There was a small shop on Bullingdon Road (about 5-10 yds off Cowley Road) which is long gone now. I think it was called Manic Hedgehog (Radiohead named a song or something after it, or maybe the shop was named after the song).kevinrt
Dead good it was too, brilliant dub selection. It's not an exaggeration to say the whole course of my life changed because of a visit to that shop-nothing to do with music/vinyl though. molee
My first forays into ‘proper’ record shops were Manic Hedgehog on Cowley Road in Oxford, and subsequently Massive Records, again in Oxford. But my best/most influential finds were at the back of a menswear shop called ‘Lucky in Love’ (which ironically Massive took over from when they moved to their second shop). It was here they used to have a little box of imported 12’s for sale, tucked away, and it’s where I scored my first copies of things like The House Music Anthem on Trax.
Manic Hedgehog Tapes, also known as Manic Hedgehog or simply First Tapes, was the first release from Radiohead. At the time, the band was known as “On A Friday”. This was intended to be a demo tape, and was the last demo tape of the band’s career.
While performing around Oxford, a man named Chris Hufford, the co-owner of Courtyard Studios, attended a show. Impressed by On A Friday’s work, Hufford, along with Bryce Edge, helped them produce this demo tape, and are still managers of Radiohead to this day. First Tapes was recorded in October of 1991. It was dubbed “Manic Hedgehog” from the Oxford shop that sold the tape. After the tape’s release in late 1991, the band’s bassist, Colin Greenwood met with EMI and got them a record contract. Soon after, EMI asked that they change their band name, and they decided on Radiohead, after a Talking Heads song.
The tape included five songs, three of which (“I Can’t”, “Thinking About You”, and “You”) would be re-recorded and make an appearance on their debut album. The others, “Nothing Touches Me” and “Phillipa Chicken”, would not be released from the band again. As the band had yet to become well known, copies of Manic Hedgehog is hard to track down, and usually demand very high prices. This is a crucial release to understand the band’s history, as it’s a part of what got Radiohead to where they are today.
