Record Shop Story #12: The Book & Record Bar, West Norwood, London
Record Shop Story #12: The Book & Record Bar, West Norwood, London
There's intrigue aplenty at one of south London's finest record shops, where you're just as likely to find a rare first edition book as you are collectable vinyl – and Alex Paterson behind the decks
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One of the questions I often ask record shop owners is whether they have any famous customers among their regulars. I don’t really need to ask this of Michael Johnson, owner of The Book and Record Bar in south London. A bone fide dance music pioneer has just walked in on our interview.
‘Um, so there’s a chair that’s just turned up. Is it yours?’, asks The Orb’s Alex Paterson. He’s looking after the shop while I chat with Michael in the yard out the back.
‘Nope, I haven’t ordered a chair,’ Michael replies.
’That’s what I thought,’ says Alex. ‘But the bloke told me it was definitely yours. Said it’s for number 22, but I told him this is 20.’
‘We’re 18,’ Michael says, with a jokey weariness that suggests this isn’t the first time these two have debated the shop’s door numbering. He tells Alex to take the chair in and he’ll square it with the people at number 22 later. Alex disappears back into the shop, half-apologising for interrupting.
This then, is just another Thursday afternoon at The Book and Record Bar.
Unless you know the place, you wouldn’t expect to bump into ‘Dr Alex’ from The Orb in this charmingly bookish record shop in West Norwood. It’s well off the beaten track of Soho’s more famous vinyl emporiums.
And yet, here he is, doing his regular Thursday afternoon radio show from the shop, making coffee for customers and fielding furniture mis-deliveries.
Gipsy roots
I’ve popped into The Book and Record Bar (BRB) to meet Michael, slightly on a whim, having already visited Lisa at Tenpin Records earlier in the day with Kevin Foakes (aka DJ Food) for a spot of digging.
As usual, Tenpin was full of temptation, so by the time we get to the BRB, I’ve already blown my vinyl budget on some choice 70s soul and breaks. But Kev had heartily recommended the BRB when we first met, so it was high time I checked it out for myself.
It doesn’t disappoint. Previously home to the Gypsy Queen, one of four pubs within spitting distance of West Norwood train station, the BRB retains the feel of a local hangout, while having an expansive outlook on music and literature from around the world.
Michael tells me he opened the BRB eleven years ago, when the pub had been empty for a good six years, and the building was falling into disrepair. But once he took on the lease, it again became a focal point for the West Norwood community.
The name of the old pub is still there in the shop’s sign, a nod to the building’s heritage. ‘It was called the Gypsy Queen after the matriarch of the first real gipsy community that had a semi-permanent place in London, in Gipsy Hill, just down the road,’ Michael explains.
Now, the shop serves coffee all day, is stacked with fascinating books and records, both curated by Michael, and has also got back the old pub’s drinks licence. It’s a fantastic use for a previously dilapidated old bar.
‘The coffee sales support the book sales which support the record sales,’ Michael explains. ‘And then we have DJ nights and live bands on a lot in the evening, with a late licence on a Friday and Saturday.’
‘We can wheel all the record racks to the side to create some dancing space, and we have a decent sound system. So we’ve got a monthly soul night, a house night… we have comedy nights and film screenings. There’s all sorts going on. The events and drinks licence are important to keeping the shop going – they’re a key part of what we do.’
West Norwood Broadcasting Corporation
I ask Michael how he came to have Alex Paterson broadcasting his weekly radio shows from the shop – under the banner of WNBC (West Norwood Broadcasting Corporation).
‘WNBC is run from here. It was Alex’s idea. He was doing radio with another guy in a barn in the middle of nowhere before, on a station called “Fnoob”. But it was a real pain for him to get to.’
‘Alex lives not far from here. So he approached me after we’d met, about a year and a half into me being here, and said, “I’m interested in doing a radio thing again, and I don’t want to keep going to that barn. Can we do something from the shop?”’
‘So he set it up as WNBC with a couple of technical people, including the software to broadcast it live. And we record all the shows so we can put them up later on Mixcloud.’ [I thoroughly recommend checking this out by the way.]
