Phoenix

Peter Harris recalls the hand-written signs in the the windows of Phoenix record shop: “My favourite was the bubble coming out of Bob Dylan’s mouth on Street Legal – “where is that damn bus”? The guy responsible for them was Mike Rintoul.”

Comments

Name: dn784533
Comment: Don't remember much about this one, except it had a tiny shop on the Royal Mile (Lawnmarket?) and I think it issued a few 45s on its own label. Certainly gone by 1984.

Name: Vladimir Lenin
Comment: Phoenix was set up by a former employee of Listen in Glasgow, hence the similarities in lettering, colours, even the motto: "Cheap 'n' Nasty". This predated Listen's Edinburgh branch and you wouldn't have been the first to think that Phoenix and Listen were the same company. Tales are told of Listen customers trying to return faulty vinyl there.

Name: Richard Watt
Comment: Where Phoenix was metal, Sound Centre/Ripping was punk. This was the place to get your Crass or Dead Kennedys singles, or just to get lost in the vast upstairs collection of thousands of records you'd never heard of.

Phoenix was indeed tiny, but a bit further down the Royal Mile - on the corner of Fleshmarket Close, across from the Tron. It was the favoured hangout for metalheads like myself - I remember queuing up to meet Ian Gillan in there, when there was literally no room to move. It was also famous for the acerbic hand-drawn comments and captions attached to record sleeves in the window.
(21 April 2015)

Name: Andy Stenton
Comment: Mr Rintoul was a superb friend to have, and we enjoyed a good many sessions in the Halfway House in Fleshmarket Close, and elsewhere, in the 1980s. I then left Edinburgh and rarely saw him again. Big shame in my life. Brilliant shop - it also had another Michael and Drew that I was at Napier College with.
(2022)