Maple Radio was situated on Penge High Street a few doors down from the Queen Adelaide pub… now also long gone. It might seem that Penge was an unlikely location for a rock steady & reggae specialist shop but it was an indication of the massive popularity of Jamaican music with white working class youth in the late sixties. At that time everyone was talking about underground music… meaning ‘progressive rock’… but reggae really was an underground music as no-one outside of the people interested in it knew, or cared, anything about it.
The shop was run by a white middle aged couple … they may have been younger but when you’re fifteen everyone over the age of twenty five looks old. Their main business was selling electrical goods and you had to walk past a display of television and radio sets at the front of the premises to reach the record counter at the rear. They also did repairs and the man used to wear one of those brown overall style coats so I assume he must have been the repairman.
At that time a number of local record shops, such as Art Nash, used to stock a selection of rock steady and reggae records (they even sold some in WH Smith in Forest Hill) and, while Maple Radio sold pop records, they also stocked the most incredible selection of UK released rock steady and reggae. The shop would be packed on a Friday evening with local jack the lads snapping up the latest records… Friday was the day for new releases and usually payday too. I was still at school and my thirty bob, earned every Saturday cleaning up and making the tea at a car repair workshop underneath the railway arches behind Loughborough Junction, was usually spent long before Friday. Consequently, I didn’t merit a place in that exclusive crowd although I managed to get in there a couple of times with a friend who had already left school and was earning, and spending, real money. The records were sold in Jamaican style… that is play twenty or so seconds, look up to see who wanted a copy, wait for a nod or a wave, then add it to their pile on the counter before moving on to the next record.
A shelf stacked with boxes of older seven inch records filed alphabetically in label order was situated on the left of the counter. If I knew then what I know now (and if I had any money) I should have bought armfuls and hung on to them. I could have then retired a long time ago as a lot of those UK releases, on Studio 1 or Coxsone for example, now sell for eye wateringly high prices. I could afford their bargain packs though… stapled/sellotaped bags (like the ones illustrated here) containing five seven inch records which sold for ten shillings… two bob (10p) each! I used to buy them all the time to build up my collection and I still have a number of these records. Unfortunately, they’re not the big money ones. My Mum used to create if I spent too much of my Saturday job money on records… “you can only play one at a time!” The only heating in our council flat, half a mile away, was a coal fire in the front room and I used to hide the bag of records down the front of my jacket, go in the flat, place the records on the ever expanding pile next to the radiogram and put the bag on the fire to dispose of the evidence.
I remember the lady refusing to play ‘Fatty Fatty’ by Clancy Eccles because of the rude lyrics which I didn’t think were that rude… especially when you think of records like Max Romeo’s ‘Wet Dream’, The Soul Sisters’ ‘Wreck A Buddy’ or Lloyd Charmers’ ‘Bang Bang Lulu’ that were huge at the time. One week her husband had a surreptitious box of Laurel Aitken’s ‘Benwood Dick’ on a blank Pama/Nu Beat ‘pre-release’ label under the counter for fifteen shillings… twice the price of a released single and the lyrics really were blatant! I couldn’t afford it although my mate’s brother did buy a copy…
During 1970/71 reggae went very rapidly out of favour… which was great for me and a few others like me (you know who you are), who for years afterwards would be able to buy x amount of records in local junk shops for pennies. Doubtless many of these had been bought in Maple Radio at the height of the craze and then discarded. Maple Radio gradually eased away from Jamaican records and concentrated more and more on pop records… I bought my copy of Rod Stewart’s ‘Every Picture Tells A Story’ L.P. there not long after seeing The Faces play at Kennington Oval in September 1971.
Unfortunately, the incredible popularity of reggae music at the time has never been fully appreciated and the important role of shops such as Maple Radio is all but forgotten.
Harry Hawke (2025)
“Maple Radio, 205 Maple Road, Penge.”