Oh, Monseur le Fopp, you are really spoiling us...

Yeah you do wonder though, what with business rates doubling etc. Maybe they could continually re-open and close again in new premises on the arse-end of Oxford Street, on a rolling 1 month lease, a la dodgy clothing emporiums.

bristol shop is looking somewhat tired.
shelves not fit to burst with goodies, and some of the floor space was totally devoid of any racks.
for the first time in years, i didn't come out with anything
(though was very tempted to just get all of the 'disco discharge' compilations which they had for £7 a pop).
i guess the question is - will they get sucked into the money woes of HMV ?

Wailing Souls, "Wild Suspense", £2. Gower St. Branch. Couldn't see any other copies, any interesed reggaeheads.

A life less lived : The Gothic Box 4CD plus book and lace-up box (£15)

Iggy/Stooges : Raw Power/Georgia Peaches £6

Best of Greensleeves Records: From Dubplate to Download (£3)

Van der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts (£3)

And a whole bunch of Virgin Records CDs from back in the day, £3 (from KevCoyne to Magaz and suchlike)

(I'm the only one reviving this anymore..)

A whole bunch of early seventies reggae CDs, £3

I went for Dave and Ansell Collins, "Double Barrell"

Oh, there's a bunch of Aphex Twin CDs there, "I care", "RDJamesAlbum", "SelAmVol2" at £5

Which one to go for?

have to be honest, the bristol one aint fulfilling my £3/£5 booster sessions these days, and hasn;t for a while now.
though, i may be tempted to pick up the o.children album tomorrow if its still there.

It used to be good for WTF box sets, the last time was the Goth one, £15 which I saw recently in the big HMV for £55.

the fopps in glasgow has been pretty barren recently - i'm guessing as a consequence of hmv's ongoing probs - tho at the moment they have lots of gd folk albs for 3 quid a pop - fairport, denny, jansch, renbourn etc etc - and yeah, they seem to have bought up a lot of old island stock, too (i got slow dazzle' by john cale today for 3 quid.) also at three quid - rush, status quo, uriah heap, rainbow, thin lizzy, etc.

I've noticed that the behind-the-counter stock shelves are completely empty nowadays in Union Street, Glasgow.

The Island folk stuff for £3 is always good. I didn't spot the John Cale though yesterday, will have to have a second look...

I had a Fopp bargain-rack splurge this week: Pentangle, Tim Hardin, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Magazine, Neu, Pere Ubu.

It's great for back catalogue filling in & hole plugging.

Today, not CDs but a book: The Immediate Story, a large thick-ish book for £5.

Basically, ALOldham's bits he wrote about the label for his autobiogs but dropped because of ongoing legal issues (it seems), with lots of pics, sleeves and newspaper articles, and filling in by the author Simon Spence.

ooooooooohh

mmmmmmmmmm

Broken Social Scene, last and first albums for 3 quid and a Dirtybird label 3 CD comp also 3 quid.

Fopp Union Street in Glasgow completely closed up and shut at 4.30 this afternoon. Bad sign?

Really? I've not heard anything about that! Will ask about...

Power problems apparently. They had a sign up outside say my scouts.

Hmm.

Fopp (London) seem to be having a 'deluxe editions' clearout. Loads for £10 each.

VU&Nico (i.e. the first yes JPaxman), Loads of the Cure ones, Siouxsie 1st, Black Sabbaths, Kinks, QOTSA, XRaySpex, TooRyeAy, etc..

Didn't get any. Was tempted by the XRaySpex one but wasn't sure if it still had those 3rd generation demo tapes (as opposed to 1st gen)...

That's quite a tempting price, might take a scout in the Glasgow one tomorrow lunch.

Fopp in Edinburgh has been shit recently. I know it's to be expected when the festival was on and the shop's full of tat but I can't really think of much I've bought from there in the last 6 months or so. Just seems to be the same titles for £3 one week and then £5 the next. I know they had loads of folk stuff in but that's not really my sound. Really hoping it's not a sign of things worsening.

^^^ same re bristol.
i've not bought anything in ages.
in fact, Head is now doing a much better job.
unexpected back catalogue/reissue stuff that you never see in other shops, and at good pocket money prices (eg the momus catalogue for £4 each).

I'm sure there's a "good day" as in "massive amounts of a deluxe title arrive,priced low to clear" day.

e.g. "Tell Tale Signs" 3CD+box, which started off stupidly expensive, I got there for £30, they also had the 4LP version for £20. They didn't hang around, obviously. When do these things tend to arrive? Or can it be any day?

Fopp in Edinburgh

Where is FOPP in Edinburgh these days? I seem to have lost it or forgotten where it is/was.

It's not far from Harvey Nichols

It's on Rose Street, just off St. Andrews Square.

One of the odd effects of Fopp is that I now never buy any Strut compilations until they go down to £5 - they all do eventually.

― seandalai, Monday, 8 February 2010 00:58 (1 year ago)

Indeed! Fopp Nottingham currently have a whole display rack of Strut releases on offer for £5 plus free sampler CD. I picked up the Walter Gibbons and Bob Blank comps.

Loads of the £10 deluxe editions in Glasgow Union Street branch, two sides of a full rack pretty much - both older and more recent artists represented, so definitely worth checking out for interested parties.

fopp in union st, Glasgow has been utter shit for jazz,soul and funk cds for years now. It used to be fantastic for it. its just a crappy tiny section on the balcony inbetween floors now.

