Walk past the amplifiers at the front of a Gloucester Road hi-fi shop, keep going, and the room at the back turns out to be a record shop in its own right. The Centre for Better Grooves occupies the rear of Paul Roberts Hi-Fi at number 33 in Bishopston, a bright white space with an orange back wall, waist-high wooden browsers down the middle and the sleeves worth a second look turned face out along the walls.
Background / History
The shop belongs to Gordon Montgomery, a Glaswegian who has spent his working life in record retail. He founded Fopp, grew it from a single shop into a chain that reached across the country before it passed to HMV, and later sat on the board of Rise, whose Triangle branch became Rough Trade Bristol. He opened the Centre for Better Grooves in March 2015 on Cranbrook Road, a couple of streets from where it trades today, with the declared aim of changing the way second-hand vinyl is sold. Moving in with Paul Roberts put the records in the same building as the turntables, cartridges and styli that play them.
What You’ll Find
Jazz, soul and funk form the spine of the stock, and the question asked of any record before it reaches the racks is whether it has the groove rather than which genre it belongs to. Reggae, hip-hop, rock and classical fill out the rest, in a mix of fresh reissues and original US pressings. The shop draws no line between new and second-hand: everything is simply a record, priced on what it is worth and guaranteed whatever its age, which sets it apart in a trade fond of selling used copies as seen. Section headers are written with a light touch, “Going to the disco?” among them, and stock also moves through the shop’s own Discogs storefront.
Experience / Atmosphere
This is a small shop and makes no apology for it. There are no towers of unsorted boxes to wade through and no reward for stamina, so a browse takes half an hour rather than half a day and turns up more than the odds suggest. A turntable is on hand to hear a record before you commit to it, and coffee is usually going while you look. Montgomery is openly impatient with shops that make newcomers feel unwelcome, and questions about where to start are treated as the point of the job. The jazz at the back runs deepest of all, and the owner’s own measure of the shop’s health is whether it still holds at least forty Miles Davis records.
Why Visit
- Jazz, soul and funk chosen for feel rather than filed by rote, with reggae, hip-hop, rock and classical alongside
- New and used treated as one and the same, with every record guaranteed regardless of age
- Owner-run by the founder of Fopp, so the curation carries decades of trade judgement behind it
- A deck for auditioning records, and coffee while you dig
- Turntables, cartridges and styli sold and fitted in the same building
- A few doors from Plastic Wax and Prime Cuts, which makes a proper Gloucester Road crawl easy
Summary
Small shops live or die on judgement, and there is a great deal of it behind this one. The Centre for Better Grooves proves that a record shop needs no acres of racking to be worth the journey, only someone who knows what belongs in the bins and why. Come on a weekday between ten and half five, take a coffee, work along the jazz at the back, and expect to leave with something you had not gone in for.
