Comments
Dave Harwood
11 Dec 2024 at 10:38
The first Woolworth's record department that I became aware of was the one in the branch near Thornton Heath railway station, opposite the clock tower, just before the High Street. They were playing the song 'Peggy Sue Got Married' but it didn't sound like Buddy Holly singing. Then I noticed the list of Embassy Records on the wall behind the counter, which I seem to remember was on the left-hand side of the shop. My parents didn't have a record player, so I would visit my friend's house on a Saturday morning and listen to Buddy Holly records on his parents' radiogram. I had to wait until 1964 before my parents finally bought one! I then started doing a paper-round so I could afford to buy my own records.
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Name: Dave Harwood
Comment: I’ll never forget when Woolworth’s in central Croydon stopped selling vinyl LPs in the early 1990s. They gave over the whole top level of their building that opened on to the Whitgift Centre to sell off their remaining stock at knockdown prices. Most people’s perception of Woolies was that they only sold chart records, but I found Folkways: A Vision Shared (1988) in the clearout racks there. I also found an eclectic mix in the West Wickham, Kent branch when I visited a year or so earlier. I bought Nanci Griffith’s The Last Of The True Believers, with its very appropriate cover photo of Nanci standing outside a Woolworth’s store! My local branch in Lower Addiscombe Road, Croydon yielded the soundtrack album of Martin Scorsese’s film The King Of Comedy, a most unlikely find!
(3 April 2016)