Alex is a mainstay of WNBC, but so is ‘King Michael’ himself, and DJ Dadaist, who also play sets most weeks. As you’d expect, the shows feature plenty of ambient and electronic music, but Michael says his set earlier today ‘was late-’60s, early-’70s, slow Motown funk – basically really long, spaced-out tracks. Then a bit of reggae thrown in.’
Other guest spinners on WNBC tend to come from The Orb’s musical orbit, and have included the likes of Youth (Killing Joke), DJ Food, Hannah Brown, Kris Needs and Mixmaster Morris.
Subterranean homesick treasures
The BRB may get most of its second-hand stock now from customers bringing in collections, or handfuls of records and books to exchange for new purchases, but this wasn’t the way when it first opened. Michael tells me how he’d been working towards opening a shop for most of his previous life in the corporate world.
‘I ran a software company in the travel industry for 20 years or so, from the end of the ’80s onwards. And that involved me travelling all over the place. As well as traveling all over the UK, we had 50 sites or more in Belgium, Spain, South Africa etc.’
‘Everywhere I went I would buy interesting-looking books and records, with the idea of doing something like this at some point. So I just kept them in storage, building up a collection to the point where I had something like 150 square foot completely full of boxes of stuff.’
‘When I opened the shop, I wasn’t hunting around for stock. I filled the place completely from day one. Really good stock, too, including multiple rare £200 albums and the like from all those years collecting.’
I admire Michael for having had the foresight to do this, over such a long period (and while vinyl prices were on the up). But then we descend some mossy stone steps into the private basement under the Book and Record Bar, and I get a sense of exactly what years of stockpiling really looks like…
The basement is literally full of records and books, with narrow walkways you have to pick through carefully to avoid treading on goodies. I almost come a cropper on a pile of pristine 12-inch copies of The KLF’s ‘Justified and Ancient’, which Michael explains arrived in bulk from a customer who presumably once worked in the music industry.
He gestures to one corner, saying: ‘Those records over there are mine, the ones I don’t have space for at home’ [where he already has around 5,000 records]. ‘A lot of them are what I would call “landfill house”, only worth a few quid each,’ he deadpans.
But I quickly realise the stuff down here is no laughing matter. As well as loosely organised boxes of records, awaiting their turn in the racks upstairs, there are shelves upon shelves of handpicked books, too.
Michael is just as adept at spotting rare books as he is vinyl, so the stock down here is a mixture of popular sellers he admires (eg Paul Auster, George Orwell, Ian McEwan), and more collectable first or early editions. Sci-fi is a particular strength, and people travel to the BRB just for its sci-fi collection.
I recognise a copy of The Hobbit on one shelf with the same illustrated jacket as the one we had at home when I was growing up. Michael asks if we had the first edition [I have no idea], as it could be worth a thousand pounds or so. Even later copies with the same jacket can be worth hundreds, he says. It’s an eye-opener for me, but once again testament to Michael’s deep knowledge and curation of his stock.
A peek into Alex Paterson’s record collection
By now, you perhaps won’t be surprised to know that Alex also has a bunch of his records stored in the basement at the BRB. Readers of Dust & Grooves will already know this from the recent interview he did with Kevin Foakes, along with Eilon Paz’s excellent photos from the shop.
As Alex and Kev go way back, and Alex is busy in the shop when we visit, he asks Kev to dig out some choice Orb pressings from his boxes in the basement, for him to play on the radio show.
We lose Kev to the basement for some time before he emerges up the steps, blinking in the light, with some ultra-rare Orb acetates. These include masters of ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ and The Orb’s unreleased ‘Deaf and Dumb’ remix of U2’s ‘Numb’.
Alex is pleased to see them again, especially as there are only three known copies of the latter in the world, and this is one of them. Michael says previous Orb band member, Thrash, let go of his copy for virtually nothing, when he sold a collection to Reckless Records. The shop didn’t quite clock what it was, so it sold to one very lucky punter for £10.
