Return to Cheapo or Is That All There Is, Sonically Speaking?

 

Whenever I start to recreate a visit to Cheapo Cheapo Records in my head I always find myself striding purposefully towards the very back of the shop, ignoring the lure of those goodies nearer the entrance. 

Which is odd, because this wasn't something I ever actually did. 

Cheapo Cheapo Records - the complete story

It's now almost eight years since the death of Phil Cording, owner of Soho's Cheapo Cheapo Records, on the 29th of January, 2009; two months later the shop was closed once for all.

Cheapo had been a kind of haven since I first came to London in 1985: many a Saturday evening had been spent within its doors, ferreting through a mix of tat and marvels. Others have praised its stock of Northern Soul, but for me just about everything had an appeal, possibly because my musical tastes were shaped jointly by David Essex and Hubert Gregg. The film That'll Be The Day started me on a lifelong exploration of rock'n'roll just as Gregg's radio shows were painlessly educating me about the music of the thirties and forties. Cheapo had no shortage of either decade; finding the same LPs I had loved as a teenager in its cramped and dingy surroundings made it a home from home in the middle of the metropolis.

A few months after discovering that Cheapo was no more I began to explore my feelings in this blog, writing about going through through "a kind of mini-grief process", aware of that how ridiculous that sounded. I didn't know then that Phil's death had been the cause; I was mourning the loss of the shop itself and its significance in my life.

The passing of Cheapo

A wonderful, painterly image of Cheapo Cheapo Records, late of  Soho, found online; another photograph provided the basis for the various images to be found at the top of this blog.

If you haven't already done so, you can click the relevant page above to read a series of posts about the demise of Cheapo, my favourite record shop, and how I found closure (of a sort).

All I need to add here is that the above photograph has the look of an Andrew Wyeth image and makes me marvel that I never realised just how steep Rupert Street is.

Cheapo Cheapo Records - guide to posts

The post "Cheapo Cheapo Records - the Complete Story" seems to have attracted a lot of attention. It was assembled from a series of earlier posts, condensed and considerably rewritten in the process. If you wish to read the original pieces, which are longer and more discursive, click on titles below rather than images.

Non-cheapo mango

Normally around this time of year I attend a work-related lunchtime event in the West End then beetle off to root around in Cheapo Cheapo Records.

Today, the event over, I thought now would be the time to brave MADD, the mango-based dessert cafe which has sprung up in the spot where once Cheapo stood.

Madditional

More details about the translated Cheapo, taken from the blog of "specialist branding agency" Underscore.

The owners appointed underscore to devise the name and create a fresh and funky brand to take their exciting concept to the market. The name itself is a mix of the words Mango and Addict, as most choices on their truly unique menu contain the superfruit Mango in some shape of form ...Our communications needed to be playful, versatile and bold to establish a new brand in such a busy location as Soho – which is why MADD is the perfect name for this destination restaurant.

So now you know the Rest of the Story. An "exciting concept" indeed.

Oh, and if you have any allergies, please let them know before ordering. Thank you.

Cheapo gone MADD

Saw this for myself tonight, already knowing it was inevitable, as I had seen, a few days after the last entry, signs of some kind of counter being put up in the Cheapo Cheapo Records space, but above is final proof. It has happened. The shop I loved, the place which sustained me through amateur and professional associations (oh, read the relevant entries, if you can be bothered to find them) is now ... "London's first mango-based dessert and coffee lounge."

Don't get me wrong: I endorse the consumption of fruit - at least in theory. And it's a  bold move to have an eaterie in the heart of London's West End. Who could have seen that coming? But will the customers be nourished as I was?

Cheapo Cheapo Records update February 2011

I'm delighted to report that Alastair Dougall (above), the Brighton-based singer songwriter who composed the lament for Cheapo Cheapo Records which you can find in the post here, has now recorded a new version which you can check out on his myspace playlist here, along with an album's worth of other tracks.

Cheapo Cheapo's Vinyl stock still for sale - updated link

If anyone reading this is interested in buying or enquiring about Cheapo Cheapo's vinyl stock, here* is an updated link. (If you're new to this blog, find more information about Cheapo by scrolling down the last few posts.) Presumably the Gumtree site only allows ads for a certain amount of time; this was reposted on 7 June. 13,000 records are available for £2000. A small sample is given in the ad but if you email the seller you will be sent a much larger list.

If the ad has disappeared again you can check if the stock is still for sale by going to gumtree, here*, or if that doesn't work, enter the following categories (click on screengrab below to enlarge)

I do hope the stock gets sold and not melted down or whatever. Perhaps the Museum of London could recreate the shop. Is there a record collector who could love all the styles represented?


*  Sadly, the links are no longer relevant.

Cheapo - slight return

Some days or weeks after my visit to Cheapo's old premises on January 19th  I went back - and this time actually crossed the road and pressed my camera against the window pane. Not much was visible on the day itself and I didn't bother uploading the photograph here, as one pile of debris looks pretty much like another, but that worn floor in the image taken from flickr in the prevous post now makes the following foggy image more readable, so here it is: Click to make it larger.

