01/06/2026
When I started at Bruce's Records' Stirling branch in October 1975, I was told that after Xmas, someone had to go, and it was either me or music-degree-holder Mike, a lovely guy who, along with Bill Williams and Colin, ran a loose but funky ship, and it was a cool place to work years before the job was over-glamourised by fiction authors. It was the time of 'Horses', 'Born To Run', 'Station to Station', and Billy Connolly; punk had yet to happen. I was sacked after Christmas. Mike was simply better at the job. I cried all the way home, and Colin cried with me as he wielded the killer blow: my 'books', which were like your 'UB40' of the time. However, within 2 weeks I landed the job in G&M, an old-fashioned department store a few streets away, which sold Scottish Country Dance and lots of MOR stuff, and relearnt all I had taken from Bruce's, which was not good at all but made me feel in with the 'cool-guys' for once. People spoke to me; they stopped attacking me when they realised the accent was actually Welsh. The manageress, the venerable Mrs Margaret Christie taught me all I needed to know about old-school customer- service, brutal cynicism, and how to treat a rep! I moved to Debenhams when the Thistle Centre branch opened, as they doubled my wages, and the management were far easier to work with than G&M's manager, who'd called me a 'traitor' to my face for moving up. Independent shops all over the town were haemorrhaging trained specialist staff, leaving holes often unfillable. I was given complete control of the record department and immediately started treating it like my own shop – a box of punk 7" singles on the counter. Not part of the store plan, but the department manager loved the footfall (and the turnover), and so Senior Management just smiled and looked confused at a system they did not comprehend and wandered off to the canteen. When the store first opened, we were a team, having built the store from a shell, and I made some great friends there, and most of them have forgotten me, too. Due to some awful HR dispute, I quit in '79 in solidarity with some friends there who had been suspended over a stupid technicality. Probably not my finest decision, but at the time I was feeling a different calling, I started chanting and became a devotee. When the John Menzies record dept job came up in the same Arcade, I really thought I was in with a shout, but a friend of mine, Neil Innes got the role and I stumbled away in a psychedelic daze. It was soon to become 1980; things were changing fast, and I had no job, no shop, no suit.
To be continued?
