DIGGING FOR VICTORY
Hunting down record collections in Brixton in the 1990s, Mark O’Shaughnessy comes across a haul of the unexpected kind
Mark O’Shaughnessy
It wasn’t too long after I started out as a professional record dealer in 1992/1993 (where did those 25 years go?) that I began to become ‘creative’ in my search for the Black Gold. I was living smack-dab in the middle of Brixton at the time (just behind the Ritzy Cinema, if you know the area) and historically, Brixton has always been an absolute goldmine for black music – reggae in particular, obviously.
A brief word about Brixton here: back then, it wasn’t ‘hipster central’ like it is now, it was mostly still a dog-rough, run-down, very dangerous and scary place – particularly after dark. It had always been a centre for reggae shops and distribution throughout the 60s and 70s and there were still several stores dotted around the place (Blacker Dread, as recently featured on the TV doc Being Blacker, being one of them), so there just had to be loads of good reggae collections in the area, it was just working out how to get my hands on them.