Cheapo 2008

Found this on flickr, dated February 2008, credited to Federella. Think you can glimpse some CDs bottom left, but it's mostly DVDs, which began to crowd out CDs in the front of the shop. The figure is looking towards the back, wherein a range of viny and jazz/nostaligia, classical etc CDs lurk. It certainly gives a sense of how cosily cramped the premises were; I'm proud to think I may have contributed to the wearing out of the floor. Click for a larger image.

Cheapo - a musical tribute by Alastair Dougall

I stayed on for an hour at work to add more to the previous blog entry. Getting home, I googled "Cheapo Cheapo closed" and found this musical tribute by Alastair Dougall, which suggests there's plenty of grief to go round. I haven't picked out all the words yet but it sounds beautiful. And who needs words when you have music? Although I caught bits and pieces like "Phil's still frowning in the grave." And the song is also a lament for the dispossessed of the record industry, and the artefacts they produced: Cheapo is the place "where old albums go to die."



Update: Alastair has kindly forwarded the lyrics and given me permission to quote them here:

CHEAPO CHEAPO RECORDS by Alastair Dougall


An open door, past the pushers and pimps and whores, that was Cheapo Cheapo Records, three full-to-bursting floors.
Phil the owner, perpetual frown, keep you head down when he's around...
If you want to piss him off, just ask him what's in the shop.


Goodby, goodbye, Cheapo Cheapo Records, Rupert Street won't be the same...
Closing time, Cheapo Cheapo Records, green paint peeling in the Soho rain...
It's a shame no one will look through your racks again.


The famous, the failed, deleted and the super-rare, second-hand and never played, the has-beens and the never-were...
Priced up the same, best check on the condition, don't ask Phil for your money back, there's no receipts or compensation...


Good bye, goodbye Cheapo Cheapo Records, where old albums come to die
Closing time, Cheapo Cheapo Records, you could pick out a classic for a song...
But it's a shame the way those Cheapo days have gone.


...Rock and roll and jazzy noises, funk and country m/f voices, soundtracks, classical, spoken word,
And piles of promos no one's ever heard....


Goodbye, goodbye, Cheapo Cheapo Records, Phil's still frowning in the grave...
Closing time Cheapo Cheapo Records, you surely lived up to your name...
But it's a shame no one will look through your racks again.

Alastair Dougall's myspace page with more songs and info about him is here. 

Earlier blog entries working through my feelings about the closure of Cheapo:

A Wreath for Cheapo (this is the main one)
Nowhere (to buy records) Boy
Cheapo Revisited (photographs of the premises as they are now)
Cheapo Cheapo's vinyl stock up for sale (includes link to ad on gumtree site)
Cheapo Cheapo Closure Closure (an unexpected chance to go through the racks again - kind of)

Cheapo Cheapo Closure Closure

Hmm ... not quite as I would have wished in every particular, but those who have read the earlier posts lamenting the loss of Soho's Cheapo Cheapo Records may be gratified to learn that I have unexpectedly achieved what amounts to a kind of closure today. And it all came about from a conversation at a party (ooh, get me) on Sunday.

I was talking about records to a former bouncer and mod, who bought a lot of Northern Soul in Cheapo, which led to my googling for recentish comments about the shop and finding the Gumtree advertisement mentioned in the previous entry. I emailed enquiring about CDs (the ad only mentions the large stock of vinyl) and today phoned to arrange a time to come and view whatever there was. I said to my colleague, only half-joking, "This feels like happiness," comparable to a wonderful moment during my dominie incarnation when I was given a week off normal duties (still paid, mind you) to take part in a sitcom summer school. Ohhh yessss. And the knowledge that my colleagues received no comparable dispensation made it, I have to admit, all the sweeter. (The eventual fate of a sitcom I wrote a few years later kind of balances things out, but no more o'that.)

Anyway, off I trot to a warehouse near Hanger Lane. The actual process of reaching it is unnecessarily arduous, largely because the directions at a bus stop are, in effect, upside down, causing me to stride away from my goal until I can figure the matter out. Not to worry, I say to myself: it's a kind of a quest, Christopher Vogler-like. Riches and fulfilment await once the obstacle of my essential stupidity in practical matters such as these is overcome.

Luis, Louis

I've been tempted to add more to that original post about Cheapo, piling on the detail in an effort to keep nudging the stark "CLOSED" of that final image out of sight. But Tuesday's visit to Rupert Street and the act of photographing what amounts to conclusive proof that my favourite record shop has not, after all, been granted a magical reprieve by some eccentric but minted collector has brought about a belated acceptance of the situation. Unless I'm still in denial.

Either way, it makes sense to discuss lesser-known jazz great Luis Russell more fully in this separate post, as he only came up in the context of my love for jazz being shaped by my local library. I don't think I ever actually sighted a Russell record in Cheapo, in fact, although the happy result of my random decision to borrow The Luis Russell Story from Motherwell Library some time in 1972 may have predisposed me to take a chance on many an unpromising item in Cheapo and elsewhere.

A random decision, I'm assuming, because the image above doesn't exactly scream excitement - especially to someone who didn't really know anything about jazz. The names would have meant nothing to me then.

But Motherwell Library (a pioneer, I was once told, in making records available to borrowers) had a strictly "no pop" policy at the time. Otherwise the range was fairly wide, not to mention eccentric, and seemed to reflect the community and immigration in the Lanarkshire area: I once had to borrow a Lithuanian folk record for a teacher who could not get it in his own Glasgow library. (By way of reward, he gave me a bar of chocolate. I was sixteen at the time.)

