Pride Records Days

Anybody who has been following my Diskits facebook page will have seen that I recently posted a picture of myself during my days at Pride Records. I must thank Richard Murdoch a producer with the BBC in Glasgow for giving me the inspiration to track down some old photos of the old Pride shop at Newark. Thanks also must go to my wife Jenny who found them. Richard is currently working on a book about record shops in Newark and contacted me a while back for any info I could pass on. So I thought it might be a nice idea to post all the pictures I have and maybe some of the old Pride employees might just spot them and get in touch.

First up some from the Newark Branch, featuring Richard Young (manager) and the girls who worked with him. These are from 1983.

Right to left are Tracy (surname?) Jane (surname?) Richard Young the girl on the left I think was called heather but most likely not! Jane married a roadie & part time drummer with the band The Meteors.

This was at the time vinyl sales were more or less at their peak, note masterbag system. Also the selection of David Bowie picture disc albums.

LP compilation browser at front of picture with the This are Two Tone album cover, what a track listing this had.

A side
The Special AKA - Gangsters
Madness - Madness
The Selecter - On My Radio
The Beat - Tears of a Clown
The Specials - Rudi, A Message to You
The Selecter - Too Much Pressure
The Bodysnatchers - Too Experienced
The Beat - Rankin Full Stop
The Specials - Too Much Too Young

B side
The Selecter - The Selecter
The Specials - Stereotype
The Swinging Cats - Mantovani
The Specials - Do Nothing
Rico - Jungle Music
Rhoda Dakar - The Boiler
The Specials - Ghost Town

When I first started working at Prides everything was filed away under 

catalogue number, but by the time of these pictures we were using alphabetical

 filing under artists or band names.

The above picture is the front of the Grimsby branch, the signage was later used at all four shops. Grimsby was by far the biggest store. Based in the Riverhead centre it was a former Dorothy Perkins store. At opening we stocked vinyl & cassettes but as soon as CDs started being issued we were in at the start and probably had the largest selection for miles around.

This is inside the Grimsby store looking toward the front of store from around half way down, the young man sat at the check out desk was called David (surname?) The photo is from 1984 spot the Roger Taylor "Strange Frontier" album cover on the wall. When we opened the store it had just about every current catalogue album from all the major distributors, many that people had never seen before. We stocked all genres of music and had extensive sections for Jazz, Folk, & Classical as well as the usual rock & pop. 

This picture is taken upstairs in the staff room and shows Rick (surname?) who was doing his Limahl pose!

This is again upstairs and shows David with the infamous shrink wrap machine in the background. All stock apart from chart singles went out live with electronic tags inserted and removed on purchase. The entrance had alarm loops that got set off when someone tried to go out without paying. This idea was still fairly new to Grimsby. All stock was on computer and fed into the chart return system, again a fairly new idea at the time, doing away with the old diary system that was still being used at Newark.

I will post more pictures soon including some from Lincoln & Grantham.

Meanwhile if anybody out there can help with names or have any memories of any of the Pride shops please do get in touch.

Mel

Trawling for vinyl

Spent another great day out with Ben my son trawling charity shops. My question to him was, where to today? Let's go to Arnold, Sherwood and move on from there. So that's what we did. Being a bank holiday we didn't expect too many shops to be open, but we managed to find a few bits. 

Mostly 7" vinyl singles though did pick up a copy of Freddie King "Texas Cannonball" Live! LP for only a quid in Arnold.
 

Here a few of the singles I picked up, for those of you who have maybe not heard of them, click on the pics and take a listen, or if you've not heard them for a long while, take a dose of nostalgia !

 

The Jags - Party Games

A none charting single from the band that brought us the classic "Back of my hand" Remember meeting the band at a Music Week night in Birmingham were several labels were showcasing their latest acts, along with the Jags Island had The Gibson Brothers there.

The Rubinoos - I think we're alone now

1977 cover version of Tommy James classic, that predates the Tiffany version by some years. What a price 49p for such a great piece of pop, cost me 30p. It is on the legendary Beserkley label that also featured Johnathan Richman.

