I run Resident with my wife Natasha. I look after most of the buying for the shop, filtering the literally thousands of releases that record companies put out every month to hopefully choose the 100 or so new titles a week that our customers are most interested in. Apart from that, I help Natasha look after the rest of our brilliant team of music nerds, all the normal stuff that goes into running your own business while trying to find as much time as possible to actually be on the shop-floor helping our customers find new music to get excited about.

Tell me about your background

I’ve worked in music retail ever since leaving university, 30 years now. It’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. I started out at Our Price, Virgin and eventually as the chains started becoming more corporate and losing their love of music, we decided it was time to start our own thing where music and customers came first

 

When I first met Natasha, she was already living in Brighton and wanted to stay here. That was 15 years ago and it was probably the easiest decision I’ve ever made. As a Sussex boy, all my first gigs and most of my teenage record shopping were in Brighton. I’ve never regretted moving back down from London

 

We work incredibly hard at it. We try to make the shop a welcoming place for all our customers no matter what music they’re into. We don’t try to be cool and we only employ people that genuinely love music. When we first opened our aim was to create a record shop that we wanted to shop in ourselves and we’ve stayed true to that

 

There are loads of reasons for this. Vinyl has always had a romance to it that no other format can match. A lot of die-hard music lovers have always preferred vinyl to any other way of listening to music but were let down by an industry that wanted to ditch LPs for CDs. There’s also a movement away from the recent view that music has no value. People seem much more aware of all the hard work and time that goes in to putting an album out and the LP represents this much more than a computer file ever could. Record Store Day has been massively important in getting vinyl back into people’s consciousness and has rekindled older fans love for music but has also struck a chord with teenagers. LPs are like books in the way they help people define who they are.

Tell me about Record Store Day, what it is, and how it has grown. I understand that customers queue up from the very early hours in order to get first dibs…?

Record Store Day has been going for 10 years now. It‘s all about drawing attention to the service and value that independent record shops bring to their local communities. It started off with a few labels bringing out limited edition, mostly vinyl, releases all on the same Saturday in April. It really struck a chord with music fans and collectors and has grown to the point where there are more than 500 releases every year and it’s become bigger than Christmas for vinyl buyers. The queue gets bigger & bigger every year and there seems to be a continual competition as to who can get to the shop earliest. The first people now arrive early on the afternoon before. We do our best to look after everyone though and probably stock more RSD releases than anywhere else in the country.

What about CDs? Are they slowly declining, do they have a future?

As with vinyl, I don’t think the demand will ever go away. A lot of people have spent a lifetime building up their collections and don’t want to stop now. Unlike with vinyl, record companies have never been dumb enough to give up on the format altogether and actually put a lot more effort into making CDs attractive, particularly with box sets for which the cd is probably the best medium. People like to have their music in lots of different formats depending on how they listen to it and ideally should have the choice of LP, CD, download or streaming for everything. We’ve only ever cut down on CD space because of the increased demand for vinyl but if we had more space we’d put all the cd racking back in. The demand’s definitely there.

 

We’ve never wanted to diversify in the way that many shops and particularly the chains have done as we think that it’s better to stick to what you’re good at but we do sell music books and magazines. Most importantly, we also sell tickets, lots and lots of them, usually 250-300 shows on sale at any time

 

It certainly helps in the job but that’s just a bonus. When I moved to London in the first place it was purely for the amount of gigs there and I’ve probably averaged four or five shows a week since my teens. Not quite as many now we have a small son but the enthusiasm has never changed.

 

I thought this year’s Great Escape was probably the best yet, particularly the Maccabees closing set. Paul Weller, Thurston Moore , Gaz Coombes and Drenge were great & Songhoy Blues were astonishing. Nick Cave was also well worth a rare trip to London.

 

There’s no other place and I’d include London here, which has such a healthy live music scene for its size. We have an amazing number of hard working local promoters and venues and you hardly ever meet anyone who’s not involved in music in one way or another. Maybe we could do with a venue to fill the gap between the Dome and the Brighton Centre but to be honest, with the amount of choice of live music on any night of the week, I don’t feel we’re really missing out.
 

We always try to keep getting better at what we do and we’d love to be able to stock a wider range of both vinyl and cd but the honest answer is always the same. This business is very much 24/7 so it would be great to get more time off. In 11 years we still haven’t managed that one.

 

I’ve been lucky enough to see most of the musicians I’ve wanted to, so it would have to be someone that I missed out on, so maybe Joy Division, John Coltrane or Muddy Waters.