Oddities I took home with no perceived confectionery humiliation overlay  included Ron Geesin (indescribable, so I'll refer you to his official website, where you can hear sample tracks) and - I now remember - McGough and McGear (two thirds of the Scaffold). Geesin deserves at least a footnote in the doo wop part of this blog, as he remastered Dell Vikings recordings for the Flyright label, but his own recordings, which I first came across on my brother's BBC-issued John Peel Presents Top Gear LP, are, to coin a phrase, Something Else.

On the Top Gear album (a tie-in with Peel's Radio 1 programme featuring musicians who hadn't yet been signed by big labels), Geesin seemed to be dropping a lot of equipment very noisily and apologising to "Mr Engineer" (which memory of his voice reminds me he was from the West of Scotland, another possible reason for the above album being stocked), but it was a fun listen, for a while, anyway, on the novelty of stereo headphones. All I really remember of As He Stands, Geesin's first album, is a supposedly withering dissection of a nightclub full of Beautiful People: "Humans pulsate! Where? Somewhere else." (It sounds better with the appropriate reverb.)

Ah, McGough & McGear ... Now there's a funny thing - there is a funny thing: Beatles verboten in the library, yeah yeah yeah, but Paul McCartney's brother Mike is okay? Presumably the reasoning was that Roger McGough was a poet and doing a bit of recitation over a guitar so that was vaguely educational and alright. (The joke is on them, however, as Macca played uncredited on the sessions.)

Folkwise, there was a lot of stuff in the library from the late fifties and early sixties. Which suggests to me either a) the library had had a bigger budget a few years earlier or b) the purchasing of items was entirely at the whim of an individual recreating his youth - now that's the sort of power that can corrupt.

Anyway, judging from my last foray, they stock all sorts these days, only now you have to pay to borrow. And there's even a cafe slap bang in the middle of the library, so it's all-talking, all-slurping, all-eating, all the time. (HOORAY!!!)

But if (muttering all the while "Serenity now") I may saunter back in the general direction of my original point, just what was it which made me choose that LP (Luis Russell, remember) on that day? If it was indeed aything other than a plunge in the dark, I can only assume it would have been the title: a single disc which encapsulated this person, telling his complete tale, saving me from having to choose from the baffling range of Armstrong, Ellington and other LPs, some with forbiddingly arty covers.

More likely, however, it was the sleevenotes. Explanatory notes for lots of those jazz and folk LPs were in tiny print and very full. Brian Rust, a noted jazz authority and the author of the comprehensive and definitive discography of the era, was probably the writer, and the basic premise - that this band were the missing link between older jazz and the regimentation of swing - may have been simple enough to appeal to my younger self: they were trying something new, musically, so maybe I should. It worked when I stepped out of the TOTP comfort zone into rock'n'roll. And there was some detail provided about individual musicians so I was given a sense of what to listen out for. It may even have been the song titles: The Call of the Freaks? The New Call of the Freaks?!

Whatever my initial impulse, this was, as it turned out, great (and accessible) jazz, immediately apparent on numbers like Doctor Blues, with its irresistible flapper-type intro, and the sheer momentum of Panama, which had an energy, from its screaming intro onwards, I could easily equate with my experience of rock'n'roll - not to mention the sense of fun which exhuded from such tracks as Feelin' the Spirit, with a wonderfully stupid bit of gravelly-voiced scat: however technically proficient they were I had no way of knowing at the time, but they were clearly enjoying themselves, which I, if you will, "dug." I remember a birthday celebration rapidly going downhill a few years later until we began shaking pasta in jars by way of percussive accompaniment to these wonderful, infectiously good-humoured sounds.

Thinking that that was it - that I now "liked jazz" - I proceeded to borrow LPs by different bands, disconcerted to find that I could not, by an effort of will, extract anything like the same pleasure; my first inkling that Luis Russell's 1929-1930 Okeh recordings were not the norm for the genre.

Why were they so good? Well, Russell was apparently a generous paymaster, which may have helped him retain the best players He had won the lottery in Panama in 1919 and moved to New Orleans; maybe he still had cash to spare. The band had arisen from the ashes of the King Oliver band, so they already had a pedigree (in 1927 Oliver turned down the Cotton Club gig which was to make Duke Ellington's name, which can't have impressed his musicians much). But perhaps the main point, again going back to early jazz vs. swing, is that the band had arrangements but weren't straitjacketed: there was ample space for them to stretch out and with excellent (and well-paid) soloists like JC Higginbotham, trombonist extraordinaire, Pops Foster on bass (likened by Philip Larkin to the engine room of a great ship), not to mention Henry Red Allen (above), a trumpeter who admired Armstrong but had his own fiery style, some of the performances on that Parlophone LP rank among the best ever recorded in the name of jazz.

Panama is Russell's masterpiece and my favourite ever jazz record. Difficult to say why except that the balance of control and passion feels so right: at times the pace is so ferocious they almost lose control of their instruments - but don't; each solo adds another delight yet there is never any sense of competition, only their delirious pleasure in adding to the whole.

