The Soul Mine Revisited

A couple of years ago I wrote a series of posts (under the Retail Therapy banner) about a handful of Record Shops that had, in one way or another, been a huge part of my life at various points along the way.

Included in that series was a post on Wellington’s The Soul Mine (1985-2006) which neatly framed my relationship with that particular shop. That post turned out to be one of the blog’s most popular in terms of page hits (even attracting, gasp, some comments), but I always felt that it was incomplete and lacking somewhat in terms of wider reach.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Tony Murdoch, owner of The Soul Mine, to talk some more about the shop and I used the guts of that conversation for a piece which I submitted to AudioCulture, a widely read website dedicated to documenting the history of popular culture in New Zealand – whether it be people, bands, venues, or “scenes”. Murdoch kindly supplied photos, flyers, and quotes, I added some words, I deleted some others, and we ended up with this (click here to read more about The Soul Mine on AudioCulture).

Retail Therapy 6: Slow Boat Records, Wellington

Aside from the two Wellington stores I’ve covered in previous blogposts, there has of course been a host of other local record shops which have at various points along the journey served as depositories for my hard earned cash.

Going way back, there was the weird and wonderful Silvio’s Emporium on Cuba Street, a treasure trove of pick n mix delight, a shop that ceased to exist sometime back in the early Nineties, maybe even a bit earlier. There was the self-proclaimed “largest record shop in New Zealand”, Chelsea Records, in Manners Mall, which I think eventually got swallowed up by one of the large faceless chains. And more recently, right up until a couple of years ago, there was Real Groovy Records, also on Cuba, a shop with just about everything any self-respecting music consumer could possibly wish for.

But to conclude the Retail Therapy series of posts, I wanted to write a little bit about Slow Boat Records, an institution in Wellington music retailing. Unlike all of the above – and the two Wellington stores I’ve blogged about previously – Slow Boat is still operating, still a going concern as Cuba Street survivors for more than a quarter of a century. Selling both new and used music, in every format, stuff from all eras.

 

 

When I wrote about the Atomic and 24-Hour Party People nights at San Francisco Bath House recently (SFBH being just along the strip), I identified the sense of community at the venue as being something pivotal to the success of those nights. That same sense of community, indeed, a wide circle within the very same community, has been at the heart of the Slow Boat success story.

Owner Dennis O’Brien is himself a local muso of some renown, and he leads a passionate and knowledgeable team. Nothing ever feels too rushed at Slow Boat, it’s a great place to browse, or just to hang out as a voyeur. A place to feed off the sort of warm organic vibe you can only get amid racks and bins of pre-loved product. It is easy to get a little lost in there sometimes, even if the carefully categorised sections ensure you can never really stray too far.

It’s just a little thing, but I really like the display of Slow Boat’s picks for the greatest albums of all-time, taking pride of place over on the far wall. Something like that works on several levels, most obviously as inspiration to finally pick up that “all-timer” you’ve always wanted but never quite got around to buying. But it also works as a discussion point, and it informs the punter that these guys have a sense of history … a love of what they do. It’s an acknowledgement that for all that popular music is so often about the present, about the now, it also has a rich and vibrant past, and Slow Boat is a place where you can engage with that. It feels a bit like an inadvertent mission statement … of sorts.

In the opening post of this series I bemoaned the fact that nowadays I don’t get across town to Slow Boat often enough. I’m really going to have to do something about that. In my defence, I did many times set out on lunch-break treks across town, with Real Groovy the target destination, only to run out of time because browsing at Slow Boat got in the way. I could never quite make it all the way up Cuba Street within the allotted hour … and now I have no reason to.

So perhaps I’ll have to revive a Friday night routine from a few years back and make the effort to get there more often. Whatever happens, it’s nice to know Slow Boat Records is still an option for me, a throwback to the past, one that just keeps on giving …

I reckon the small but nostalgia-rich New Zealand music sections at Slow Boat are among the best I’ve ever seen, especially in terms of used vinyl, but more generally across all formats. Here’s a tribute to indie record stores from NZ band The Brunettes …

 

 

 

 

Retail Therapy 5: Colin Morris Records, Wellington

If the Soul Mine was my record digging poison of choice when I lived in Wellington’s Eastern suburbs in the late Eighties, then later moves to more central locations like Aro Street, Majoribanks Street, and Dixon Street, meant I also found myself frequenting inner city record shops more than ever before. One of Wellington’s most iconic and best loved shops of that era was Colin Morris Records in the heart of downtown Willis Street, a staple of the Wellington record-digging scene for the best part of two decades either side of my ‘OE’.

