I knew I was in trouble when Alastair Clark started talking about working in an independent record shop. His first job was behind the counter of one; so was mine. Within minutes I was mentally leafing through the stock, remembering the customers, the characters and the particular smell of a shop where cardboard sleeves, vinyl and decades of accumulated musical history somehow became a workplace.
The surprise is that On The Record isn’t really a show about record shops. It uses one as its starting point, its setting and its soundtrack, then takes us somewhere considerably more interesting. That might sound like heresy in a show advertised as “high fidelity stand-up comedy”. Fear not: there are plenty of record references to keep even the most dedicated crate-digger engaged. Clark has enough vinyl knowledge to qualify for a subscription to Geek Monthly — go on, admit it, you have one — yet this isn’t High Fidelity revised, and Clark is emphatically not trying to be Nick Hornby.
Instead, he takes us behind the counter of what he describes as Liverpool’s third-best independent record shop, mining nearly a decade of experience for characters, observations and the peculiar social anthropology of selling music to the public. Anyone who has worked in retail will recognise the species. The customer who knows everything. The customer who thinks they know everything. The customer who wants something but cannot quite remember what it is. The customer who believes that the person behind the counter is personally responsible for everything that has ever gone wrong with music.
Clark’s great achievement is to turn those experiences into something considerably more universal.
There are enough musical references to provide a fresh soundtrack to the hour, yet this isn’t an exercise in vinyl nostalgia. Beneath the records, customers and shop-floor absurdities is a story about finding your dream job, obsessing over it, discovering its realities and eventually walking away. The record shop is the setting; the subject is life.
It is also a show about community. That seems particularly appropriate given that Clark has taken On The Record on a record-shop comedy tour, performing in the very places whose atmosphere informs the material. His Fringe home, the wonderfully named Slow Progress Cafe & Records, feels less like a theatre venue than a slightly steamy little back room of a back-street record shop (newsflash – it was a sauna on the sold-out sultry day I experienced for myself).
I was even gently instructed not to be a martyr and surrender my reserved seat to a late-arriving paying customer. I should point out that I was also a paying customer, albeit one contributing to the Free Fringe, a cause Clark champions passionately.
Slow Progress could be my new city centre haunt. You’re browsing with a latte in one hand, and the musical coup of the Fringe wafts through from the backroom. It sounds like My Bloody Valentine are the supporting straight act. On The Record is funny, affectionate and considerably more thoughtful than its premise might suggest.
Clark has broken the record-shop mould without breaking faith with the people who love those shops. For me, it was personal. For everyone else, it is still very much worth a listen. Put the needle on it. *Dannii Minogue, from her 2002 album Neon Nights – which doesn’t feature in On the Record, but may linger in someone’s collection. That would be me, then.