The power of those performances knitting together on Panama is also, as I now know, about the common language of New Orleans and the experience of playing together night after night - resulting in three minutes of distilled joy which the late Humphrey Lyttleton described, with far more detail and authority than I can muster, in his appropriately entitled The Best of Jazz. He surmises that the final chorus was the result of a signal that there were still about twenty recordable seconds, and so they went for it. It's an astonishing thought, as the thing seems so fully formed: it's the recording that I wish, above all others, I'd been present to witness. Did they realise immediately what they'd done? There are no alternate takes, so maybe they knew they'd nailed it. But from various accounts those musicians had a blast playing live, so who knows what other wonders were lost in the air night after night?

Why, then, does the Luis Russell Orchestra seem to remain unknown to the general (as opposed to the jazz-loving, or library stock-purchasing) public? I've done my bit, thank, having made a compilation tape for the late friend referred to a few posts ago - at his own request, I might add - as an introduction to jazz. He liked blues, liked soul - there was once a drunken phone conversation in which he entreated me most earnestly ("It's very important") to listen to Bobby Bland forthwith - but jazz had apparently been a no-go area. I forget what else I chose for this baptism by oxide but I do remember putting Panama as Track 1 and Track 2, just to press home the point that this was no ordinary recording.

De mortius, but to the best of my recollection, when I later asked him if he'd enjoyed the tape, he said something along the lines of how he recognised it was probably the best of its kind but he didn't want to submit to having to like it and then get too involved ...

At least I tried. And I was able to convert a mutual friend more recently ("Thank you so much for the CD It is AMAZING"). Plus I think I feel the same about watchingThe West Wing, which was one of his favourites, so I understand - sort of.

Of course, one factor in acquiring fame is the sheer amount of product you have out there, and there are a limited number of recordings under Russell's own name, and an even more limited number of absolutely top drawer sides. The excellent sleevenotes for a fairly recent, comprehensive double CD (fuller than I have seen for any other compilation) explain why the band never attained the longevity of the Ellington or Basie orchestras: economic factors and a lack of nerve (or simply common sense, given the depression?) which led to Russell emulating other bands rather than continuing to plough his own distinctive furrow - but as the notes say, "the records, in all their undimmed splendor, endure."

The CD set, on the Retrieval label, gives you all you need and rather more - there are some treacly vocal performances on the second disc, and the sheer number of tracks makes it less of a cohesive listen than the album I happened upon in Motherwell Library.It's also very odd to have the tracklisting, familiar to me from LP, cassette and CD issues, rearranged as a result of all the extra material, including King Oliver tracks, but as the JSP CD Savoy Shout, which has all the essential sides and not much else, is deleted and secondhand copies are usually priced fiendishly high, the Retrieval double is undoubtedly the best alternative soundwise, as both were remastered by the late John R.T. Davies.

I'm happy to say that I emailed him a few years ago to thank him in particular for his remastering of the Luis Russell sides on CD and received a charming reply almost immediately. (I have never heard the original 78s directly but the CD had the punch both of the vinyl and a cassette issue, possibly from 78s, on the Neovox label. And if the reader thinks that these things are unimportant, then the reader has not experienced the sonic horrors of some vintage jazz CDs like what I have. Late 20s jazz has the potential to sound like they're in the room with you. Alright, yes, yes, I admit, with the unwelcome addition of a pan of bacon sizzling in the corner throughout, but that doesn't affect my point. May I go on, please? Thank you. Ahem.)

Russell later recorded a great deal on Decca with Louis Armstrong; those tracks, from the mid-thirties onwards, are agreeable enough (Humphrey Lyttleton thought they had been unfairly dismissed by critics) if hardly world-shattering, but it's very much Louis Armstrong "and his Orchestra.". I particularly like the simplicity of the blues Hey Lawdy Mama, featuring a small group drawn from the orchestra including Russell on piano - as in the photo above, presumably, plus Armstrong himself. Taken from the Mark Berresford Rare Records site, the photograph features Russell on piano, Paul Barbarin on drums, Pops Foster on bass and Lee Blair, guitar. I think it was this number that the Melody Maker's Max Jones was referring to in a 70s review of some cherrypicked Decca sides: "When Louis plays the blues - hold everything." I later bought a complete CD collection of the Decca masters but my pleasure was not increased tenfold; the cherrypicker had done his job. The LP started with a banal enough ditty, Thanks a Million; in Louis' hands it approaches something genuinely humble and touching.

Thanks to the wonders of the net, I have just picked up some interesting information about airshots from the early Decca years which Armstrong himself preserved. I was typing in words in an attempt to locate a phrase which I remembered had been used to describe the Russell band: something like "twelve men swinging with the power of twenty but the looseness of six."

No joy, but it did lead me to a blog entitled The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong. This quotes several of the standard views that the Russell Orchestra, once harnessed to Armstrong in the thirties, became a shadow of its former self but then reveals that Armstrong kept 12 inch 78s of radio broadcasts, selections from which have now been issued on CD, which suggest that the Russell band live in 1937 was still a pretty fiery proposition. You can listen to examples directly on the blog.

And by searching that same blog for "Luis Russell" you can also find an entry where different recordings of On the Sunny Side of the Street are compared; another small group from the Russell Orchestra provides one of the standout versions. You can listen to it, and many other recordings, directly on the site and enjoy the detailed and informative commentary, not to mention mind-boggling industry, of Ricky Riccardi, " a 29-year-old Louis Armstrong freak with a Master's in Jazz" who is working on a book on Armstrong's later years.