Got a couple of Ornette albums for £3 a pop in there a couple of weeks back - On Tenor and Twins. But generally, their jazz selection is poor. Ok if you want to plug the Miles and Mingus gaps in your collection, but rubbish for anything that's not on Columbia, Atlantice or Blue Note.

the blue note is nowhere near what it used to be and they also used to have a brilliant impulse section all £5 or under

That's true. They had a good Blue Note sale a couple of years back in which I picked up plenty of goodies. That probably cleared out their stock though. I remember getting a few Impulse! things cheap, but those all seem to have gone now.

Fopp in the late 90s was the basis of my soul and funk collection. Remember getting Stand! for a fiver and it changed my life (well, I was a 15 year old Radiohead fan). The stuff they had back then on vinyl was amazing. If only I'd been into jazz then - I've heard tales of people getting Su Ra vinyl reissues etc for a fiver. David Keenan has stories about coming across all kinds of rare free jazz stuff in the Edinburgh Fopp in Cockburn Street. The founder of Fopp was a big jazzer, so tracked down all kinds of stuff from warehouses.

yeah i got the heliocentric worlds of vols 1 and 2 on vinyl for £5 from fopp up the west end in the late 90s. A lot of my funk lps came from there too. They also supplied Tower with funk vinyl that fopp actually got pressed. once they expanded nationwide it went to shit and obviously went bust.

I really miss the old Fopp. I'll never forget going to Munich on holiday and upon returning going straight to the Cockburn Street branch only to find it closed. A sad and disorienting experience. The vinyl section downstairs played a major role in me starting to vinyl in the first place. Guy that worked there really knew his stuff as well.

There was a Fopp franchise in Stirling between 94-97 which was my first exposure to indie record stores. It was totally different to what Fopp is now - it was just a solid indie store, with a box of 7"s on the counter, zines, free posters, and all these cool records I'd never seen the likes of before - bear in mind all we had in town for new records was a really shit Our Price. My teenage mind found it impossibly romantic. Sadly they closed just as a really shit Virgin (now Poundland) opened in the shopping mall. But at least we had the fantastic Europa over the road - still one of the best SH vinyl shops in Scotland.

re fopp and jazz.
the bristol one used to be pretty good for jazz, however, there is now a glut of old classic blue note albums that are being pressed up by other budget labels filling the racks.
i guess these are recordings that have fallen out of the copyright rules and so open game for these budget labels to reissue ?
have to say, i aint interested in them as the packaging is often shoddy, and as we all know, a lot of the excellence re blue note albums is the cover art, and seeing as the cheapo issues replace the original covers with some crappy photo, i aint interested.

Yeah, Fopp have a bunch of those. They're pretty good value as you get two albums for one, but as you say, they look pretty crappy and the magic of the Blue Note packaging is lost. I've not done a like for like comparison, but I don't imagine they're mastered as well as the Blue Note RVG remasters. Worth spending a fiver on the proper ones if you can get 'em.

when that Stirling Fopp closed.... I picked up their entire mo wax/ninja tune catalog and just walked it right to the till..

prior to the original one in bristol closing, i did the same re Output
they had a clearout on, and the whole Output catalogue on cd was £3 a pop.

Glasgow Union Street is advertising a new "Swap & Save" scheme, where you exchange your CDs/DVDs/etc for money off purchases...

It advertises £1 per item swapped. Anyone else spotted this, or even used it? What will they be doing with the secondhand stock; selling it through Fopp or farming it out to other already secondhand-oriented operations? Is Fopp/HMV in any kind of cahoots with Music Magpie/That's Entertainment (which has also just launched round the corner in Glasgow's old Tower premises).

they've had this in the bristol shop for a while now.
they sell the trade ins for £2 in a separate rack.
bought a couple : villalobos fabric, and elvis nbc tv special.

Thanks Mark. Does it appear to be pretty much an automated operation? As in, everything handed in is bought for a pound, sold for two pounds, rather than being individually evaluated for value/rarity? It's a surprisingly low mark up/high value paid, when one considers the prices offered by, for example, cash converters and music magpie.

do music magpie offer 50p then sell for £8?

Presumably there's a maximum amount for a new item, off.

It's not like you could take in 15 old Robbie/take that CDs and get the new J&MC deluxe set for nowt?

Does it appear to be pretty much an automated operation? As in, everything handed in is bought for a pound, sold for two pounds, rather than being individually evaluated for value/rarity?

seems pretty straightforward.
last week i saw someone trade in a pile of stuff, and they quickly checked for scratches on disc and that was about it, they bought everything for £1 irrespective of the artist/album.

I take it you can only use it as credit for purchasing in store?

wasn't watching that closely. sorry.

A 2x mark-up is relatively low for secondhand, I believe, especially if it is done as a blanket thing, because you'll often be paying over the odds for ubiquitous mainstream items that wouldn't sell especially easily at £2 secondhand (cf. hundreds of listings on Amazon starting at a penny + shipping for almost any big selling CD album of the last x years). Cash Converters & Music Magpie for example generally pay <50p per item (for run-of-the-mill things), but would sell at >£2. You can try Music Magpie here... http://www.musicmagpie.co.uk/index.asp

Anyway, I'm very interested to see how this pans out here in Glasgow, on many fronts...

Swapping old CDs for £1 a pop seems very appealing, as does £2 secondhand trawling. Which of course points to their strategy being sound on at least one very important point; drawing in customers...