Last Shop Standing: The State Of Independents

Graham Jones, author of Last Shop Standing, has an unconventional qualification behind his decision to write about the demise of the independent record store. “I’ve probably visited more record shops than anybody on planet Earth,” he boldly claims at the top of our conversation. As a record sales rep for the past 25 years, covering the whole of the UK, he may well have a valid shot at such a title. Yet whilst Jones has steadily witnessed the erosion of those record stores, from over 2,000 in the 1980s to around 280 today, it wasn’t hard and fast numbers that led him to asking, as his book’s sub-title puts it, ‘whatever happened to record shops?’

“It was a conversation with my auntie who was in her eighties,” begins Jones on the genesis that saw him put pen to paper. The chat centred around the continuing decline of Jones’s work, leading him to speculate as to whether there was any future for independent record stores at all. “Then my aunt said to me ‘they’re going the way of the candlestick maker.’ At first I didn’t know what she meant but she explained that when she was a little girl, every high street would have a candlestick maker, a stamp shop and a coin shop. It just made me think, ‘blimey, you don’t go down the pub and talk about what happened to all the candlestick makers.’”

Yet this thought process did get Jones talking about record shops. Travelling to fifty stores across the country, he interviewed the owners of what he believed may well be the last shops standing in their areas. But rather than a glum appraisal of the current, seemingly inevitable demise of his beloved hangouts and livelihood, the book took on a more celebratory feel. “They all had incredibly funny stories about their life in music,” says Jones of the experience. “And so the book became more a celebration of record stores instead of what I originally thought was going to be me writing their obituaries.”

This positive and anecdotal nature of the book helped gain it widespread acclaim before eventually landing in the lap of filmmaker Pip Piper. Approached by Piper to make a film about his book, it didn’t take much persuasion for Jones to give the green light. “A couple of other companies had approached me but Pip was the first to actually be enthusiastic and passionate about it,” says Jones. “I was impressed with his whole operation and I just felt it’d be good to do it with him. I thought we’d have a good laugh and that his heart was in the right place.”

Piper has a somewhat different take on how the process went down. “We [himself and producer Rob Taylor] drove down to where Graham was living at the time and took him out for a pub meal,” he begins. “We bought him a ploughman’s, a pint of shandy and talked to him about why we thought this might make a great film. He got quite excited about it and the deal was struck. There were no posh hotels or fat cheques in advance. It was a real spit-and-a-handshake agreement really.”

While the go-ahead came about easily enough, the actual structure of the film took some time to fall into place. “We really didn’t know what film we were going to have because the book is full of anecdotes and great stories,” explains Piper. “Which is great, you know, but that’s not a film.” Yet without a clear idea of how the film would eventually pan out, the small group, including Jones, set about touring the country’s stores, interviewing their owners and sleeping on the floors of relatives while they did so. “It was like the book; a completely low budget, independent affair,” laughs Jones.

“We really just allowed ourselves the freedom to gather the material,” Piper elaborates of the filming process. “It was a couple of months into the edit before we felt there was a shape beginning to emerge. Conversations were very much centred around the rise, the fall and the rebirth of record shops and that’s how it came about.” Sub-titled, unsurprisingly, The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Independent Record Shop, the film of Last Shop Standing does exactly what it says on the poster, charting the humble origins, obstacles and victories of record stores like a classic three-act play.

Taking the leading roles was Jones himself, as interviewer and commentator, as well as a wealth of shop owners from across the land. However, the film also features a number of cameos which may pique general interest further still, among them Paul Weller, Johnny Marr, Norman Cook and Billy Bragg, who all took time out to visit their local record stores of choice and talk openly of their experiences.

Once again though, there was no dealing with agents or record companies to get people involved, just a good old-fashioned sit down and chat. “We wanted it to be a real passion project from the grass roots up, so Graham talked to a lot of the shops and asked who they had contact with,” reveals Piper of how such celebrated artists got involved. “It gives it a real authenticity. All of the people are really passionate about that particular shop [they were filmed in] but also about record shops in general. We didn’t want to overwhelm the film with that though. We wanted the record shop owners to be the real characters of the film and the celebrities very much in a supporting role.”

It’s a tact that works well, the dishevelled owners and known faces sharing in painting the bigger picture while filling in the spaces with anecdotal asides. “It’s great, the shape it found in the end, that it wasn’t just a homage to something that’s disappearing or a bit of a rant about what’s been lost,” says Piper. “I think it was liberating for all of us to experience that, not in an idealistic way because obviously shops closed while we were making the film, so it’s still a rocky path out there. But I think the film captures something of a wider social comment on the desire and the shift away from homogenised consumerism to something that’s more independent and connected to people’s lifestyles. I think that’s really positive.”

Jones agrees that, despite the hard times, some good has come from the twin assaults of digital downloads and supermarket loss-leading that has decimated the industry. “I remember ten or fifteen years ago, many record shops were very snobby about their customer base,” he states with some embarrassment for the old cliché. “Those shops are gone now. If you actually care about your customers and you go that extra mile for them, then you can learn to survive.” Indeed, Jones brings forward his latest figures on the matter, showing that while we are never likely to see 2,000 record shops bustling on these shores again, the number has actually risen, up from an all-time-low of 269 three years ago to 280 today.

“I think what you may well find is something in excess of those numbers,” says an even more optimistic Piper. “People who have little boutiques, who maybe share a space and sell vinyl while someone else sells cupcakes and good coffee.” There are, however, even stranger combinations than buying the latest Godspeed record before sitting down to a nice blueberry muffin. “There’s a shop opened in Southsea called Pie and Vinyl,” laughs Jones. “You go in there and you buy a pie, sit down and eat it while they play an album for you. That’s thinking outside the box and it’s maybe going to one extreme, but that’s what you have to do.”

It may be a bittersweet idea for the likes of Aberdeen’s One-Up and Edinburgh’s Avalanche, both of whom have announced that come a bad Christmas period, they will likely be shutting up shop in the New Year. Jones feels he has little to offer such shops in terms of advice beyond what they are already doing, but agrees that announcing their intentions is a good move. “When you have a record shop closing, you have people in tears. So I think that by announcing that unless things improve then they’ll be off, that’s a good tactic, a last throw of the dice. Hopefully the people of Edinburgh and Aberdeen will realise that it’ll be a sad day if these record stores close.”

“There’s a need for city councils to rethink rates to help independent stores to have a presence in shopping areas,” says Piper on the subject. “There’s also a real need to think beyond Record Store Day, to have stuff going on all through the year to keep kindling the public imagination. But I think there is definitely a groundswell of people rediscovering new ways to consume music and to be in and around spaces where people love it, have intelligence about it and want to share it. That’s definitely growing and will continue to grow. I think that’s very exciting.”