Apart from Russell's own recordings on the Retrieval set, the only others I'd really consider essential are a sprinkling of sides backing Armstrong in the studio from that same golden period (29/30) before the more permanent, but generally less adventurous, hookup on Decca. They can be found in many places, including the Louis and Luis CD mentioned below, but the JSP Complete Hot Fives and Sevens set (John R.T. Davies again), widely regarded as the best transfers of Armstrong's historic recordings, includes them on Volume 4.

And Henry Red Allen, Russell's star trumpeter, also has a number of sides in his name using the Russell band, some of which are also very good indeed. Hearing them for the first time some twenty five years after my first exposure to the Luis Russell Orchestra was a pleasure like discovering an unexpected photograph of old friends.

Those early Armstrong/Russell numbers include St Louis Blues, the track which Philip Larkin (in that missing review) called "the hottest record ever made." As Stirling's Llibrary in the centre of Glasgow where I found that information in the original hardback of All What Jazz is now an art gallery, I can only rely on my memory of Larkin's claim that after the third chorus you can feel the walls begin to move; it certainly felt like that when I listened to that Louis Armstrong album borrowed from Motherwell Library, and for those tempted to dismiss the performance as "mere rhythmic excitement" Larkin went on to discuss a lumpen effort, possibly utilising the same arrangement, by Cab Calloway's Orchestra.

You can hear Armstrong, backed by Luis Russell's Orchestra singing (and playing) St Louis Blues here; unlike the writer of this blog I have never heard the 78 so I can only say that the vinyl worked for me on that Chris Ellis EMI compilation. (Yet another LP, incidentally, which I had a chance to buy for myself and didn't - although I can't remember whether I sighted it at Cheapo or Steve's Sounds, a similar, but inferior, vanished emporium of musical tat and treasure).

St Louis Blues opens as a "raunchy tango" but then it just builds and builds, increasing in intensity, with bassist Pops Foster going at it ever harder. It's similar to Panama, in that every so often there's a thrilling ensemble "shout" as they take things up another notch. But somehow it doesn't quite work for me in quite the same way: there is so much musical richness all the way through in Panama (I can only refer you to Lyttleton), whereas towards the end St Louis Blues sort of becomes headbanging - powerful but not exactly subtle.

I prefer what would originally have been the flipside, Dallas Blues, where there are all sorts of small decorative musical details which enhance, rather than detract from, the performance. And Louis Armstrong's on Dallas Blues here is impressively raw. I think what it always comes down to for me is a sense of passion and control holding each other in check: you really feel the held-back power of Dallas Blues. This was a recording I first happened upon, unidentified, by turning on a radio (it wasn't on the Library LP); it may even have been Larkin being interviewed or introducing some records. But again, that family/friend recognition thing worked; even that sense of the room they were playing in was familiar. What one might term "one of the good old good ones."

There is a CD entitled Louis and Luis, which is the only one I know to couple the golden period Armstrong/Russell Okeh tracks with the best of the Deccas, so it might be a good place to start. I haven't heard it so can't comment on the quality of the transfers. Henry Red Allen, incidentally, became for a while a kind of surrogate Armstrong, doing a lot of trumpet-and-vocal recordings in his own right, and in possession of a similarly gravelly voice; I bought several CDs of these but they don't really approach the sides with the Russell Orchestra. There is one standout, however, Roll Along Prairie Moon from 1935, done at a ferocious lick, with his audible encouragement of "Higgy" - fellow Russell sideman JC Higginbotham - to do one more chorus at the end. We're not talking power held in reserve here but wild, irresistible fun.

Clicking the first mention of Luis Russell's name at the top takes you to redhotjazz, a wonderful repository of the kind of jazz I like. You get brief and to the point accounts of musicians and bands, and lots of streamed tracks (in middling quality) on realplayer. It's a great way to become acquainted with the form. You can find better quality streamed audio for some Russell tracks if you look on the right of this page on the riverwalkjazz site, although I haven't been able to open the audio for the Pops Foster documentary on the same page.

And if you go on to buy stuff, the name "John R.T. Davies", not just on JSP CDs but such companies as Retrieval, Hep, Frog and Timeless, is a guarantee of audio quality.

One final note worth placing here relates to that sense of double exposure mentioned in some of the Doo Wop Shop posts: Russell's daughter Catherine, surprisingly young, is a jazz singer who has released several excellent albums, sample tracks of which you can hear on her website, here; there is also some footage of her father (although nothing survives, or perhaps was even filmed, of the Russell Orchestra in its glory days) and there are even some home movies of her as a child with Louis Armstrong.

Her material is a mixture of jazz and blues, including an excellent version of Kitchen Man (the BBC's Russell Davies summed it up, if I remember, as being "full of passion and commitment but without adding a single unnecessary note)." She has also recorded Back O' Town Blues, jointly credited to Louis and Luis. Essentially - and I'm speaking after hearing two CDs in full - she owns the songs she sings, without making them sound old-fashioned. As John Lennon said of the Ronnie Hawkins song Down in the Alley (part-payment, I suspect, for the wreckage and unpaid phone bill he and Yoko once inflicted on the Hawkins homestead):

"It sounded like now and then, and I like that."

