Mr Dunlop and the Blow-up Doll

Mr Dunlop and the

Blow-up Doll

Istart the second week of my odyssey in the south of England at one of the

most famous names in record-retailing – Adrian’s of Wickford.

Anyone who bought the NME throughout the 70s and 80s will be

aware of Adrian’s. For twenty years it had an eye-catching advert highlighting

the latest releases in each edition.

When he left school Adrian wanted a career in the theatre and soon

found work as a jobbing actor. To supplement his income he also helped

out his mum, who sold wool on a local market stall. Then Adrian noticed

that the adjacent stall that sold ladies tights and suspender-seconds

(conjuring up some bizarre images) was not utilising all its counter space.

Adrian rented the spare space and thus began his career in music – running

the world’s first ‘Suspender-seconds and record stall’.

Soon however, with his mum’s wool stall doing exceptionally well, she

took the decision to rent a shop. Adrian also felt this was an opportune time

to move his business forward, so he asked his mum if he could transfer his

little business from the suspender stall to her new wool shop. This was

progress indeed; the lucky people of Wickford were soon to have the

world’s first ‘wool and record shop’.

Inevitably, problems arose from the beginning – Adrian’s customers

were teenagers, whilst his mum’s customers were mainly pensioners. The

wool customers complained that the music was too loud and this caused

tension between Adrian and his mum. To solve the problem Adrian

installed a partition between the two parts of the shop and also knocked

through a wall to give his music store a separate entrance. The good people

of Wickford struggled to come to terms with all this change. They no

longer had the world’s only ‘wool and record shop’, but, in its place,

they now had the world’s smallest wool shop and the world’s smallest

record shop.

Fortunately, his acting career soon took off when he landed a role in

Godspell. The cast in this production included David Essex, Jeremy Irons,

Marti Webb, Julie Covington and Robert Lindsay, and it was a huge

success. Adrian was required to employ staff to run his store in Wickford.

Jeremy Irons became one of his first regular customers. Adrian remembers

him as a big fan of 8-track cartridges, but he also always wanted a

discount on every purchase.

Unless you have a long memory, you may wonder what 8-tracks were.

They were launched in the mid-60s as a method of listening to recorded

music, rather like a large version of the cassette. The Ford Motor Company

offered them as an option on all their new cars. The format was successful

for ten years before the advent of the compact cassette, which was smaller,

cheaper and had a faster rewind capacity. Subsequently, there was a

concerted effort by the record companies to reduce the number of

different formats offered and 8-tracks bit the dust.

Adrian decided his next move should be to start a mail-order operation.

He and his partner, Richard Burke, took over the upstairs bedrooms

of the London house for stock and dispatch, and their first advertisement

appeared in NME in 1975. They were astonished by the reaction, and

within a short time were employing eight people and turning over

£18,000 per week – a lot of money in the 70s for a business originally run

from home.

By now Adrian had outgrown the wool shop, and indeed its successor –

an upstairs floor of the new Wickford Indoor Market building – and had

opened a new vinyl store with a rear warehouse for the mail-order operation

in Wickford’s High Street.

Next came a shop a few doors down the street for the selling and renting

of videos. The video selling became so successful that it was necessary to

separate the operation from rental, so a new store was opened for rental,

whilst the original became the UK’s first-ever stand-alone video retail

outlet. The new rental store – immediately opposite – not only rented

videos, but dispensed confectionery and soft drinks. The tally of Adrian’s

stores – all within 50 metres of each other – now stood at four.

This was during the days when chart manipulation was rife, and the

record charts were compiled by writing sales of catalogue numbers down

in a white book in a selection of record retailers. Adrian would leave his

book on the counter whilst he made coffee for the sales reps, and on his

return the book would suddenly be full of numbers. For being so

hospitably careless he was often rewarded with boxes of free stock.

Also around that time a record-buying team was in operation. Funded

by the record companies, this team would traverse the area buying the

records its own label had on release. Each week the same gang of housewives

would call in and buy several copies of targeted records to

manipulate their chart position. They obviously had a set route, as you

could set your clock by their weekly visit, before they swept on across the

rest of the record stores in Essex.

