Song, by Toad

[This is the first in a series where Toad readers introduce us to their favourite local record shops. Little independents like this are going out of business at a rate of knots, and they become very personal places to music fans, so I thought it would be a nice topic for us all to chip in about. Starting us off is Adam from Pretending Life is Like a Song, one of my oldest blog pals.]

Winchester Wax changed me. It opened in about 1981, when I was 12. Until then, records had, more or less, been a birthday treat or a Christmas present. I’d just reached the stage where I could buy myself a single each week if I could do without, well, sweets and comics (and I had a friend who bought every number one single for a time in this way) but no more than that. And then suddenly just a few minutes walk from home, on the way into town, there was a second hand record store. Records became a right and not a privilege and nothing was the same ever again.

It was the simplest of shops – tables around the wall and an island of tables in the middle of the room, a cash desk against the back wall, a glass front. Nothing much on the walls. All of the tables around the edge full of boxes of albums, except for straight ahead as you came in which was shared by the one pound box and an every growing number of 12″ singles. The island table was full of singles.

At first I played it safe – I didn’t buy anything unless I knew I could sing along with it – but this was the summer that I came home from a holiday at a Cousin’s house with my first mixtape – The Undertones, The Sex Pistols, The Jam – and before long I was fleshing out my knowledge of these with weekly purchases, rushed straight home to what was then the only working record player, sat in the living room, and sat and listened hard. On the rare occasions that the 7″ sleeve had lyrics I would burn them into my skull. More often there was scribblings and ideas to convince me that I understood more about the song and the artist than I ever could have done without this great find.

I couldn’t get past the idea that Albums had to be reserved for Special Occasions for quite a while, but then suddenly moved my allegience from the singles to the cheap album selection and I was away. A great many things came from that box, particular stuff that let me look back into the past instead of worrying about the charts – several Who albums (including a strange orchestral version of Tommy and a lovely vinyl copy of Quadropenia, the original album, not the OST one, with the booklet still embedded inside) both of which were cheap because of minor scars on the vinyl which our record player wasn’t good enough to notice, Bonzo Dog’s ‘Gorilla’, that classic ‘Big Wheels of Motown’ compilation. I think my one lasting regret from these days was that I couldn’t even begin to work out how to get together the fifteen quid needed to buy the huge Motown boxset that sat in the ‘Compilations’ section until about three weeks before my birthday. Three weeks of hopes which disappeared up in smoke so quickly.

One week the singles’ table changed – instead of the simple A-Z with a 10p box on the end, there was a Punk/NewWave label which seemed to me (and like all of us I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of what was in those boxes) to be made up of singles pulled out of the normal run but suddenly hiked up in price – that copy of ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’ in its original sleeve, which I hadn’t managed to convince myself to pay three quid for, was suddenly a tenner (fool, this turned out to be the last of the set I got hold of, about seven years later). The cheapest thing that we all really wanted was suddenly five, instead of one, and we became convinced that we were all sitting on small fortunes what with the things we’d already bought.

Trying to sell things back to The Wax was a complete waste of time, a harsh lesson in the economics of power. You’d think ‘hey, they sell albums for a fiver, so if I take in these four I should still get about fifteen quid, even after their profit.’. Oh no. You’d be lucky to get three, and you’d go and spend that straight way on the copy of Ziggy you’d had your eye on for weeks. (Obligatory ‘High Fidelity’ quote – “If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do”). The guy that ran the place had a slightly sleazey, lazy look about him (for obvious reasons, I guess, the place always had that thrillingly sweet smokey smell about it) and would never acknowledge anything about us other than to take our money, even though we spent hours and hours in his company over the years (how could he behave this way? We may have been smelly little teenage boys but we were his people – surely?)

Two things that ring the most bells for me about the place? Well, one is that by the time we were fifteen a small group of decided to form a ‘birthday’ group – we’d all pitch a quid in for everyone elses’ birthday and go down to The Wax to buy a present for the birthday boy. I was lucky enough to have the first birthday in the group and got a copy of Face Dances, with it’s wonderful cover and frankly dodgy songs, none more so than this one but I love it still. I think Nic, who had his birthday at the end of the year, is still waiting. And there was always, always a copy of Architecture and Morality in the quid bin – so much so that, rather like the rule we later made that if you didn’t get served alcohol in the pub you had to buy yourself an Appletise, so if you couldn’t find anything else you wanted on a Saturday you had to buy another OMD record.

It’s gone now, of course, but it went long ago for me, and in a strange kind of way. One Saturday morning, summer of 86, I started wandering down the road and found, on the corner of my street, a good 200 yards before I’d reach The Wax, that a second hand bookshop had opened. I went in, and left half an hour later with the beginnings of a map of the stock in my head and a small bag of books in my hand – and went straight back home to read. Jack and his bookshop started to take my money and I started to not buy music – the beginnings of something that, by the time I had graduated in 1990, had moved into not listening to music, and that lasted until about five years ago. But I had a lot to fall back on when I started again, and almost all of it came from the one shop.

The Who – You Better You Bet
OMD – She’s Leaving