That Hawkins track, incidentally, came from an LP I took a chance on when it was going cheap in my local Woolworth's in the seventies. Was it a similarly life-changing experience?

On this occasion, alas, no cigar. Not even close.

Cheapo Revisited

My Cheapo gaffe friend (see earlier post) has a young nephew also given to superfluous utterance. His grandmother once told him that her mummy was up in heaven. To which that mite replied : "She's dead - face it."

But perhaps today was the right time in my own grieving process to seek a final pointless-but-necessary confirmation of my own loss by making a pilgrimage to Rupert Street to see - well, whatever there was to see where once Cheapo stood. Subjecting my battered psyche to this ordeal, I reasoned this morning, could only strengthen it - and besides, I had to go into town for work-related purchases, anyway.

Aware both of the ridiculousness and the necessity of adding Rupert Street to my itinerary, I proceeded to make the journey precisely as I would have done in those long-ago days before my love for the place became devalued, or at any rate changed, when I moved into professional purchasing mode. I left the Argyle Street exit of Oxford Circus tube, walking past Carnaby Street (that "heaven on earth," as I believe the New Vaudeville Band once termed it) and what had been, until 1997, Marshall Street Pool, where I used to swim regularly. The site of the building was covered in scaffolding and padding, but there was an entrance through which I caught a glimpse of the whitened shell of the pool. It would have been easy to walk quickly in, take a few snaps before anyone thought to question me, and go. For a moment, I was tempted, but (in what I fear is fast becoming this blog's catchphrase) I didn't. Not simply for fear of being chased by "the man", but at least partly because I think I already knew, the instant the thought formed, that a few snaps of a now dilapidated pool would be unilikely to bring either pleasure or succour.

The same might be said for going back to Cheapo, but the difference is that, quite apart from the the twelve and a half years I've had to get my head around the closure of Marshall Street, there was a very neat cut-off point. The Guardian newspaper has a column entitled Notes and Queries, a mind-boggling mix of the trivial and the serious. One of the questions put to readers was: "What would have been the lead story on the day Princess Diana died, had she not popped it?" This was my response:

Not, perhaps, headline-grabbing on a global scale, but the imminent closure of the Marshall Street swimming pool, just off Oxford Circus, was uppermost in at least one mind that day. Going for one last swim before it shut its doors for good that afternoon, I attributed the long faces to employees losing their jobs. I did not see a newspaper with an alternative explanation until about 1pm.

That diversion over, let's zigzag down from Marshall Street to Rupert Street and "face it." I have my camera ready for whatever awaits, and here it is:

The grey is an apt touch. Harsh and metallic where once there was the green of growth.Click on the next image if you want to torture/heal yourself by getting even closer:

And finally ...

Now there's no doubt about it anywhere, is there? as a Noel Coward character might say. No, no doubt anywhere.

As I type this, it occurs to me that, having taken the photographs from the opposite side of the road, I didn't then cross and peer inside. Had I done so, I'd have been looking for what, exactly? A binbag full of forgotten CDs? Unlikely: the repainting and the darkness of the interior suggest nothing has been left to chance. No; as with Marshall Street, I think I immediately grasped that any further investigation would not bring comfort.

There isn't much else to say. All images in the earlier post were taken from the net: the picture Lennonised then adapted for my blog heading is by Laura Appleyard, whose flickr photostream, and the image in its original form, can be found here; other flickr images were by abkeating200, Tschechoslowakische Ausschussware, renaissancechambara and TheNotQuiteFool, who has his own, slightly briefer, lament for Cheapo here. The above mementoes were taken by me today, January 19th 2010. If others want to use them as a staging post in their own half-real grief, feel free. I took some more, hoping to capture someone in the act of walking past in the manner of Ms. Appleby's image, but I'm new to the world of digital photography and kept being half a second late for the decisive moment.

In any case, the empty street captured above feels more true to my subjective experience - although I was moved by the small kindness of one individual who waited until I was done (unusual in Central London) before walking past; perhaps he, too, had lingered overlong in Cheapo on occasion.

Nowhere (to buy records) Boy

A Wreath for Cheapo

"Wandering around Soho, it's quite possible you may stumble into the aptly named Cheapo Cheapo Records. A belter of a tiny shop found located on Rupert St that has cheesy vinyl and oddball stuff hidden amongst its dusty shelves. An assortment of second hand vinyl, Cheapo Cheapo might resemble a jumble sale inside but you can lose yourself for hours." (Londonnet / pic: Laura Appleyard)

I was really sorry to learn of the demise of Soho's Cheapo Cheapo Records last year. If you don't live in London, it probably won't mean anything to you, and maybe other people's favourite record shops are intrinsically uninteresting to the rest of the world - a bit like other people's babies - but I felt a sense of loss that I'm going to try to explore.

And just as people with children are interested, sort of, in other people's children - if only to make withering comparisons - record collectors may find something to interest them in the following.

First off, and ridiculous as it sounds, I feel I have gone through a kind of mini-grief process. There was certainly that casebook sense of initial disbelief, partly because I'd been to the shop a few days before when a sign on the door had simply indicated closed for stocktaking. Then a week or two later a new sign simply said CLOSED. No, lose the block caps, I'm not ready: Closed. That's better.