Pop Will Eat Itself - X Y & Zee

A terrific piece of poppy rave from PWEI

Flash and the Pan - Midnight Man

Yet another very under-rated band. Not one of their biggest hits but still well worth a play. Electro synth pop.

The Quarks - Mechanical

Yet another piece of synth pop from the eighties that somehow failed to register on the charts over here.

So that'll do for today, will post a few more finds another day.

Having recently seen Lucy Ward at Headon cum Upton village hall I thought it a good time to list my top twenty favourite folk tracks. Also it will not be long until The Gate to Southwell Folk Festival. So here they are in reverse order..........

20. The Full English - Man in the Moon

19. Jess Morgan - Freckles in the sun

18. Christy Moore - Morecambe Bay

17. Lucy Ward & Brighouse & Rastrick Brass Band - Lion

16. Richard & Linda Thompson - Wall of death

15. Anne Briggs - Blackwaterside

14. Oysterband - Bright morning star

13. Jackie Leven - Some ancient misty morning

12. Trees - Lady Margaret

11. Eric Bogle - No man's land

10. Richard Thompson - Vincent Black Lightning

09. Martin Simpson - Sir Patrick Spens

08. Loudon Wainwright III - Human cannonball

07. Donovan - Goldwatch Blues

06. Oysterband - The shouting end of life

05. Martin Simpson - Never any good

04. Little Johnny England - Welcome to the Sparrow Club

03. Lucy Ward - Alice in the bacon box

02. Fairport Convention - Matty Groves

01. Eric Bogle - The band played Waltzing Matilda 


So there it is, though maybe tomorrow it will be different as I listen to more tracks and hear new ones for the first time. I could easily have chosen many more songs by Eric Bogle, Martin Simpson or indeed anyone on the list. Maybe another time.

It's funny what sparks a memory of a tune, it can be something that someone says in conversation or a sound in the distance. Just such a thing happened the other day. A bird somewhere near by was singing what sounded like The Spice Girl's "Wannabe", totally bizarre. This got me to thinking about the crazy amount of this single that we sold in the shop on Outram Street and the real buzz of excitement they created with a whole new generation of music buyers. We had youngsters a young as 5 or 6 coming in with mums and dads and grandparents, many who had never been in the store before. So this re-lit the music buying bug for these older generations as well. Over several years we watched these youngsters grow up, changing their taste in music, many growing into a genre completely different to The Spice Girls. 

This was just as I remember myself developing my own musical tastes, trying this or that style. From the pop of The Beatles, Freddie & The Dreamers, Adam Faith and others, listening to blues orientated tracks from the likes of Them and The Animals to folk inspired tracks from Donovan & Bob Dylan.

Then I started to by more disco and soul tracks that I could not only listen to, but play at the discos in Bilsthorpe and other local villages. Then came the weddings and party scene that meant an even wider range of musical styles that needed to be played. Everything from ballroom dance to rock n roll was requested. At the start of a wedding if people were a little reluctant to get up and dance, two certain floor fillers were Motown or Status Quo, never failed.

All this time I continued buying mainly singles, not only chart releases but many non chart tracks that I liked that would very rarely get played at a disco. This is why my collection is so varied.

As I've said already in previous posts cataloguing my singles collection is proving to be such a memory jerker. Remembering where I purchased certain discs, such as Blackfoot Sue's "Standing in the road" at Bakewell whilst staying at my Uncle's for the weekend, or Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" in Buxton on a camping trip.

So time for a few tunes, enjoy.

  First Class "Life is whatever you want it to be" This was one of the follow ups to their huge summer hit "Beach Baby". Not quite such a hit though, failing to make the charts, despite once again featuring Tony Burrows on lead vocals, and a T.Rex Riff at the start!!

I was a huge Roxy Music fan from the start and also liked much of the solo stuff from the various band members, such as the debut solo from Bryan Ferry a great cover version of Bob Dylan's "A hard rains a-gonna fall"

 

Though I still prefer the original  

Keeping in the folk style one of Dylan's contemporaries was Julie Felix who had several hits in the mid to late sixties and indeed the early seventies. Both with her own songs and with cover versions like this one.

Alongside this folk style I was a also a big Ska and Reggae fan, and the late sixties early seventies produced some of the best sounds ever.

      

     

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