London

The record shop: Out On The Floor
As a north London teenager, Jake Travis would head to Camden to buy his vinyl. Now he runs his own record shop, Out On The Floor, in Inverness Street. With a stock of more than 10,000 records covering everything any vinyl junkie could wish for, it’s the first port of call for Camden-based DJs, collectors, and those who simply don’t want to have a sanitised music buying experience at large megastores. Out On The Floor was set up nearly 20 years ago, and Jake took over the shop four years ago, after being a regular since it opened.

‘It was somewhere to go out for the day,’ he recalls. ‘I was always into records and I’d go up to the Music Exchange and spend a fiver on two or three records, and people would go in and try to put a couple of extras in the bag at the same time, to get one over on the legendarily grumpy student staff.’
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Back then, the market had plenty of weekend music lovers drawn to the collections and remnants of house clearances. ‘Records were cheap,’ says Jake. ‘There was not the importance back then people attach to vinyl now. Now they are like gold dust. That is reflected in Camden today. There used to be five or six well-established record shops here, but not any more. It’s harder to get the stock and sell it at a reasonable price.’

Camden’s reputation as a music mecca came from these early one-man stalls, the pubs that doubled as venues and the host of flea-pit music rehearsal spaces that gave local bands a place to hone their acts. And this was epitomised by Camden Town’s role as the spiritual home for the Britpop explosion.

‘During the whole Britpop thing, you’d get Oasis come in when they lived near here, Bobby Gillespie, Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. They’d come in one after another,’ says Jake. ‘The whole place kicked off and there was a great feeling round here. They’d all be hanging out in the Good Mixer. They’d have a few beers and wander past. We’d get them in the shop and get them to sign a few copies of their records for us.’