I'm not sure whether, at that point, the stock was still enticingly present - enticing, that is, if like me you enjoy the incidental journey through a certain amount of old tat - nor am I sure whether I altogether believed - or quite understood or even wanted to understand - that new sign at first glance. Closed as in "closed-closed", as Whoopi Goldberg might have put it? Not a shop which had been around, endlessly generating new (in the sense of newly acquired) stock at least since I first came to London in 1985.

I dreamt about it, about being inside once again, a few nights later. The pain, really, is in not having one final chance - not to plunder, a la the ill-fated Apple boutique, but to pay my last respects, and maybe finally buy some of those fairly pointless and inessential jazz/nostalgia CDs which hovered on the margins of possibility on each visit. And to do that not so much for the music as to perform a kind of final, altruistic - I might as well saying loving - act: to show that someone finally cared even for those unlovely parts of the shop.

I had developed severe lumbar pain towards the end of 2006 which kept me off work for several months and ever afterwards had been much more cautious about the amount I would carry from Cheapo in one go; even the necessary actions of standing still in one place or bending slightly as I went through the racks would lead to the onset of warning pains, so although I didn't stay away from Cheapo once staggering (in the time allocation sense) back to work, my body no longer allowed for the absolute immersion over extended periods which had once been the hallmark of those visits. And after all, I must have told myself, it didn't really matter if I didn't take absolutely everything my heart had desired and my eyes devoured on any one visit: this small and cluttered record shop would always be there, with its infinitely extendable stock ...

Stock such as a rarely explored (given that they remained there for years) supply of the many World Records (an EMI nostalgia offshoot) LPs, most of whose contents are probably on CD in one form or another, but I don't feel happy in now being obliged trust to luck. The vinyl remastering of those ancient (20s/30s) recordings was excellent, as I know from an LP I had of Vivian Ellis's Bless the Bride.

Downstairs I once saw the budget label Marble Arch reissue of Donovan's LP Fairytale, the very first record I ever bought, and it seemed that everything I had ever listened to and discarded could be found in some part of the shop. There was even the That'll Be The Day soundtrack double album which I had never actually owned, despite its importance in my musical history. I didn't buy either but always assumed they'd be there waiting for me. Or another copy later.

I did buy a CD of Fairytale there later, in an approximation of its original, full-price, cover, but that was hardly the same thing; the psychedelicised image of Donovan - in effect passing off Try For the Sun as Sunshine Superman to attract pocket money purchasers, if you know your Mr Leitch - on the front cover of the Marble Arch album was my memory. And it was substantial, heavy vinyl. Even if they knocked a couple of tracks off the original issue.

In its sheer range of items, Cheapo suited me very well. In addition to the growing love for rock'n'roll and especially doo wop noted elsewhere in this blog, my musical tastes had been partly shaped by what was available in my local library. No pop to speak of; lots of classical music, which didn't interest me, but a fair amount of folk and jazz - especially early jazz. By good chance I stumbled across individuals whose work I still love: Luis Russell, the orchestra leader who later became part of the Louis Armstrong backdrop but whose band around 1929/30 formed a link between the freedom of early jazz and the riff-based attack of swing.






Clarence Williams, on an album later described when I bought it at another shop in London (a jazz specialist, closed down long before) as being "rare as hen's teeth," featuring my (and the world's) first unwitting exposure to Louis Jordan's singing ...I liked some of the folk-related stuff, such as Davy Graham, but jazz: Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Clarence Williams - essentially everything up to Charlie Christian - was my main enthusiasm, running alongside the love of pop shared with my brothers. I seem to remember doing a lot of borrowing on Thursday evenings then walking the three minutes home to catch TOTP.

The library must have softened its policy at some point, as I can recall borrowing, at the same time the recently issued double album of Kingsize Taylor's Beatles Hamburg tapes and an EMI Louis Armstrong memorial album which featured the performance of St Louis Blues backed by the Russell orchestra which Philip Larkin once called "The hottest record ever made" (though he may have recanted as I couldn't find the review reproduced in the paperback edition of his collection of reviews entitled All What Jazz).

But - just as I might have done when in Cheapo, and settled in for an hour or two - I digress. The warning signs about the shop's possible demise were certainly there, and had been for some time. As one assistant there put it, when someone comes in with no conception of overheads, quotes the Amazon price for an album and expects you to match it, the writing is on the wall. Maybe the wonder is it had endured so long. I overheard another worker (possibly the boss; I don't know) evidently at the end of his wick one Saturday night, complaining about the number of tourists who came in demanding directions, alternating with junkies. (Both went, literally, with the territory.)

My relationship with Cheapo changed when I began buying CDs and DVDs for work. They never gave out receipts so I was obliged to explain that my employers needed some evidence of legitimate purchase so could some form of ... after that, they would give me a business card with the amount handwritten on the back. As this explanation needed to be reiterated to different assistants, and as it became pretty obvious I was buying quite a lot on each visit, I began to chat regularly to one of the assistants when I came in and learnt in more detail of the shop's difficulties. He bemoaned charity shops who would mark up poor condition albums because a certain price was mentioned in the Record Collector guide and said the shop was only surviving on its weekend business.

