Drift Record Shop, in the Devon market town of Totnes, has launched its own magazine and festival without abandoning its ethos of supporting emerging acts. Gary Walker finds out more…

TALKING SHOP

When Rupert Morrison took up a job at the tiny World Video & Music shop in the beautiful Devon town of Totnes, he surely can’t have envisaged where it would lead him. Two decades later, he’s at the helm of one of the UK’s most pioneering independent record shops, championing vinyl releases from some of the world’s brightest unheralded talents. Drift Record Shop even has its own music festival and a free newspaper.

Now in its second home in this alternative-spirited market town at the mouth of the River Dart, Drift is a record shop that would grace any of the nation’s major cities. “I started working at World Music & Video when I was about 16”, recalls Rupert. “A few years later, around the turn of the century, when I was about 19 and at art college, my parents had some redundancy money and were looking to invest in something. I’d been offered the shop by the previous owners, but I wasn’t in a position to buy it. My folks asked if they were still interested…

“We got the shop and I realised fairly quickly that calling a shop World Music & Video limited what we could do, and people didn’t realise it was a record shop. So we rebranded as Drift, because I was running the Drift record label and that gave it a spiritual home.

“It was a shop about the size of a living room. One of the first big successes for us was the Buena Vista Social Club album… it just resonated so perfectly with the audience we had.

“At the time, we sold a handful of CDs a week and couldn’t really get hold of vinyl – there wasn’t a huge amount of new vinyl being pressed, but we sold shoeboxes full of Buena Vista Social Club for a while. I’d be fascinated if someone could tell us what kind of numbers we did on that record. That was a big ‘the system works’ moment.”