We’re always happy given the chance to wax lyrical about our favourite record shops – both those still operating and those sadly now defunct – and it’s something we’ve taken the opportunity to do a great deal recently, with the release of Jeanie Finlay’s documentary Sound It Out and the ongoing growth of Record Store Day. Now Finlay has launched an online project entitled More Than Music that allows people from across the globe to tell tall tales about their record shopping past.
An online map, it provides users with the tools to tag and write a story about their favourite record shop, tell a story, share a track they bought there, et cetera, all under the banner of ‘The record shops that changed our lives’. You can head across to the site now to see the ones that have already been added, or to add your own. A great opportunity to shout out the likes of Norman, Honest Jon’s, Piccadilly, Sounds Of The Universe, Flashback, Rooted (RIP) and Idle Hands (just a few of our favourite picks) as well as a host of others new and old. Click here to browse and contribute to the More Than Music archive.
"More Than Music is a worldwide memory bank of the record stores that changed our lives," reads the information on the site, which also offers a potent reminder that over 500 record shops in the UK have closed over the last five years. "It’s a place to express the sentiment at the heart of the film Sound It Out that ‘records hold memories’, and it’s about so much ‘more than music’."
Last year we ran an interview with Finlay about Sound It Out, a documentary about the last remaining record shop in Teesside and the people who help make the shop what it is. She talked to us about how funding for the film was crowdsourced via Indiegogo, the process of putting it together, and the staff at Sound It Out, including Tom who looks after the vinyl in the shop. "He is passionately and whole heartedly addicted to music," she said. "The classic albums, the well loved (aka knackered) ones, the hard to find records, even the Makina. He says when he looks at a record "he can hear every single tune in his head, it’s all memories – records hold memories". His gentle passion is infectious and his customers really value it." Read the full interview here, and for more information on Sound It Out head across to their website.
To celebrate Record Store Day in April, we put together a massive feature asking a whole host of our favourite people to tell us the stories behind their favourite slab o’ wax, including the likes of Stewart Lee, Neneh Cherry, Jerry Dammers, Aidan Moffat, Brett Anderson, Mark E Smith, Ty Bulmer and more. You can read the feature in full here, though if we’re picking favourites, it’s got to be a toss up between FaltyDL scaring a lady out of his flat with Moodymann’s Black Mahogani and Jerry Dammers’ floppy flexidisc of a song called ‘Love Lies Limp’ (and you can take a wild guess yourself about the subject matter of that particular forgotten gem).