At times I was given the rare privilege of a look-see at new aquisitions on bakery-type wooden trays including, on one memorable occasion, a whole lot of Ace CDs which I bought for around £4 apiece. Whether or not my place of work was in dire need of a comprehensive collection of the recordings of Rosie and the Originals was not, I have to confess, uppermost in my mind at that moment of shy, manly pride at thus being ushered to the inner sanctum. (But in my defence I have always gone for the bargainy side of things - and besides, the shade of the late John Lennon, he say an unquestioning yes.)

There was something slightly odd in this change of relations, however. I'd been patronising the shop for over fifteen years before becoming a professional punter, as it were, and during that time there had been no need for greetings or pleasantries. This wasn't about rudeness (although elsewhere on the net you can find reference to the dourness of one worker there) but a recognition of what we, shopkeeper and customer, were there for: it wasn't HMV or Tower Records; the surroundings were far from spacious, and when it was crowded at weekends there'd be a fair amount of squeezing past people, but the point was this: the stock was the thing, and the stock spoke for itself.

I once took a female friend to this almost exclusively male domain; buying an LP, she felt obliged to say to the assistant, by way of explanation: "Reliving my lost youth." I ought to be ashamed of my glee as I pounced ("Wrong!") on this solecism as soon as we left the shop; sadly I'm not. It was my world and she had made a dreadful - if, let us be fair, understandable, what with being a woman and all - error. We were all there for our lost youth. It didn't need pointing out.

Over time, the available areas of Cheapo shrank a little (yes, you're right, I'm softening you up for the death, but let me tell it anyway; I, for one, need to hear it at the appropriate pace). An upstairs area was no longer in use, although I don't know whether that means that large chunks of stock had been successfully sold off or not. I think some of the upstairs vinyl was the nostalgia-based stuff which then found a home on the ground floor at the back. There was a basement which concentrated on soul and jazz; many cassettes in those long-lost cassette-playing days were bought there, including those of Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson, a Grenadan cabaret singer whose music was the soundtrack for an important relationship; I commemorate both the singer and the other listener with the image below:

Once the darling of Mayfair (and Edwina Mountbatten in particular; see the biography by Charlotte Breese), Hutch was buried in Highgate Cemetery at a poorly attended funeral, although messages still appear in The Stage on the anniversary of his death.

I could go on with lists of records and artists but I think it should be clear by now that the main point about Cheapo is that it is bound up with so many of my memories. There is probably even, on some level, an association with the annual visits to Glasgow in December when very young, my little legs aching with the vast distances covered, to see Santa in one or other of the posher old-style shops - Copeland's, Pettigrews and some others - later to be swept away by cheaper alternatives. It was in one of those, or possibly in the Dalziel Cooperative in Motherwell, who also put a lot of effort into their Father Christmases, that one year there was a kind of tunnel you had to go through to reach Santa; years later, when I walked through a basement room of the art school's Blytheswood Square building, all of whose surfaces had been entirely covered in newspaper (by a fellow art student, Sheila Calder), I had a tantalising, elusive sensation of deja vu which I knew was associated with those Christmas visits without being able to summon up a precise image. And even though Cheapo was about interests developed in adolescence, the cramped and cluttered areas, the tiny staircase, now seem interwoven with both of those memories: more burrow or lair than cavernous emporium of the sort found just down the road at Picadilly Circus, it was the kind of record shop that Kenneth Grahame's Badger might have felt at home in. It was a place where you could lose yourself, or rather find once again that truer self, that non-coporeal identity, a thing of undefined hopes and dreams: a record collector, exactly as you were at sixteen. So I have to admit my cruelly maligned friend's "Reliving my lost youth" was precisely right, although I still say the utterance of that intention was wrong or, at best, superfluous - rather like, if you have the appropriate faith, saying to a priest mid-Mass "You do realise that this ceremony is quite important on a spiritual level?" Babe: they already understand. That is why they are record shop assistants. Or so I'd like to think.

I wish the former workers and owner well in whatever they undertake. They were, as I think Andrew Loog Oldham said of Immediate Records, part of the industry of human happiness. The last conversation I had with the Cheapo assistant whom I'd come to know a bit was, I fear, slightly cut short by me, as I had other stuff to buy, and it was getting late; I wish now that I had stayed longer. Ah well.


I don't want to make this piece just a list of records but I do want to mention one more which can stand for so many others. The area around the entrance had been largely taken over by DVDs but towards the back of the ground level area of the shop there was still a lot of vinyl which compelled you (or me, anyway) to linger.

The image found on the net, above, is not quite right, but at least you can glimpse beyond the DVDs to the very back where (trust me) waist height shelves were stocked with jazz and nostalgia CDs. Vinyl was just to the left. So many albums I'd seen on record shop shelves in Glasgow in the seventies, there they were again, and I'm not just talking about artists of the day: most of those budget rock'n'roll reissues of the seventies which I've talked about in other entries were there too.
And I suppose it's partly that which makes the loss of the shop so poignant: here was a magical second chance to acquire or reacquire those albums and I didn't take it.


One which I particularly regret was a double Jerry Lee album in a gatefold sleeve with a tinted archetypal picture of the young, blonde-locked Killer. I'd totally forgotten about this album, issued on Phonogram before the advent of Charly, which had been played at an art school dance, possibly on Halloween 1975, and I have a vague but pleasing memory of connecting with the older student whose record it presumably was, so that it has come to represent a token of that promise-laden time:

Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
Pluck'd in a far off land.