I don’t really know Colin Morris, but I know enough about him to say he’s an expert in the art of music retailing. And he was always a mine of relevant information on those occasions I dared to engage him long enough in chat. For whatever reason, I always felt a little wary of Morris. I was perhaps a bit in awe back then, probably because he was that bit older, but also for the fact that he was prolific in music critiquing circles, and a regular contributor to The Dominion’s music pages – something that continues to this day. I guess it was because he was an authority in a field I was passionate about.

By the time Colin Morris Records became the most convenient central option for me, there was a mainstream shift away from vinyl and tapes, and CD’s had taken hold as the music consumer’s vehicle of choice. Me? … I had been buying vast quantities of music on cassette, mainly for the portability it offered … but the Compact Disc definitely appealed. I had a few, and I just needed to invest in some decent hardware before I could delve too heavily into that format. Curiously enough, it was my obsession with buying product that kept me too poor to do just that.

The thing about Colin Morris Records was not only its central location, but the sheer variety the shop offered. Morris is obviously a serious jazz fan, and as I recall it, his shop also stocked a wide range of classical material. I was not particularly interested in either genre, but it’s fair to say it was one of the most well rounded “small” record shops I’ve ever visited. I’m not even sure it was all that small, it certainly felt like it expanded in floor space sometime between the mid Eighties and mid Nineties, and I spent many a Friday night or midweek lunch break diligently digging through the seemingly endless rows of product on display.

My recall of the shop’s demise is hazy – it was at least a decade or so ago now, or maybe even longer if my suspicion that the shop as an ongoing music outlet was swallowed up by one of the chain brands is correct. Morris himself has continued a career in retail, and for a while ran a music mail order business called Slipped Disc. He’s clearly a passionate music man, and his thoughts on the subject can be found just about everywhere you care to look. He currently has shows on both National and Concert radio.

I’d loved to have sourced a decent photo of the shop in its prime, but sadly there don’t appear to be any online.

Such was its wide range of stock genre-wise, and its overall longevity, it would be impossible to sign off with a single clip truly representative of the shop, so here’s something local, something very Wellington, and something from an era I associate strongly with Colin Morris Records …

Retail Therapy 4: Avalanche Records/Love Music, Glasgow

Another regular train journey I made during my years of living in Scotland in the early Nineties was the one that took me out to the bosom of family living in Coatbridge, about half an hour east of Glasgow, in an area known as the Monklands. The not-so-picturesque Glasgow Queen Street to Coatbridge Sunnyside, return, was made at least every couple of weeks.

On the fringes of Queen Street station, in Dundas Street, was a shop called Avalanche Records, perhaps THE prototype indie record store, a genuine throwback to a bygone era, and very much a serious distraction for me on those occasions I wasn’t running for the train. It isn’t called Avalanche Records these days. It’s called Love Music, but at last sighting the shop was very much alive, and it remains in that very convenient location.

I’m not sure if it is still owned and operated by a guy called Sandy McLean, but when I was there most recently in 2008 – or it may actually have been as recently as 2011 – it was like walking back in time. But in a good way. And it wasn’t only a sense of nostalgia driven by my relationship with the shop 15 years earlier, or the vague whiff of familiarity, it was the sense that the shop had successfully retained its soul, its independence, and a most charming point of difference from the chains and superstores surrounding it.

Back in the mid Nineties that meant Tower Records, HMV, and Virgin. All had megastores within shouting distance of Avalanche Records, but none offered the warmth and quiet passion offered by the comparatively tiny side street shop. Selling used and new, vinyl, tapes, CDs, everything was sorted into some semblance of order, yet there remained a prevailing sense of chaos – something which becomes unavoidable when at any moment a used copy of a long deleted title can jump right out at you and greet you like its long lost owner ... or owner to be.

The walls of Avalanche weren’t about being bombarded with the latest major label favourite either. Rather it was more about the retro, the obscure, the low budget, and the unique. And when I finished scouring the racks and bins for that rarely sighted old soul 45, I could flick through magazines, pick up a fanzine, or get local gig information by perusing the multitude of flyers left laying about.

I think I probably spent more money on gap-filling CD singles, mixtape fodder, rather than anything else when I regularly shopped there back in the day. But the last time I was in the store a few years ago – I’m pretty sure it had become Love Music by this time – I came across a used (but mint) Lee Scratch Perry CD that I’d never seen before, and an album often omitted from many of his “official” discographies: ‘The Essential Lee Scratch Perry’ on Mastercuts, a series more renowned for its retro dance music collections and various artist titles.