By this time Adrian had reached a crossroads in his life. He had just

finished a major tour playing the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing

Technicolour Dreamcoat alongside Paul Jones, of Manfred Mann fame, who

played the lead. Adrian felt that he had to make the choice between music

and theatre and, fortunately for the people of Wickford, he abandoned his

acting career to manage his shops.

Over the following years there were several examples of Adrian’s

shrewdness as a businessman.

His was the first CD store to install a National Lottery machine. It took

him years of lobbying to Camelot before they relented and granted him

one. Unfortunately, his sales of only £2,000 a week were unacceptably low

to Camelot, who threatened to remove his machine unless sales improved

dramatically. Adrian responded with a terrific ruse. He advertised that

everybody who won a £10 prize in his shop would, instead, be paid out

£11, with the extra £1 being in the form of a record voucher to spend in his

shop. During the first week of the promotion they sold £10,000 worth of

lottery tickets and, to this day, lottery tickets do a buoyant trade in store.

I asked Adrian where he would be in five years. Hopefully alive, was his

reply. Over the last few years he has battled cancer yet his enthusiasm and

cheerfulness are undiminished. Adrian was lucky to have made his money

when ownership of a record shop offered the chance to make a good living.

These days, in semi-retirement, and like many other shop owners, he has

downsized by slimming his business down to just a single shop.

* * *

The next day I visit one of the UK’s most expensive places in which to live

– Cobham in Surrey, home to a shop with a real history. Threshold

Records is owned by rock legends The Moody Blues, is frequented by a

very up-market clientele and is, without doubt, the most highbrow record

shop I know.

It is a proper record shop, which stocks a vast selection of rock, blues,

country, world, folk, jazz and classical music, but which refuses to stock

boy bands or reality TV stars.

Phil Pavling, the store manager, is proud to have created a Simon

Cowell-free zone. Whilst it is unfair to blame Simon for declining sales

across the whole industry, it is undeniable that his company has been

responsible for changing people’s music-buying habits. Nobody understands

the global music industry and how to market CDs better than

Simon. The man is a genius but, for independent music stores, he is a

disaster.

Finalists in the The X Factor are all contracted to Simon’s company, Syco,

as are all of the writers and producers, and the resultant CDs are all

released and distributed through Sony BMG. The X Factor is, effectively, an

hour-long television advert for Sony BMG – its artists dominate the choice

of guests and, if you listen to the songs covered by those guests, you will

find that a very high percentage of the material used in the show is from

original recordings by Sony BMG artists.

Back in the 1970s record shops were thriving and Threshold quickly

expanded by opening stores in Andover, Chichester, Birmingham and

Swindon. By the mid-80s, however, these shops were no longer economically

viable and the decision was made to close down all-but-one of them.

John Lodge, a key member of The Moody Blues, was keen to keep open the

store in Cobham as, by then, it had become his home town.

That the shop is still trading is down to the fact that the building itself is

owned by The Moody Blues, who had based their administrative operation

and fan club there. They also have an enormously passionate music fan in

Phil, who manages the shop and plays a huge part in the continued existence

of Threshold Records.

Phil told me the story of how he got involved in music. He was an ex-

Our Price manager who was after a new challenge, so he lined up a couple

of interviews for jobs at local record shops.

The first was at a shop called CD Vids, whose owner, interviewing Phil,

asked his opinion of the shop’s name. Phil commented that it was the first

thing he would get rid of, as it read like they were selling pornographic

videos! “I thought of that name,” the owner replied. He next asked Phil

what he thought of the coffee bar installed inside the shop. Phil told him

that it was tacky and whoever thought that it would work was potty. “That

was my idea,” the owner replied. At this point Phil just said, “I’ll get my

coat”, and walked out, hoping the interview that he had lined up at

Threshold would go better.

Fortunately the owners of Threshold appreciated Phil’s forthright views

and, in 1988, he was taken on to turn around their struggling business.

