London,

Off the record: David Smyth

 

Joy of browsing: Lily Allen checks out Rough Trade's range

Ready to buck the downturn: Stephen Godfroy, co-owner of Rough Trade Records, outside the new East End store

Loud and clear: Kelly Jones, lead singer of Stereophonics

Look here too

• Ever-changing band has an energetic live show

David Smyth questions the wisdom of Rough Trade Records opening the biggest store in its 30-year history.

WHAT'S IN STORE AT ROUGH TRADE

With last week's closure of the Fopp chain and HMV's announcement of a 73 per cent drop in profits in the past year, opening a new record store should be up there next to launching a chocolate teapot emporium in the list of smart business ideas.

So Rough Trade's decision to choose this moment to open the biggest store in its 30-year history is either bloody-minded lunacy or an ingenious piece of trend-bucking in troubled times. After an afternoon touring the 5,000 sq ft shop - that's roughly the size of an HMV in the average town - I'm erring towards the latter.

Located in the Truman Brewery complex off Brick Lane, it's still a bit of a building site, despite its intended launch date of 20 July, but I can easily visualise the long counters, listening posts, the wifienabled area known as the "snug", the coffee shop (don't worry, it's not a Starbucks) and the live bands stage at the back of the long space. Designed by Stirling Prize-nominated architect David Adjaye, who created Whitechapel's Idea Store, it will be sleek and modern, though co-owner Stephen Godfroy promises enough posters to maintain that "teenager's-bedroom feel".

Godfroy seems unconcerned by the problems affecting the high-street chains, and is certain that Rough Trade is "a completely different beast". The original shop, on Kensington Park Road and then on Talbot Road, Ladbroke Grove, since 1982, has long worked in a mode familiar from Nick Hornby's record geeks' novel High Fidelity, with knowledgeable staff convincing music enthusiasts to buy albums they've never heard before.

"The retail market has polarised," he says. "At one end you've got nonspecialists who compete on price - the supermarkets and online retailers. At the other end you've got specialists, such as ourselves, who provide customer service, authority and recommendations. In the middle you've got the high street, which is struggling because it's neither one thing nor the other. They can't compete with the internet on price, and no one's going to ask an HMV employee for advice on which album to buy."

Godfroy insists that there are still people out there who want to buy real CDs or vinyl from a real shop. "The public hasn't gone off physical product; the retailers have failed to sell it to them in way that enthuses them to buy it. We want to reintroduce people to the joy of browsing."

The new store seems like just the place to do it. See you in the snug.

INVEST IN YOUR FAVOURITE BAND

One of the most exciting things about this fast-changing, supposedly doomed music industry is the amount of innovation going on in the face of falling revenues.

I've been intrigued this week by www.slicethepie.com, a site that claims to "turn every fan into a record label" by allowing them to buy shares in unsigned bands and grab a portion of the profits if they make it big.

The thinking is that thousands of people investing a small amount of cash is better than one record label providing all the money, because the band keeps copyright of their music and, theoretically, profit margins will end up bigger.

Tuneful Portsmouth quartet Gilkicker are keen, having used Slice the Pie to raise £15,000 remarkably quickly to release a single, and soon an album. "We'd recommend this to any unsigned band," they say. The first real hit is yet to materialise, but the time is certainly right for experimenting.

AN EARLY LISTEN TO...
Stereophonics
Pull the Pin (V2)

"We don't remember much about it - we were smashed the whole time," said Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones this week, as he previewed his band's sixth album in a central London bar well before its 1 October release date.

Pull the Pin certainly sounds like it was fun to make, dominated as it is by raw, riff-heavy rockers. Recent download-only single Bank Holiday Monday and album opener Soldiers Make Good Targets are among the loudest things the trio have ever set down, and My Friends and I Could Lose Ya also turn everything up to 11. First single proper It Means Nothing is uncharacteristically gentle and pretty, as is acoustic ballad Bright Red Star.

Disappointingly, they've ditched the synthesisers that characterised their best song and only UK number one, Dakota, but amid all the clamour most fans may not notice.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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