Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

The Last Record Shops of England(Part 3)
THE DISKERY BIRMINGHAM

The Diskery has been where it is now for as long as I can remember; and then some! In fact it's rumoured that the DISKERY was actually a record shop long before records were even invented. Even before wax disks! The rumour goes that the Diskery has been on Bromsgrove Street stocked to the gunnels with vinyl for hundreds of years; way before Charles Cros was even a twinkle in his old mans winkle.

You see people used to pass by the Diskery in olden times unable to understand what beepin hell they were selling. The Victorians cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics alright, but the words "SOUL", "FUNK" and "GOOD DISCO" which are daubed on the DISKERY shop front remained an impenetrable mystery to them. It wasn't until the nineteen fifties when man finally invented the 33 and the 45 that folk finally realised what the Diskery was all about.

In Brum hundreds of record shops have come and gone - mainly gone in my lifetime. Even stalwarts that you thought would remain forever like REDDINGTONS RARE RECORDS succumbed in the end. Reddingtons moved round the city quite a bit in its time before shuffling off online. Tempest Records only went west last month. But the DISKERY has doggedly stood its ground and lives on unchanged. One day it will be absorbed into the National Trust's Back to Back properties, or moved lock, stock and last brick to The Black Country Museum, or bought up by Jack White and shipped off to Memphis. And when that day comes the CITY of Birmingham will be a much poorer place.

Now once upon a time you could forgive the record buying punter for not venturing across the city to visit THE DISKERY. But today being so close to O2 The Academy there is no excuse. So next time you got to the Academy to see a band go bleedin' early and take in the Diskery, it hasn't been there all this time for nothing!