How are your memories of Birmingham’s record shops in the Seventies? Maybe you can help Long Live Vinyl reader Miss J Lee by leaving a comment below…
Triggered by watching UB40 concerts on YouTube this evening, and remembering buying the originals of their cover versions, I was wondering if anyone could possibly help my memory please. Endlessly Googling different questions (as you do), I just cannot find any answers…
I have been trying to recall a record shop that I used to go to just out of Birmingham city centre in the 70’s but my memory has become so vague now that I have got older.
The shop was all reggae, bluebeat, etc.. West Indian guys behind the counter, hey had all the latest and some unreleased reggae singles… Stuff you could buy ‘under the counter’, banned reggae singles that you couldn’t buy at the normal record shops…
This shop sold stuff like Max Romeo, Wet Dream, Judge Dread which was rude back then (how times change!). The Trojan label was also just stepping up then and becoming renowned.
I think the shop wasn’t far away from what was then the Rag Market, and near what was also then the Midland Red bus depot. The shop was in a row of old terraced houses, the shopfront itself being like the front room of a house (as was the record shop at the bottom of Park Road near Aston Cross where I used to live then).
Something in the back of my mind is even making me wonder if the shop was Reddington’s Rare Records or the source/start of it. But I may be confused on that one as I know that shop was in Birmingham town centre at a later time.
I recall something called The Bee which was a thing people used to go by when giving directions to the shop. It may have been a painted sign/advert on a wall at the start of the road and the shop was just down past on the left-hand side?
I can picture all of this in my head but I look at online maps and I can’t work out even what the road was or where…
Any help would be gratefully appreciated – just get in touch!.