Record Store Day Shops - Day 9 - Pure Vinyl - Brixton

Pure Vinyl Records

The Department Store

246 Ferndale Road, Brixton, London SW9 8FR

0203 598 5272

Hello@purevinylbrixton.co.uk, @PureVinylRecords

Monday-Wednesday 11am-6pm

Thursday-Friday 11am-7pm

Saturday 11am-6pm

Sunday 12am-5pm

Established 2015

Stock: Vinyl, Pre-owned, Merchandise, T-shirts

Nearest station - Brixton

“Reggae music is hugely responsible for keeping vinyl alive and is a massive part of the current vinyl revival.” Claudia Wilson - Pure Vinyl

Located only a minute from Brixton tube station Pure Vinyl Records is owned by well-known local DJ Claudia Wilson. I guarantee anybody who visits this wonderful shop will leave in a happier frame of mind than when they went in. Claudia likes nothing more than talking music and playing customers the latest records she has discovered. She is especially supportive of the local Brixton music scene with her enthusiasm being so infectious that it is difficult to resist purchasing one of the records she will play you.

Claudia is a Brixton girl. Her parents moved from Kingston, Jamaica in 1958 with Claudia the youngest of their seven children. Her earliest memory is listening to a pile of Blue Beat singles her father kept in the Radiogram. By the age of five, Claudia had taken her first steps to being a DJ by learning to play the records herself. The house was always full of music as her older brother and sisters bought loads of records. Her brother would visit the legendary record shop Desmonds Hip City on Atlantic Road bringing back little brown boxes full of records. He would take out the titles he wanted and give the rest to Claudia to play. Her sisters were the ones who introduced her to soul and funk.

Her brother was a trained electrician and started building equipment in his bedroom in the 1970s. When he was away working she would go into the room herself to listen to artists such as Big Youth, Dennis Alcapone and U-Roy. They sang about things she understood and in an accent like those she heard in her community. It was a tense time entering the bedroom, not because her brother might catch her listening to his system, more from fear of receiving an electric shock from his home-made valve amps.

She practised her DJ skills with her friends and first started DJing at house parties in the 1980s. By the 1990s she was getting paid to DJ in bars at a time when few women were on the decks. It was during this period she met her partner Mark. He was running his Sound System RDK Hi-Fi, which he has continued to do for the past 30 years as well as establishing the record label Universal Roots Records.

Claudia Wilson owner of Pure Vinyl

The 1990s were a wonderful time for the couple. With young children in tow they toured Europe, where Mark and other DJ’s would play their booming Sound System at clubs, festivals and parties. Claudia has fond memories of Rome, Pisa, Geneva and Salento. This was where she first started selling vinyl to help finance the tour, running a record stall as well as DJ-ing at some of the events.

Claudia also had a day job as a care worker, but her ambition was to open her own record shop modelled along the lines of the many reggae shops in the Brixton of her youth. Claudia had a residency at the now sadly closed Mango Landin bar which was at the hub of the Brixton scene. It was here that she played soul and reggae during a 10-year residence. She started an open deck night in 2011, naming it Pure Vinyl and is proud that she introduced many people to the joys of spinning vinyl.

At these events a constant stream of people kept coming up to her to ask where they could buy the records she was playing. She decided to bring a few boxes along to sell on the night. This proved so popular that she opened her own stall on Brixton market.

Claudia told me her story and her thoughts on the Brixton scene in general.

“It was in Brixton that I first realised the impact of gentrification. I knew Granville Arcade as a child and walked there holding my mother’s hand. Now it had changed. It is Brixton Village. In the 1980s after the Brixton riots we watched as many of the Caribbean families we had grown up with left the area disillusioned with the lack of investment and the hardship of living here. Places like Granville Arcade had no investment and were no longer the vibrant markets of my childhood but now as I returned with my record stall in 2013 it had changed again.

Investment in the form of cheap rents brought in businesses from outside the area. Brixton Village was filled with brand new people. More and more people wanted to come here. Local businesses were closing or being forced away by rising costs. The Music Temple Record Shop was hugely important for me as I watched the markets change. As a working mother of four children, money was always tight and I wanted to buy records. To get to the record shop I had to walk through the new Brixton watching people eating food as I did my weekly shop in the market. I would get there and the record shop would be my sanctuary. I knew that I would find something that would make me happy and a place I knew I would be welcome even if I only had £2 left to spend.

I opened my own shop in Reliance Arcade. My aim was to have a local record shop that everyone could enjoy. Everything about it was amazing I built it from scratch with the help of family and friends and had inherited the space from the lady who had run the Holy Shop for the past 40 years.

 I was an early pioneer of recycling as I noticed workmen removing windows from a local school and asked if I could have them. I found some wardrobes that had been thrown out and a friend, Mattias, made the boxes for the inside of the shop. The outside was built with the help of Mark and my friend Rex out of wood they took from skips and of course some I bought.

Reliance Arcade is truly the one part of old school Brixton that is untouched. The sense of community there is unparalleled in Brixton. Soon the locals found the shop. The collectors and the DJs came and, as word spread, so did everyone else. My Partner Mark, who has his own record label Universal Roots, joined me, and took over for a couple of days a week and quickly helped to soup up the Reggae selection.

For the black community of Brixton, the shop was especially important - for the elders and young people alike. For many people coming to Brixton has become alien. Except for using the market there are few places many people in the community can go. It is important to have somewhere to walk into that is welcoming and familiar where you are hearing music you love and bumping into people you know; the old-fashioned local record shop.

My shop wasn’t built with lots of money behind it - none in fact - but what I was able to do was to make a space that would hark back to a time when the music mattered and where I could engage with people who were curious, happy or amazed to see vinyl return.

In 2017 while working in my shop I was introduced by a friend, Devon Thomas from the Brixton Neighbourhood Forum, to some architects who said they were about to open a record shop in their new building on Ferndale Road in Brixton across the road from me. They asked my advice about the current vinyl revival. I told them how vinyl had always been alive for collectors and DJs and that it was only the popular music industry that had completely abandoned it. Reggae, soul and rock collectors and DJs had never stopped buying vinyl. We talked about the quality of the sound and how having something that was tangible enabled you to feel more invested in the music and how I had designed and built my shop from scratch. Then something very strange happened. The architects came back and asked if I would like to move my shop into the new building. After the most difficult deliberation I have ever had to make…. here I am now!”

If you are coming to London for vinyl shopping Pure Vinyl is a must visit for anybody interested in soul or reggae.

Check out 220 more independent record shops in the book  'The Vinyl Revival and the Shops That Made it Happen' 

 

 

The books of Graham Jones are available in record shops or online. The latest book The Vinyl Revival and the Shops that Made it Happen has been turned in to a film. It has just been released on DVD and is available in record shops or online. Distributed by Proper Music.

Each week I record The Vinyl Revival Record Shop Podcast. It contains lots of funny tales from the crazy world of record retailing. It is also available on Spotify.

Twitter: @Revival_Vinyl

My blog has over 100 features on record shops and vinyl.

grahamjonesvinylrevival.blogspot.com

For film screenings and talks contact Graham.graham@lastshopstanding.co.uk

 

As the person who has visited more record shops than any other human, I often get asked my advice on buying turntables. I always say do not purchase a budget model. What is the point of buying one that costs the price of a few albums? The sound will not do the recordings justice. For a long time, I have recommended Rega Turntables as they are superb quality at great prices. They got more brownie points for sponsoring 'Record Store Day' and manufacturing limited editions just for record shops.