47 f A Soho Temple
Looking back to 1950s and ’60s folk, blues and jazz vinyl anorak heaven – Dobell’s Record Shop. From Garth Cartwright’s new book Going For A Song: A Chronicle Of The UK Record Shop.
H
itler was dead, Europe liber- ated and Britain shattered. Nothing would be the same again and many returning soldiers, after living so close-
ly with death, were determined to ensure their lives counted. Londoner Doug Dobell, having worn uniform from 1939 to 1945, decided he would open a record shop – a jazz record shop – where he, his friends and like-minded individuals, could gather to bathe in the beauty of fragile 78s made by American musicians with names like Kid Ory and Jelly Roll Morton.
Not that opening this trading post would be easy: the UK was broke and near-broken, bomb-pocked, food remained rationed, Spam and lard were kitchen staples and ‘luxuries’ – as records were regarded by the government – endured heavy taxes. No bank agreed to underwrite Doug’s dream; jazz may have inspired fierce passions in the young but record shops were still viewed by many as gramophone salons dominated by classi- cal music. And who could afford Ameri- can records? Going to work at Dobell’s, his family’s antiquarian bookshop at 77 Charing Cross Road WC2, 28-year-old Doug felt the past weighing heavily on his slender shoulders.
Dobell’s first opened in 1877 when Bertram Dobell – Doug’s grandfather – set up at that address and his sons Percy and Arthur continued to run the shop after his death. Arthur, entertaining his son’s pas- sion, allowed Doug to set aside a small space in the shop to display 78s he had for sale and exchange. Immediately successful, Doug began liberating bookshelves so as to make more space for 78s and, month by month, tomes lost space to records while music lovers gathered to shop and gossip.
In 1955 Arthur retired and Doug completed his transformation of Dobell’s into the UK’s foremost musical oracle, a record shop that served both as Aladdin’s cave and philosopher’s salon, albeit a salon where the gnomic utterances and activities of mythic New Orleans musi- cians like Buddy Bolden and King Oliver carried more weight than those of Aris- totle and Socrates.
Around this time Soho entered its most celebrated phase, an era where all that appeared urbane and risqué in con- temporary Britain seemed to emanate from the square mile. Dobell’s, alongside Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, helped spark Soho into a hotbed of post-war British jazz, not just a record shop but a salon of sorts where youths could clash over whether ‘hot music’, as exemplified by Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, ruled or the modernists, Bird/Miles and Monk/ ’Trane, were running the game. (“Monk eats shoes” was written on the wall of one Dobell’s listening booths).
D
obell’s blossomed in a dirty old town where smog led to winter peasoupers and an omnipresent haze of tobacco smoke permeated all public
spaces. Consumer goods were austere, expectations limited, class divisions rigid and the rights of women and ethnic minorities pitiful. In opposition to this, Doug’s record shop provided a democratic space where race, class and gender were ignored as everyone gathered to celebrate jazz (and its siblings blues and folk). Upon entering you were likely to be struck by a clarinet solo so seductive that all in the shop nodded along, many dreaming them- selves to be in steamy New Orleans not smoggy London town. To some observers Dobell’s helped build a postwar society where artistry and inclusivity served as unacknowledged legislators. To others Dobell’s might just be remembered as a place where people gathered for one hel- luva good time: drinking wine, feeling fine, listening to Louis blow his horn!
The iconic Dobell’s Record Shops bag
British jazz fans took their musical passions very seriously and the youths divided into two distinct camps – mouldy fygges and modernists – with the fygges championing local heroes Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton while the modernists favoured rising Soho stars Joe Harriott and Ronnie Ball. That the musicians often got on, even played together, was ignored: here the fans maintained a culture clash akin to the split between Sunni and Shia Islam. A decade later youths would argue over blues (acoustic or electric) and gui- tarists (Clapton or Beck) and, again, Dobell’s acted as a church of sorts for the devotees to congregate, discuss the true faith, declaim heretics and ponder those elevated to sainthood.
It was Chris Barber who brought a jazz-loving youth named John Jack to Dobell’s for the first time. More than 60 years on, Jack still recalled the encounter. “I’d joined the London Jazz Society in 1950 and we would meet in The Porcupine pub on Charing Cross Road. There was a net- work of record clubs before there was a network of record shops. They were the backbone of record collecting as it is now. I met Doug through that and one day he said, ‘do you want to come and join us?’”
“Everybody was in and out of the place all the time. In the ’50s and ’60s pubs still shut 3pm to 5pm but one or two places opened at 3pm for members. So when we got visiting bands in we would be back and forth across Charing Cross Road to get the day’s drinking in. Back then a very much sought-after job for musicians was to get into Geraldo’s Navy and work on the transatlantic liners play- ing in the band. You would get 48 hours in New York so people would rush around the shops and clubs and certain guys would bring us back suitcases full of LPs! We had to be careful as Customs & Excise would raid us from time to time to see if the taxes had been paid on the records!”
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