Revolver was an intimidating but beguiling record shop in Bristol where I worked during my 20s. Although I was confident it would make an interesting subject, I was wary of writing about somewhere so redolent of my youth. My intention was to evoke the peculiar atmosphere of Revolver and the sense I often felt there that time had undergone some form of adjustment. This was an experience I had accepted as part of my job, as I spent days alone in an empty, badly lit shop with a remarkable and idiosyncratic record collection at my disposal. As I listened to music in this environment, with barely any responsibilities other than to be a presence behind the counter, the records I heard seemed to connect directly with my subconscious.

While reading Teju Cole’s Open City I had been struck by the manner in which the narrator and his surroundings interchanged roles as observers of the world around them, and wondered if I could adapt the idea to explore the relationship between music and place. The records I first encountered in Revolver, from fairly obscure avant-garde compositions to mid-seventies dub to Virginia Astley to Massive Attack, provided a context for these exploratory mental journeys. As the book grew into an examination of how time, our surroundings and passion for discovery shape us, I hoped the reader might recognise a similarly intense attachment to somewhere from their own lives.

If Original Rockers is a memoir, it is a memoir of an absent space. Modern Nature by Derek Jarman was an influence, as it demonstrated how one’s past and passions might be written about objectively, without lapsing into solipsism. After a certain age, nostalgia feels uncontrollable and the idea of being sentimental about a subject so prone to caricature as a record shop was one I was determined to avoid. Although I was writing about my experiences, it was the shop, rather than myself, that was the subject.

There were many anecdotes to illustrate Revolver’s eccentricities at my disposal: the shop was raided by police convinced it was an LSD factory, the owner was kidnapped by concert promoters, our customer service was predicated on a dreadful musical snobbery that often resulted in animated disagreements. Such incidents were certainly entertaining, but it was Revolver’s presence in the city as a meeting point for the dispossessed, who largely made up our clientele and who felt temporarily at ease with themselves within the shop’s four walls, that I most wanted to celebrate.

As I began work on the book, the then-mayor of Bristol, George Ferguson, in a process that is as familiar as it is banal, was exploiting the city’s reputation for bohemianism and individuality as an incentive to attract investment from property speculators. This encouraged me to emphasise how the perceived cultural capital of the city was the result of years of illegal and semi-legal behaviour, of people coming together at sound systems, blues parties and in front of graffiti-decorated walls, to demonstrate their legitimate sense of injustice at how the city had treated its less affluent areas and citizens in the past. I also felt that, through initiatives such as Record Store Day and the recent narrative of vinyl’s renaissance, record shops themselves were undergoing a form of gentrification.

On publication, Original Rockers was variously described as “moving” and “intensely personal”. It was intensely personal: my mother, who had been seriously ill, died shortly after I completed the first chapter. Some months later, when two thirds of the book had been written, my father was diagnosed with an advanced cancer. Although the book concludes in the present I felt it unnecessary to share these details with the reader, but my emotions doubtless seeped into the pages.

While completing the book I spent a great deal of time in the dream state elicited by grief, which provided me with the same unconscious receptiveness to music I had first experienced when sitting on a stool behind the counter in Revolver. I was once more overwhelmed by the act of listening to records. It is perhaps this extraordinary capacity for music to influence and sustain our lives that is the true subject of Original Rockers.

Extract

To stand inside and loiter in a record shop is to be in a separate habitat, one that feels cloistered, protective and disengaged from any other type of retail activity; an ecology whose ambience can be experienced by degree and by the subtle shifts in mood that are set by whatever music is coming through the shop’s speakers. If a shop is playing a familiar album there are few greater pleasures than settling in to its running order and allowing its well-worn grooves to prompt the head to nod along while flicking through the racks. There is also a thrill in discovery. A previously unheard record coming through the store’s sound system often prompts the question that, despite their studied air of indifference, anyone working behind a record shop counter longs to hear: “Excuse me, what’s this you’re playing?”

There is never a shortage of music to play in a record store. Music from every era, especially some of an era’s most unloved records, sits for years awaiting rediscovery gathering dust on a half-remembered shelf. Barely perceptible changes in taste bring forgotten albums back to life. A decade after its dominance in the recording studio, a gated digital drum machine was the totemic sound of eighties excess and records made around its production values could be found for a pound. Twenty years later some of the more esoteric or flawed albums from the period were no longer considered relics but instead appeared to new generations as talismanic recordings to be appropriated as influences. The greatest record shops are fine-tuned to these processes and are constantly aware of the shifting nuances in demand and popularity before they enter the mainstream. Such moments of precognition occur especially within the kind of music whose natural home is amid piles of unsorted records in the backrooms and improvised shelves of record shops with serious reputations.

Revolver was that kind of shop; its ability to thread a connective love of music across genres and fashions and to encourage its customers to do the same was its raison d’etre. Anyone who worked there was less interested in selling the weekly inundation of new releases than in delving through the racks of rare and obscure records that were kept from view. Behind closed doors Revolver contained a lifetime’s worth of music that could only be absorbed one side of an album at a time. The shop stocked any and every genre that a customer might desire, but its principal sales technique, if it had such a thing, was finding new ways in which music might unlock the subconscious. It was a shop that would reasonably strike any passing customer as not so much disengaged as unhinged. The type of place that was entirely divisive; for some music lovers it was the high water mark of any Saturday visit into town, for the more casual record buyer it was best avoided and with good reason.

More about the book

A lot of Original Rockers is very personal. In its intoxicating sense of place, and King’s tying together of disparate pop-cultural strands, it sometimes seems to be a modest cousin of Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic or Lipstick Traces, or an example of the idiosyncratic kind of cultural-historical writing lately done by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys in his travelogue American Interior. Such an idiom is replete with trap-doors, and from time to time the emphasis on evoking subjective experience means that King inevitably falls in: the use of such words as “eldritch” and “liminal” is usually a sign of over-writing, and so – very occasionally – it proves here.
That said, among his strongest talents is the braveness not to worry about Pseuds Corner, and capably evoke the magic that music and people’s surroundings can combine to create. – John Harris
Read the full review.

Buy the book

Original Rockers is published by Faber & Faber priced £9.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £8.19.