This is crate-digging with a difference, and I feel like I’m holding a little piece of music history as I thumb through these. I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing in this basement in West Norwood, but apparently Alex’s house and another lock-up are already chock-full of records. So they’ve got to live somewhere…
Psychedelia ‘rising faster than the price of gold’
I don’t want you to come away from this piece with the impression that all Michael sells is ultra-rare books and records. That’s certainly not the case, and there’s lots of much more affordable vinyl on the shop floor. It’s not the cheapest second-hand record shop I’ve been to, but it’s fairly priced for the level of care and attention he puts into finding good, clean records.
It covers a wide range of specialisms too – jazz, blues, soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, reggae, house, rock, punk, electronica… all present and correct. There are even a few racks of brand-new records, which mainly focus on newer electronica and reissues of albums that are harder to find second-hand.
Michael’s own special interest is psychedelia, though, and this is where the BRB excels. So if you’re a lover of ’60s (and later) psych, or science fiction books, this shop is most certainly worth a detour.
But as we discuss his love of psych, Michael happens to mention that ‘the price of original British psychedelia has rocketed in price in the last 10-20 years. It’s probably gone up more than the price of gold.’
This sounds like a stretch, but he backs it up with an example to illustrate the point.
‘I bought an obscure self-titled progressive folk album by Tudor Lodge on the very collectable Vertigo label, back in 2004. I paid £150 for it back then, which is what a good copy was fetching at the time. I sold it in the shop soon after we opened for £1,500.’
‘It has this sleeve that folded out into a massive three foot by three foot square poster. And yeah, it’s value had gone up by 900% in 10 years.’
If you happen to have £1,000 or more to drop on a copy of a single record, you can still find a couple of Tudor Lodge originals on Discogs for that kind of money. It’s mindblowing for me, who baulks at spending more than £30 on a record at the best of times.
Much as I love vinyl, buying something like this is about as alien as buying a slab of bullion – neither of which are dilemmas I need to worry about any time soon. I will, however, soon be heading back to The Book and Record Bar in search of coffee, books and more affordable tunes. It’s the kind of place I could while away a few days, panning for spiritual gold…
Run-out questions
Do you remember your first record? ‘The first album I bought was a record by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown – the guy who did ‘Fire’ and used to have flames on his head. I bought their album from Rumbelows in Luton, where I grew up. They used to sell TVs and washing machines, things like that. But everywhere sold records then – you could get records in the Co-op.’
‘The first single I went to buy was ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T.Rex, but it was sold out. I only had enough for one record, so I bought something else, and it’s a record that no-one remembers by a guy called Don Fardon. It's called ‘Indian Reservation’, and I saw him doing it on ‘Top of the Pops’, I think. He’d been in a ’60s psych band called The Sorrows before then. And I just loved this record. So my first single was ‘Indian Reservation’.’
Do you sell online too? ‘Yeah, we’re on Discogs. I’d say 95% of the stuff that's on Discogs is also in the shop. There are a few things that aren’t – usually because they’re rare releases of common records. So if we get the very first pressing of a Beatles album, there’s no point putting something in the shop for £100 or £200 when there are £20 or £30 copies available. With the best will in the world, there are some people who will switch sleeves and things. So I tend to hold those things back for Discogs.’
What was the best recent gig you went to? ‘The last one I went to was Rain Parade – neo-psych from the ’80s, in the club beneath the International Students House on Great Portland Street. Bizarrely enough, I met someone in there who saw them the last time they played in the UK, which was 40 years before that, at Dingwalls. So they don’t exactly play here often.’
Sleevenotes
Where to find it
The Book & Record Bar, 20 Norwood High St, Norwood, London SE27 9NR
Shop hours: Tuesday to Saturday 10:30am to 6pm | Sunday 11am until 5pm
Plus evening events each week
Online
bookandrecordbar.co.uk | thebookandrecordbar@gmail.com
Listen to WNBC radio online or on Mixcloud
The Book and Record Bar on Instagram
Thanks for the restack, Steve!