.
But the reality is that social media has also allowed the underground, the alternative, the truly indie, to flourish entirely away from the gaze of the mainstream. Disparate fans around the world can easily come together online to form communities and give fledgling bands, labels, radio stations and video channels the audience they need.
Record Store Day may be a rare day when this scene pokes its head above ground and attracts broader public attention. But it heartens me to know that neofolk, French psych, Japanese new romantic and Brazilian ghetto tech are thriving, and available at a record shop near me – even if it does exist only on 18th April.
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