I’m not so sure that CD – picked up for a mere £3.99 – correctly identifies the truly essential Perry but it does at least showcase some of his best work from the Seventies. It remains my most recent purchase at the shop, and it felt quietly satisfying and no less fitting to find it there.

Here’s a clip from the album:

 

Retail Therapy 3: Fopp Records, Glasgow and Edinburgh

The ‘OE’ has become almost a rite of passage for anyone growing up in New Zealand. I’m not sure if that is simply because of the sense of isolation we feel from the rest of the world, being an island nation “off the coast of Australia”, or whether it relates to some kind of lower curiosity threshold, but an “overseas experience” is often considered something akin to an auxiliary university degree. So we all leave, have a look at what the rest of the world has to offer, and some of us return.



Fopp, Cockburn Street, Edinburgh

Thanks to a couple of barely anticipated long-term relationships, my OE came quite a bit later than I’d originally intended, and I was in my late 20s by the time I arrived in the UK, specifically Glasgow, Scotland, alone and homeless, in early 1993. I quickly found a place to live in a loft floor “bedsit” right in the heart of party central, Sauchiehall Street, home to some of Glasgow’s best nightspots. That I ended up working nightshift at a large inner city hotel meant my body clock was tuned to stay up all night, quite the bonus come the weekend or those precious nights off. Apart from the love affair I developed with all things Celtic FC, it’s fair to say that music and nightlife soon dominated the very fabric of my being … hey, it was a hard life, but someone had to do it, and even today I still pay for those sins with periodic bouts of hard-out insomnia.

That lifestyle naturally led to me having plenty of daylight time to discover all of the “new” record stores at my disposal, whether that meant a brisk afternoon walk out west to the bohemian delights of Byres Road, or just a lazy stroll around some of the more centrally located shops. On more than a few occasions I found myself leaving Glasgow altogether – sleepless and wired – on a bus or train bound for Edinburgh, the monumentally gothic and unbelievably beautiful city about an hour to the east. I was the proverbial pig in hog heaven.

 

Fopp, Byres Road, Glasgow

And it happened that Edinburgh’s Old Town area was home to Fopp Records, in Cockburn Street, a short walk up from Waverley Station. This was a little bit before Fopp became a nationwide chain of more than one hundred outlets, and the sense back then was that Fopp had an MO unlike any other music shop I’d ever encountered … it not only sold music, it sold books, posters, all manner of pop culture paraphernalia, plus the odd Tee-shirt or three. I think I’m right in recalling that Fopp did this before any of the major chain stores really caught on, common practice though it is today.

Fopp (the name taken from an Ohio Players record?) started life in the early Eighties as a market stall located in the aforementioned Byres Road area of Glasgow. It grew and grew to the extent that it eventually had shops in London before the vast majority of stores were sold and rebranded, as is the cut-throat way of the retail chain.

 

I’m fairly certain that Fopp, Cockburn Street, was one of those casualties and the shop – as at 2013 – no longer exists. Edinburgh still has a Fopp in Rose Street, on the other side of the gardens that dominate the city’s main drag, plus outlets in Glasgow – indeed, there’s one in Byres Road. But the Cockburn Street shop was definitely the one to turn to back in the Nineties, a shop so worth visiting I’d often forego the option of a decent day’s sleep in order to sate my "need" to browse the bins. Racks and bins that frequently hid a long lost gem or that rare dance mix I'd only ever heard once before in a club. It was a treasure trove of retail love.

 

Its pricing also seemed much less complex by the way prices were rounded up or down – discs were £5 rather than £4.98, or £10 rather than £11.99 … psychologically it always seemed so much easier to part with cash when less numbers were involved (I have no idea whether this is an actual cunning plan within retail circles or merely an accident of chance when it comes to me).

And so this was about the time that my CD collection really started to expand. It coincided with the rise of indie music in my wider consciousness, and although dance music remained a big part of my life in terms of going out, indie and post-punk releases formed the core of my early CD collection at that point. So I’ll sign off with this clip from 1993, a noisy two minute trip of such pure velocity it puts me right back on the Glasgow Central to Edinburgh Waverley Express in an instant ... here's Elastica with 'Stutter', turn it up and breathe in the bitumen:

 

Retail Therapy 2: The Soul Mine, Kilbirnie, Wellington

When I moved to Wellington in 1986, my first two flats were in the eastern suburb of Hataitai, with my third in the heart of Newtown. All three “homes” (and I use the word loosely) were a mere stone’s throw from the satellite suburb of Kilbirnie, which is where I discovered one of the best little record shops I’ve ever had the pleasure of stumbling into.

