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IF YOU’RE WORKING THROUGH THIS issue of MOJO from cover to cover, you’ll already have read our All Back To My Place special with The Kinks on page nine. There, both Ray and Dave Davies remember buying their first records at Les Aldrich Music in Muswell Hill, a shop that lasted 78 years before closing in 2023. As is The Kinks’ way, the tone is a little mournful, the end of Les Aldrich Music sounding like the end of an era; a loss with reverberations beyond their north London homeland.

But record shops endure and in some cases flourish, and the business of record collecting remains a critical part of our culture. This month, we’ve decided to celebrate that a bit more by relaunching MOJO Collections (MOJO lifers may recall it as part of the mag in the early 2000s and also, for a while, a publication in its own right). It’s a place in each issue where we can go in search of the rarities that sit on your record shelves, in your attics and, perhaps, in your underwear drawers. We’ve also tweaked our regular Buried Treasure and How To Buy features, so you can see how much original pressings of the records are worth; in the case of our 10 favourite Tropicália albums, it’s somewhere north of £1,000. And in our mission to find the world’s finest record shops, we pay a call to Spillers in Cardiff – an institution that, having opened in 1894, makes Les Aldrich Music look like a fly-by-night pop-up. Now it’s your turn: share your secret hotspots via mojocollections@bauermedia.co.uk