Name: Thunder Thumbs
Comment: Ah... dear Rob's... the vinyl mecca of my youth, with the Batman and Robin prints, to all the demo 45s stuck to the back wall (...which occasionally fell down, only to be replaced by Rob with a discarded roll of packing tape!)
I loved this place, from the moment I walked in as a very impressionable 13-year-old in 1982 I was mesmerized!
It just felt impossibly cool to me, with its incredible 5p boxes of 45s, later to be the 20p back wall. I would literally lose myself in how much I could ingest just by looking at as many labels as I could before deciding both what to buy, and how many I could afford!
It taught me how to be me, going in that shop as a very shy teenager, going into Rob's on a Saturday morning (I would wait for him to open at 8:30am and munch through a packet of custard creams while I waited! Those that know the 'Thunder Thumbs' moniker will know that I stiĺl cherish a good biscuit as well as any record!) and every time I would wait patiently while Rob bought his two newspapers (The Sun and The Mirror, which I assume he still does to this day?) from the newsagent at the bottom of Hurts Yard - and then my search would begin.
And this was in the days when it still looked like a record store of the, erm, traditional type shall we say, where you could go up to the counter and browse - yes, browse, dear reader - at the New Wave 45s to the right, next to the stairs, or the Mod/Two-Tone to the left, and then dig in the 20p bins for the best part of, what, four hours?!
This is where my long, arduous and thoroughly enjoyable musical education began - and do you know? from that first day to this, all I've ever wanted was my own little record store, just like Rob's Record Mart... only without the mountainous climbing over boxes, people, coats, discarded bags of cash from the 1980s... that rare John Lennon Apple demo that Rob's been looking for since 1996!
I hope he never changes... halcyon days, my friends, halcyon days...
(2018)
