[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. Read the rest of this entry »