JAY WHITEHEAD
#7 REVOLVER
If you grew up in a small Somerset village in the late 80s, then record shops were in short supply. I wanted to find the sort of record shop I’d read about in the NME, so off to our nearest city I went. Allegedly, in Bristol there were record shops aplenty. My favourite, by far, was Revolver Records at the top of Park Street on the Clifton Triangle. Revolver wasn’t your average record shop – it had no regular shop window, just a door on the street, unmarked and mysterious. Through the door you went, then up a sloping corridor, with walls covered in gig posters and adverts for band members wanted and then into the shop. Several minutes were usually needed to adjust your eyes due to the amount of cigarette smoke filling the air but there it was, the record shop I’d imagined a record shop to be. It’s hard to do it justice now and all the memories have been altered by time’s rose-tinted specs, but it was a mad place, full of brilliant characters. It was also full of records that I’d heard about but never seen, particularly reggae, dub and jazz records, that were definitely in short supply in Somerset. Revolver was where I was first introduced to Captain Beefheart, Neil Young, Frank Zappa and Can. Although the doors of Revolver closed in 2000, its reverberations and influence on the city and the people who spent time there are still felt.