the lost art of browsing

Whilst out on my lunchtime walk I found myself strolling along Baddow Road past where one of my favourite record shops, Slipped Discs II, used to be. What a shame it no longer exists.

In Chelmsford it was truly the last of its kind. A delightfully ramshackle building, a happy place that Health and Safety would have hated, with uneven floors, poor lighting and steps where you least expected them. It was the sole survivor of a breed of independent record shops that flourished between the 1950s and the 1980s, but struggled as the 1990s gave way to the new millennium in the face of internet shopping and supermarkets selling super cut price albums.  

When I started buying records at the tail end of the 1970s, Chelmsford was well equipped with record stores. Serious music supplier James Dace had two shops, with the one in High Chelmer selling instruments and sheet music downstairs and a surprisingly solid selection of classical, jazz and rock records upstairs. Although it was never fashionable, Dace’s was a valuable source of really obscure singles for years - I picked up David Bowie’s 1979 single “Alabama Song” still with the extremely rare fold out poster sleeve at least four years after it had been released.

Parrot Records catered for the rock fan’s needs. Two shops operated under the Parrot banner; the first was in Duke Street, with rather dingy wooden racks containing everything you could possibly need by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and all the 'serious' rock bands; the second Parrot Records was newer and brighter and sensibly placed opposite the entrance to the High Chelmer precinct and this shop contained the more commercial pop albums as well as the usual wide selection of other stuff. Between the two shops I was able to buy pretty much all the stuff I wanted.

I remember looking for Iggy and the Stooges Raw Power in 1981. But it only seemed to be stocked in the Duke Street Parrot. One lunchtime I plucked up the courage to venture inside. It was dark, there were large, tattooed, hairy, leather jacketed men sitting on the floor smoking intriguing smelling cigarettes and the little shop was hugely intimidating to this skinny fourteen-year-old schoolboy. Feeling very out of place in my grammar school uniform, I sifted through the albums in the big wooden racks and finally found Raw Power. As I took it to the counter I felt the gaze of the various heavy dudes hanging around the shop. ‘He’s buying Raw Power’ was the general buzz. The long-haired biker type behind the counter looked approvingly at my choice ‘Raw Power eh?’ I’d already worked out my next move and as casually as I could said ‘Yeah, and I’m going to get Metallic KO next’, a statement which was met with another rumble of approval from the guys on the floor - Metallic KO was a Stooges live album, and about as uncompromising a record as you could get. I was ‘in’. For quite a while after that whenever I shopped in Parrot someone would mutter ‘That’s the kid who bought Raw Power and Metallic KO’.

I must have spent hours and hours in those shops. There was something inexplicably exciting about flicking through the rows and rows of records, pouring over the sleeves of albums that I wanted to buy, scouring those 12 inches of square cardboard for every bit of information, so that when I had eventually saved up enough money to actually buy the thing it felt like I was welcoming an old friend into my home. But it was the act of browsing, in a place with lots of stuff to browse, that was, if anything, just as pleasurable as buying and listening to the music.

With Parrot often selling all sorts of terrific albums at just £1.99, cheap even for the early 1980s, I would guess that most of my pocket money went into the Parrot tills. A very sad day indeed when Parrot closed down.

Back in the 1980s, Pop Inn in Baddow Road, just along from the Odeon, was the place to go for singles. Somewhat cramped, due mainly to the sheer amount of stock crammed into the oddly shaped shop, Pop Inn was a delightful place to spend some time, browsing happily through what seemed to me to be the widest selection of singles I’d ever seen. They had a load of albums too. Pop Inn later moved to Moulsham Street and started stocking CDs, but it was never quite the same. When Pop Inn closed and reopened as Slipped Discs II (Slipped Discs I was in Billericay) I was delighted. The shop was back in Baddow Road, opposite the old Pop Inn premises, situated in a wonderfully rambling shop, the floors piled high with stacks of singles and CDs. Goodness only knows how the owners ever found anything, but they seemed to know where everything was, and would tread carefully around towers of discs, often as tall as they were, to retrieve exactly what you were looking for. For back catalogue CDs and long out of the chart singles Slipped Discs II couldn’t be beaten. It was a haven for all music lovers who hated the shiny identikit world of HMV, the superficial supermarkets and the chart only stock in Woolworths or WHSmith.

Later a branch of the East Anglian independent chain Andy’s Records opened in the High Street. A large shop packed with a great selection of back catalogue albums, Andy’s was an excellent CD age replacement for the now departed Parrot. Of course you had to contend with Andy’s endearingly stubborn insistence on stocking everything under first names. In most shops I would go straight to the end of the racks to get my fix of Frank Zappa. At Andy’s I would have to search under F, just after the Frank Sinatra albums. Fans of Tim Buckley wanting to pick up his son Jeff's album Grace would need to trek from the T section back to the J area. But, crucially, at least Andy’s stocked all this stuff. The newly opened HMV was small, not well stocked enough, and generally only contained albums by bands that sold loads. Obscure music, the little known artists and poor selling albums that I wanted were not commercially viable at Chelmsford's HMV. Fortunately Andy’s hung on until a few years ago, but sadly couldn’t compete with the rise of the internet. On the net you could easily find all those obscure Nico albums you needed and, what’s more, they were much cheaper than in Andy’s.

As CDs replaced vinyl the independent shops hung on. But they were smaller than the previous generation of record stores as the CD cases simply required less room to display. There must have been a concurrent improvement in the frequency of deliveries as the new CD shops seemed to stock far fewer copies of each album too. Browsing became less of a viable pastime as it was hard to while away the hours looking at tiny pieces of plastic in a shop not much larger than a decent sized living room.

Whilst I’m as guilty as the next person of buying from the internet (generally cheaper, easy to get hold of obscure stuff etc etc) I still feel rather sad at the decline in the numbers of backstreet record stores. Browsing the internet is too easy, too simple. There's no thrill. Physically flicking through the hundreds of record sleeves, actually finding a record that had long been searched for, holding the cardboard  and vinyl in your grateful hands - this was a true pleasure. And in the age of anonymous internet deliveries it seems that it is a pleasure that is all but lost forever.