Remember Those Oldies

Name: Alan Esdaile
Comment: Owned by Lee Wood who started the record label Raw Records. Bands who recorded for his label were Users, Hammersmith Gorillas and Killjoys who featured Dexys' Kevin Rowland on vocals.

Name: Tom Tremayne
Comment: I bought my first LP in 1974 when I was 9 years old. Using pocket money I got it at the first proper supermarket that Cambridge had (Bar Hill Tesco) whilst there in tow with my mum and dad. I've still got the LP, like a talisman! It was a greatest hits-type album that covered the year and had a track on it that I played over and over (Cindy Incidentally by The Faces) which set me on the road to a love of power chords and drums.

By the time punk happened in 1976 I was buying proper rock records and visiting record shops but not really 'in the know' about punk as such. One record shop was 'Remember Those Oldies' (48 King Street) which opened in 1974 and was run by the enigmatic Lee Wood. Wood also started one of the first punk labels and managed bands nationally. Don't ask me how he did it - stuck in a tiny shop in King Street, but he did!

At around the time punk was breaking and the Pistols would have been gigging I bought Blinded By The Light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band in Wood's shop so that shows you that I wasn't really aware of punk at that time.

Lee Wood was generally nervous about selling records to kids and often wouldn't serve us at all! I can clearly remember going in to his shop in 1978 (by which time I knew about punk) with James Gawne who tried to buy a t-shirt. I was fascinated because Gawny, who was my age but tall, looked older and knew some prototype Cambridge punks (i.e Nigel Woodrow, Steve Cheese, Lisa Bernard and Geoff Peacock) had heard a rumour that Wood was selling t-shirts from Malcolm McLaren's shop in London. Sure enough we were shown a suitcase, literally from 'under the counter', which contained a selection of shirts with all the different designs on them. These would have been designs screen-printed by Vivienne Westwood on the kitchen table of the house she and McLaren lived in in London. When Gawny asked to buy one Wood told us to get out. There had a been a police raid at McLaren's shop (by then called 'Seditionaries', formally 'Sex' and where the Pistols were put together) and this may have made Wood nervous. Indeed one of the shirts showed a picture of the Cambridge rapist who Cambridgeshire Constabulary had been unable to catch during 1974 and 1975!
(2018)