Any trip to London for a self-respecting vinyl nerd is incomplete without a trip to Rough Trade records, the shop which gave birth to the label which just owned the early ’80s, putting out masterpieces by the likes of the Young Marble Giants, The Feelies and The Clean. I’ll post clips at the bottom. They are all amazing.

But it was the shop that started it all. On prior trips to the UK I’ve always made the pilgrimage to the original Rough Trade store, on Talbot Rd in Portobello. It was started in 76 and remains as pokey and passionate as ever, with reams of incredible albums which have a strong sense of John Peel’s ethic about them. That is, rather then the stock being driven by current orthodoxies and trends it’s more about digging hard as hell to find the good from wherever it might spring.

I love it, and will probably make the trip this time too, even with our limited time resources. Yesterday though I hit up Rough Trade East, its far bigger and posher sibling. It’s easily ten times the scale of the original shop, and the emphasis is as much on CDs as vinyl, and thus I wasn’t as wowed by it. But there are still plenty of treasures to be found. And this sign from the toilets kinda blew my mind.

I picked up a copy of Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall, the autobiography of Luke Haines, the legendary misanthrope behind the Auteurs, which looks fantastic. I particularly liked the description of britpop on the back as “the idiot runt child of all music genres”. As a guy who owned albums by Cast and Kula Shaker, it’s easy to see how you’d form such an opinion.

I guiltily snuck a look at the overseas section to see which of the NZ-bands-making-it-in-London were actually making it, and was disappointed to only find Collapsing Cities (Fear Of Opening My Mouth - expected, and in quantity which was good to see), Liam Finn (ditto minus the quantity for Better To Be) and The Rock’n'Roll Machine (Rock’n'Roll Disease, WTF? That must be like seven years old now. I was half-tempted to buy it to put it out of its misery, but for a fiver…).

So no Cut Off Your Hands (who I did hear in H&M) or Ruby Suns or Connan Mockasin, but not a bad showing I suppose. In any case, the LP section was WAY better, five different Dead C albums made them the best represented artist by far.

That kinda sums the store up, an almost absurd dedication to running with what people need rather than want, and somehow they’ve made that fly as a business model in the face of all logic. The label went down in a screaming heap in the early ’90s before emerging stronger this decade, but the stores march on, carrying their strange cargo ever onward. Go there.

Here’s the sound of the label’s early years, rickety but so right.