This year for the first time we will be taking part in Record Store Day, an annual event with over 200 independent UK record shops hosting live events and selling special edition vinyl releases. We are partnering up with local independent venue 81 Renshaw Street to promote the music-related archives we hold in Special Collections and Archives. The front café will be open from 7.30am for hot drinks and butties, and the record store will open at 8.00am. Over 400 items are released on Record Store Day, many of them limited edition vinyl, and fans queue early to make sure they can purchase the ones they want to add to their collections. All the new releases are listed here.
We’ve had a look through our archives to find some original magazine features, band interviews and record reviews relating to titles being re-released on Record Store Day. We will be featuring two main eras and genres: 1970s punk rock and the late 1960s/early 1970s hippie counter-culture. In our Pop-Up Museum in one corner of the café we will display a selection of tickets and flyers from Liverpool Eric’s Club Archive, reminders of the bands that played there such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, The X-Ray Spex and Iggy Pop. Among the punk releases on 13th April are a live New Year’s Eve gig from 1979 by The Ramones and I Am A Cliché, a compilation double LP on day-glo vinyl by the X-Ray Spex. We located a Ramones interview in an issue of Zigzag magazine in the England’s Dreaming Archive, which also contains a flexi-disc of two tracks by the 13th Floor Elevators: their 1969 Psychedelic Sounds Of… LP will be released again as a picture disc on Record Store Day. In the Adventures in Wonderland Archive, we have an interview with Poly Styrene and the X-Ray Spex conducted in Liverpool for Sounds magazine which demonstrates that music journalists didn’t have it easy in the punk era – the band say practically nothing over three pages but there are some good photographs.
We recently acquired a large archive of popular music magazines from music writer Jon Savage covering the period 1958-1988. Both the British and American music press are well represented, with long runs of titles including Rolling Stone, NME, ZigZag/Circus, and Crawdaddy. Some of them are too fragile to bring the originals with us, but we have made copies of early record reviews and interviews with artists such as The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Captain Beefheart, and a lovely souvenir of the Monterey Pop festival in 1969. One of our more unusual archives is a small collection of books and magazines on Brigitte Bardot – you will be able to check the details of the tracks on B.B La Legende in a long article on her recording career we found in the collection.
At LJMU we are very lucky to have a John Lennon Time Capsule donated to us by Yoko Ono in 2010. This is the first time it will be shown outside the university, alongside the Box of Vision book which documents Lennon’s post-Beatles career. We hope that all the exhibits in our Pop-Up Museum bring back memories of bands, gigs and tunes across Merseyside – visitors will be invited to write their memories on postcards which will be stored in our Archives with the John Lennon Time Capsule, to be opened on 9 October 2040, marking the centenary of Lennon’s birth.
We will be at 81 Renshaw Street from 7.30am – 4pm on Record Store Day, Saturday 13th April.
LJMU Special Collections & Archives 