The Soul Mine was owned and run by a guy called Tony Murdoch, who’d moved to Wellington and established the shop in 1985, having previously run Vibes in Gisborne. Murdoch was a musician in a band called Marching Orders and his knowledge of music was (and remains) second to none.

Murdoch was clearly passionate about what he was doing at the Soul Mine. The shop had a sense of family, and of community, as much for its location as for those who worked behind the counter over the years – a close knit team that often included Murdoch’s mum, Doreen (RIP). It was a fun place to visit … you could catch up, get some tips, and hear the latest stuff. Murdoch would put something new on and spend the next five minutes shimmying and grinning from behind the counter, supremely confident that you liked his choice as much as he did; this man loved his work, and his enthusiasm was hugely infectious. It never really felt like it was only ever about the sale.

 

That ordinarily would be reason enough to visit regularly, but the key element that singled out the Soul Mine as being something out of the box – particularly for the capital’s leading DJ’s of its era – was the massive range of dance music it stocked. From mainstream stuff, to the imported Streetsounds and Upfront compilations, to more early Hip hop than you could poke a stick at – on the freshly established Def Jam and Tommy Boy labels – right across the spectrum to the more specialised DJ-geared high-bpm 12 inch imports. If it wasn’t already in stock, Murdoch would source it for you.

The Soul Mine catered for the DJ at a time when DJ culture needed some catering for, and although it may not have been part of any great master plan, Murdoch quickly became the default “go to” guy for all niche DJ needs. The shop didn’t just sell music, it acted as a rallying point for a growing subculture, taking on what could almost be described as a de-facto custodial role for the capital’s burgeoning Hip hop scene. In the late Eighties, and early Nineties in particular, the Soul Mine regularly promoted specific club gigs or one-off parties, and I think I’m right in saying the shop itself hosted a few very special gigs and DJ performances of its own … (De La Soul? … or is that just an urban myth?)

For me personally though, The Soul Mine was mostly about the dozens of funk and dance music compilations on cassette tape I bought there (lame, I know, but it was primarily for the car), mostly between 1987 and 1990; things like the early House Sound of Chicago comps, various Streetsounds Electro comps etc. I still have a few of them in a box somewhere. But one of the best purchases I ever made there came only on vinyl, and came blindly, directly after a recommendation from Murdoch one Saturday morning. It was a vinyl copy of Pay It All Back Volume 2, an On-U Sound compilation LP, on import. I loved it immediately, and it kick-started something of a love affair with anything On-U. In fact, I ended up collecting the entire Pay It All Back series – volumes 1 to 6 – over the course of the next decade.

Pressures directly related to changes in the way we consume music, the format it took, the presence of non-specialist chain stores, and I’m guessing, its suburban location, led to the shop’s closure after 21 years in 2006. I was briefly present late on at the Soul Mine closing down “party”, some twenty years after I’d first set foot in the shop, and I was blown away by some of the faces present … a virtual who’s who of the local DJ scene across the previous two decades.

I caught up with Murdoch recently and asked him to recall some of the guys who spent a lot of time in the shop during what was – remember – a time of massive change for the musical landscape; as dance music evolved, as funk morphed into house, and Hip hop exploded from a small niche scene into something resembling a massive global phenomenon … and in Wellington terms, the Soul Mine was very much at the heart of that:  

 Tony Murdoch (Soul Man in chief 1985-2006) …

 “(There was) the Lyall Bay collective - cats like King Kapisi (Bill Urale), Ian Seumanu aka DJ Raw, who currently does the Rumpshaker old skool gigs, and runs the DJ school out at Whitireia. Plus Shaun Tamou, who is now based in Oz.

The Newtown collective - cats like Kerry 'Aki' Antipas, who’s still doing it week in week out, DJ Rockit V, the Wright brothers, Douglas Swervone Wright and Andrew Kerb 1 Wright, break dancers and graffiti artists of the highest order. True upholders to this day of Hip hop’s finest traditions!

And the Island Bay boyz - Rodrigo Pantoja aka Don Luchito, now with Radio Active, and Danny Mullholland aka DJ Mikki Dee, who has regular gigs round town and overseas.

Then of course there were inner city cats like Kosmo Fa'alogo, now in Sydney promoting Hip hop parties and shows. And Tony 'DJ TP' Pene who was kinda the godfather DJ at Exchequers back in the mid Eighties, now in Colorado USA, in IT, and still mixing it up.

