Meanderings

Today I went to Records Records, a music shop that has been open in the same place in Dunedin for the last 30 years. When it was established, it was only supposed to run for a month.

It's a small converted terrace house, just off the Octagon. There's Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones playing on the stereo, and posters papered all over the hallway, advertising gigs and retrospectives and art exhibitions. There are local indie papers mixed with glossy rags full of adverts for international artists. Today is grey and cool and drizzly, and the light coming through the overhanging tree in the tiny front garden was soft, augmenting the golden glow of the lightbulbs overhead.

The shop started because the resident of the house, a music reviewer, had hundreds of records that he wanted to get rid of. So he offered them up for sale, and the shop, which was initially unnamed, has been going ever since.

The collection is small, but comprehensive. There are two rooms, with high ceilings and Victoria terrace fireplace frontispiece intact. There is barely enough room to stand two people between the racks of cds and records. The collection is evenly split between vinyl and cd, and there are even some tapes for sale!!

There were a couple of young men wandering around, talking enthusiastically about the jazz influences apparent in Hendrix's music, and telling each other with absolute authority that "Yeah, that's a really good Iggy album. Did you know that Bowie played keyboards on that tour?" It's wonderful that each new generation of music lovers find out the same snippets, same secrets, and passes them on with the seriousness they deserve. It did, I have to admit, make me think of High Fidelity - more the book than the movie.

I ended up getting 4 cds, including a best of Split Enz, the soundtrack to Velvet Goldmine and two compilation of New Zealand indie music. One from the Flying Nun label, which has been going since the early 80s, and the other from a more recent label, Powertool Records. So that should be a good explore of the history of NZ music...