Food for the soul
Patti Smith | Mission of Burma | Jimi Hendrix
Record shops, and book shops for that matter, are where I go to relax and drift off in contemplation – though mainly of present and future purchases.
So, for our recent long weekend in Rome tourist attractions like the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain and the Vatican were joined on my Google Maps list by plenty of record shops.
With the likes of Soul Food, Radiation Records, Transmission and Mille Records to choose from Rome seems particularly well catered for when it comes to record shops, far more so than other cities in mainland Europe that I’ve been to.
Perhaps that’s a function of mainly travelling to them for work, when conferences send you to out of the way places, perhaps gifting you a couple of hours free time to march around whatever sights happen to be nearby.
Nevertheless, it’s given me a somewhat blinkered view of what’s available in major cities.
Take Berlin. An amazing city, and its now-closed Tegel airport was certainly not shy about talking up its connection with David Bowie after you collected your baggage.
But staying centrally there I didn’t have enough time to explore to the east of Alexanderplatz and reach places like Bis Aufs Messer.
Thankfully there was the huge Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus within walking distance of the Brandenburg Gate. It’s mainly a book shop, but has a generous selection of records. I picked up John Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album and, somewhat more appropriately, Neu! And Neu! 2.
The krautrock band Neu! may be from Dusseldorf, but I still get a kick out of buying a German band’s albums in a German city. (And I really must listen to the 2022 tribute album, Tribute, which featured remixes of their work by The National, New Order’s Stephen Morris, Idles, Mogwai and more.)
Even when there isn’t such synchronicity, memories of places and records persists.
Converge’s brilliantly abrasive You Fail Me reminds me of shopping in Madrid, at a well-stocked but less than romantic CeX store. It helped that the warm September afternoon that was also filled with art at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the tropical gardens – and turtles* – at the Madrid Atocha railway station, and plenty of bocadillos de chorizo and cervezas.
For Marseille it’s Lollipop and David Bowie’s The Next Day and Greatest Hits by The Cure, and a family holiday that took us to the small island fortress of the Château d’If, famously one of the settings for The Count of Monte Cristo. (Now, of course, I regret not buying one of the overpriced copies of Alexandre Dumas’ novel that included a stamp showing its location.)
And so, to Rome. I didn’t make it to Radiation Records, Transmission or Mille Records, but Soul Food turned out to be just around the corner from our hotel.
Taking the shop’s name at face value, I assumed I’d be looking to plug an Isley Brothers shaped hole in my record collection, when in fact its selection was far more diverse, encompassing punk, indie, rock and jazz.
Putting some spare time to good use before our taxi to the airport arrived I picked up albums by Patti Smith, Mission of Burma, Jimi Hendrix and Amadou & Mariam.
I wouldn’t normally have chosen Patti Smith’s covers collection Twelve as the next of her albums to buy. I’m most familiar with her mid-to-late 70s work of Horses, Easter and Wave, so there’s plenty still left to buy. But seeing her live for the first time two years ago this month – on the same day that I interviewed one of the Sex Pistols (see below for a link to that article) – left me in no doubt that she contains multitudes** and many more album purchases were necessary. My version of Twelve sadly doesn’t have the bonus track of R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts, but Patti’s covers of songs by Tears For Fears, Paul Simon, Jimi Hendrix and even Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit all hit the mark.
When I saw Patti Smith at the Royal Albert Hall in London she exited the stage to the strains of Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile, a track that features another of my purchases from Rome – Electric Ladyland. The third and final album from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, it’s been reminding me ever since that, although I think I’m not bothered all that much by the blues, there are some players that I could listen to forever. The album itself, a 2010 reissue, came with a bonus ‘making of’ documentary DVD and instructions to “insert this CD into your computer to get Bonus Video Footage”, which dates it far more than I might have thought at the time.
I didn’t really learn about Mission of Burma until reading Michael Azzerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life some 20 years ago, but I knew that I’d get to them eventually. Academy Fight Song and That’s When I Reach For My Revolver are canonical US post-punk, and I found a mp3 of Max Ernst on Napster way back when, so Signals, Calls, and Marches was an easy choice at Soul Food.
Finally, to Amadou & Mariam’s Welcome to Mali, a beguiling ‘Afro-blues’*** from the duo of Amadou Bagayoko (guitar and vocals) and Mariam Doumbia (vocals). The album’s contemporary feel, and the fact that I probably discovered its lead track Sabali on Fluxblog’s 2008 Survey Mix (Fluxblog is also on Substack), means I associate it more with, say, the indie pop of Au Revoir Simone. It’s also music that came to me shorn of context, not knowing the couple were blind or even a couple or that they’d been recording since the 1980s. I’m only learning that now, along with the fact they played Lollapalooza in 2008 and the following year Sabali became the most-played French single worldwide of 2009.
So, filling gaps in both my record collection and musical knowledge.
* No longer there, overcrowding (and cannibalism!) caused the turtles to be relocated to a wildlife park in 2018
** See also Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, 51 or Bob Dylan’s recent song I Contain Multitudes
*** Some blues are clearly more to my taste than others
Bonus writing: Paul Cook - “We Should’ve Sorted Out The Sex Pistols Court Case In The Pub.”