A yellow smiley face in the door and a genre list printed straight across the fascia have marked out 87 Corbets Tey Road for decades. Crazy Beat Records is one of the biggest record shops in the London and Essex area, and one of the few traditional ones left in this corner of it.
Background / History
The shop first opened in 1988. Gary Dennis, who had spent years DJing on the club circuit, bought it in 1991 and has run it ever since. In those early years the racks were given over almost entirely to reggae, dance, hip hop and soul, aimed squarely at DJs and serious collectors. The remit widened steadily across the following three decades until Crazy Beat covered nearly every genre worth stocking, though club music and black music remain its centre of gravity. It has also become a familiar face on screen, standing in as a location for My Mad Fat Diary and Come Dine With Me, an Audible advertisement and a BBC segment on Trojan Records.
What You’ll Find
Stock runs to more than 100,000 items across the shop floor and the online catalogue, including roughly ten thousand records in the building that never reach the website at all. Soul, funk, jazz, disco, northern and modern soul, house, garage, boogie, reggae, rap, hip hop, drum and bass, jungle and hardcore all get proper space, with plenty of rock, psychedelia and sixties pop and beat besides. Formats cover LPs, 12in and 7in singles and CDs, and vintage record boxes turn up regularly alongside the occasional pair of Technics turntables. Bargain racks start at around a couple of pounds, while the other end of the shop holds genuine collector pieces. Anything sold through the website is graded at Excellent Plus or better, and collections of any size are bought across the UK, house visits included, with 78s the one format they leave alone.
Experience / Atmosphere
This is a shop that rewards patience. The racks are dense, and much of the pleasure lies in the boxes stacked under counters and along the walls that have never been sorted for the internet. Listening posts let you check a record before committing, and staff each look after their own corner of the shelves, so questions get a proper answer. The customers are a wide mix, from DJs after club stock and collectors chasing one specific pressing to teenagers buying a first LP. Record Store Day is marked each year with limited titles in on the day.
Why Visit
- More than 100,000 records in stock, thousands of them never listed online
- Real depth in soul, funk, disco, reggae, house, garage, drum and bass and hip hop
- Bargain racks from a couple of pounds sitting alongside serious collector stock
- Listening posts, and staff who each specialise in their own genre
- Collections bought anywhere in the UK, from a single box to a whole house
- A short walk from Upminster station and straightforward from the M25
Summary
Few shops of this size and age are still trading, and fewer still keep this much stock on the floor rather than tucked away behind a website. DJs, diggers and ordinary record buyers have relied on Crazy Beat for more than thirty years, and it remains the kind of place where an hour vanishes and you leave with a heavier bag than planned. Whether you are hunting one particular twelve-inch, selling a collection or just after somewhere unhurried to browse, Upminster is worth the trip.