From the Hutt, the legendary Rhys Bell aka DJ Rhys B, big on Active's Famous Wednesday Night Jam (with Mark Cubey) and still phunking it up. DJ Laina Tiata also from the Valley and yep, still mixing it up.

Then of course the next wave featured guys like Jason 'Jaz' Ford, hip hop DJ/upholder extraordinaire. Also Cian O'Donnell, an English DJ who worked for me for a few years in the Nineties, (who was) into rare groove/soulful house/and a lot of tasty mixes. He now owns Conch Records in Auckland. We used to import huge quantities of all that stuff from the UK.

We can't forget of course the one and only Jason 'Clinton Smiley' Harding who was also there at the beginning and who traversed all the scenes and genres in his usual impeccable style. Not forgetting Matthew Poppelwell and Liam Ryan (ex Active breakfast host) who among other gigs now alternate each week at Boogie Wonderland …”

That’s a potted history of two decades worth of Wellington nightlife right there, and your humble blogger is thinking that if a Wellington equivalent of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life is ever to be penned then Murdoch himself might be a resource well worth preserving (place a heritage order on that man, quick).

It seems appropriate then to finish with a clip of something representative of the shop, it might be something I heard for the first time there, I can’t really be sure, but it seems far more fitting for Soul Mine purposes than – for all that it was the recommendation of a lifetime – something from the On-U Sound catalogue! … here’s some Hip hop then, (very) old skool styles … Eric B & Rakim, a masterclass in rhyme and flow:

 

Retail Therapy 1: Digging Through The Bins Of The Distant Past

So I’ve been indulging in quite a lot nostalgia recently, and one of the things I’ve been thinking about is the way I consume music and how much has changed over the past 30-odd years. How I source it, what form it takes, and when I listen to it. These days everything is accessible online to the extent that I no longer need to leave the house – or even my rather luxurious armchair here at the everythingsgonegreen mansion – to find exactly what I want, when I want it.

35 years ago, when I first started buying music regularly, such a notion would have been considered out of this world. And while it is all very convenient nowadays, the sense of adventure I used to associate with discovering and tracking down new music has largely been lost. It just isn’t the same as it used to be.

 

As I’ve touched on previously, I spent a large portion of my youth cruising what used to be known as “record shops”. A lot of hours, and a lot of record shops. You might have even called it a pastime, if I hadn’t been so professionally thorough and anally obsessive about it. Hell, you might even say it was one of the few things in life I’ve truly excelled at. Friday nights and Saturday mornings were an especially productive period for me. I loved it.

It wasn’t always about the new product or even buying it, it was the ritual, the browsing, the digging, and the compiling of a mental wish-list (of sorts). I still do it occasionally, but my options have become very limited in recent years, and even in a city as large as Wellington, you can now count the dwindling number of specialist record stores on one hand.

My central city work location means that if I want to “browse” music during lunch breaks – the after work browse is just no longer an option – to peruse actual physical product, as opposed to the online equivalent, the chain store JB HiFi is the only genuinely close-at-hand option. JB has a good range of stuff and some great bargain bin pricing, but the shop has no soul, no feelgood factor, no sense that the music is even important. It all feels a bit sterile, a jack-of-all product, post-Foodcourt option for the masses.

 

 

When I get really clever, or remotely organised, I’ll jump on a crosstown bus and head up Cuba Street to Slow Boat, or around the corner to Rough Peel … but it always feels rushed, a little fraught … so many bins, so little time. I guess it all depends on just how hungry I might be. Both of those shops have an expertise and credibility not found at any chain store and I really ought to make the effort more frequently.

There’s also Evil Genius on Adelaide Road, out in Berhampore, and as refreshing as it is to know that an independent record store is surviving out there in the suburbs – beyond those of the Mall variety – it just isn’t an option for me on any occasional, let alone regular, basis. Huge kudos to the Evil Genius guys for taking that on.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about a few of the key music shops I grew up with – relics from the distant and not so distant past – and I thought it would be fun over the next few weeks to document a few thoughts on some of the very best I’ve encountered during my prime record digging years. Specific shops, mostly in Wellington, and a couple in Scotland. Why they were important to me, the key purchases, and whether that shop was about the vinyl, the tape, or the CD. Basically a blurb on why that particular shop was special, and I’ll take a short journey across the formats as they’ve evolved.

So I thought I’d cover five key shops at the rate of one or so per week, over the next month or so; let’s call it an exercise in extremely self-indulgent virtual retail therapy.