One thing that he introduced was Threshold’s ‘Recommended Wall’,

where Phil writes his own reviews of CDs that he seriously recommends.

The work that is put into these reviews is impressive and his humorous

writing style has convinced me that Phil could have had an alternative

career as a rock journalist.

Mind you, I would also have loved to have seen the look on Phil’s face

on the day he opened his copy of In Tune International, to find that the magazine

had printed a letter from a certain George Hulme, complaining about

his being grumpy. Here is the letter, followed by Phil’s published reply.

“I was alerted to the existence of a specialist CD retailer in Cobham,

Surrey, and paid it a visit. The stock is large and covers classical

(instrumental and vocal), jazz (all styles), blues and easy listening.

They charge full price for the CDs and the manager is noted for being

rather grumpy. The address is 53 High Street, Cobham, Surrey KT11

3DP . The shop is at the end of the High Street

and I recommend a visit.”

Phil’s reply:

“Resisting the impulse to begin this letter “Nnnnnyeeeeeeah”, I’m

somewhat perplexed at being labeled (by George Hulme in your

April letters page) as some kind of retail Victor Meldrew. I really feel

I should query this curious and rather unwarranted slur on my generally

upbeat and, even though I say so myself, ‘perky’ nature. At the

end of a long day spent trying to identify the most obscure customer

enquiries (“It was on the radio last week and it’s got ‘love’ in the

title”) my general conviviality still shines through. Despite endless

complaints as to why we (a small local independent store) can’t match

the prices at Tesco, my joyful exuberance remains undiminished.

Even after seeing yet another ex-customer in the high street and being

greeted with the words “I’ve got an i-Pod now and I just download

everything”, my joie de vivre continues unabated. Truth be told, it’s

only being so cheerful that keeps me going!”

The shops most notorious buyer was Mr Dunlop. He was a builder by trade and was

working on a large mansion in the Cobham area. It was a big job, and Mr

Dunlop lived on-site in a small caravan. He was a massive man, looking not

unlike the wrestler Giant Haystacks, with long, straggly hair and a bushy

beard. Phil found it amusing to picture this giant of a man living in such a

tiny caravan.

Then, one day, Mr Dunlop turned up, having decided on a new image

for himself. He had completely shaved off all of his hair. Sadly, it looked as

if the job had been done for him by Sweeney Todd, as his newly bald head

was covered in dried blood.

On the very top of his head was a big grey cross. He had slashed

himself badly and, no matter how many elastoplasts he put on the

wound, the blood still seeped through. He eventually decided to stem

the flow by covering the wound with a cross made from duck tape.

This did not quite do the job, as blood still trickled out from under the

cross. Mr Dunlop did not think it was important to wipe the blood off

his head, so he walked the streets of Cobham looking like an extra from

Dawn of the Dead.

As he did not have a TV in his caravan Mr Dunlop had to find alternative

ways of entertaining himself. One of these was listening to music, which

was why he was spending some of his hard-earned cash in Threshold.

However, when he entered the shop on this day Phil suddenly saw how else

he entertained himself on those lonely nights in his caravan in Cobham as,

tucked under his arm, was a fully inflated blow-up doll.

Phil could not decide if he was more shocked by the sight of Mr

Dunlop’s slashed head or by the inflatable doll. Mr Dunlop nonchalantly

propped the doll up on the counter and asked Phil to look after it (as if

somebody was likely to steal it) whilst he flicked through the rock ‘n’ roll

CDs. Phil and the remaining customers stood there – as open-mouthed as

the doll! For the next twenty minutes Mr Dunlop picked out a selection of

CDs, before coming to the counter; paying for them in cash; wishing Phil

good-day; tucking the doll under his arm; and strolling off down Cobham

High Street.

Sadly the shop has now closed leaving Mr Dunlop and his blow up doll having to purchase their music elsewhere.

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 is released on 13 April on DVD and is available in record shops. Distributed by Proper Music.

 www.thevinylrevivalfilm.com

@Revival_Vinyl

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