by mariteaux

If I didn’t tell you about it already, I was in Wales for three weeks last month into this month visiting Caby. It was genuinely life-changing, and even though it wasn’t that long ago, I’m still wishing I was back over there, and her and her family keep telling me how much they miss me too. Life is seriously much easier in person–and it’s a lot more fun when there’s adventure to be had! And what better adventure can you have than foreign record stores?

There’s two in Caby’s immediate area, and I hit up both to great success. It was a lot of fun digging through the bins, picking out CDs, telling stories, trying risks, and even having some encounters with some curious strangers! I even bought some Welsh-language music! While I continue to put off working on the much larger trip diary, let me laser-focus on the days I visited…

Spillers Records

Spillers was the first one we visited (in the Morgan Arcade in Cardiff, if you’re keen to visit it yourself), and it’s got a certain prestige to it. It’s actually the oldest record store in the world! I don’t know if that means “still in operation” or oldest period, but either way, 1894 is no short run. The oldest living people in the world right now wouldn’t be alive for another 15 years or so.

It’s a little modest in size in that specific arcade (sadly, as I’ve heard, they had to do some downsizing over the past decade), and we actually had trouble finding it at first since it’s around a weird corner. Most of the floor space is dedicated to records, natch, though because I had to actually transport my music home this trip, I opted not to even scan through them lest I be tempted. The CDs are all on the east wall, and they seem to focus more on new releases, sealed and all, as opposed to the heavy used bias of the other store I visited.

Spillers is really good for Welsh music–not just in stock, but in the people who work there. I unfortunately didn’t get her name, but the mild-mannered clerk who was working there came over to us initially to tell us that they were closing up (this was around 5:30 in the evening–seriously, stores in Cardiff Central close weirdly early). She wouldn’t have minded staying open longer like they sometimes do, but it was her birthday, and I wasn’t about to keep someone from celebrating that.

But then something funny happened. Firstly, she complimented my Pixies shirt–I promise you I did not intend to go into a record store wearing a Pixies shirt, that’s just how that happened. She mentioned that the Pixies actually did an in-store performance in Spillers a couple years back and recommended I give their reunion work a shot (which despite owning a copy of Indie Cindy, I’ve been hesitant to do because of the middling things I’ve heard about it). So already, she was stopping what she was doing, on her birthday, to chat with us, but then the conversation switched to her recommending me Welsh bands–and I got curious.

I don’t know if it’s the history of it, the fact that the culture’s been suppressed by England for hundreds of years, or the fact that I don’t understand a bit of it (or that I’m dating a Welsh girl), but hearing that bands are more keen to explore the weirder end of rock music–my end of rock music–in their own language, through their own lens, that’s just exciting period, let alone for me as someone with no way of discovering this stuff on my own to dig through. I’d never really given Welsh music much thought, sitting back home in Pennsylvania, even with Caby’s lyric translations and videos, but I mean, I was in Wales. What better time than now?

The clerk mentioned she wasn’t fully fluent in Welsh, but she ran through a small gauntlet of acts, some hyperlocal to Cardiff, in a bunch of genres and I took pictures of some of her recommendations and a little card for one of them, Datblygu, home. Apparently they have a boxset out exploring their entire catalog this year, which I couldn’t justify grabbing without having heard a note of their stuff, but if I do like ’em, that’s a damn good deal for getting a lot of Datblygu in one go.

No, what I picked up was a little more modest. You see, I have this tradition for record stores, one I picked up back when I’d visit my older sister on long trips into central Pennsylvania or into New York. We’d go into a record store and buy something without having heard anything from the band. It could be a weird cover, it could be that I recognize someone in the band, it could be that the band worked with someone I do like, but it had to be a surprise, effectively. I discovered the wonders of the Lemonheads’ It’s a Shame About Ray doing that, and I have a vinyl issue of the ever-weird (and perhaps long due for a rediscovering by me–not that kind) Cartharsis in Crisis by K Records stalwarts Old Time Relijun.

I’d decided I’d pick up Melyn, the debut album by a trio of Welsh girls calling themselves Adwaith. Caby said I’d be into ’em, and damn was she right, even through the crappy speakers on her TV (since the PS2 is the only CD player she’s got). My first impression was like Warpaint doing Yeah Yeah Yeahs covers. The guitars have that really classic, thin 80s Cure sound to them (same as the bouncy basslines), and if I’m honest, you barely notice that it’s not in English because her voice is just plain lovely to listen to. Actually, the only English-language lines on the entire thing, “Jesus won’t let me into Heaven/It’s back to the drawing board” off “Diafol y Fi”, jarred me right out of my seat–I suddenly could understand words on this dreamy art rock record! Really good. I gotta spend a lot more time with this one. (My favorite track as I listen back to it writing this post: undoubtedly “Newid”.)

I didn’t wind up buying anything on that day. Caby and I came back a week later (sans Pixies shirt) where I also picked up a reissue of Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over Me and a copy of Shellac’s Dude Incredible, which I had torrented a long time ago, but was yet another casualty in the Fusion Drive crash of 2019. That time, there was this other dude in there scanning through the CDs, maybe my age, maybe a bit younger, and I heard him mention the Lemonheads to his friend, so I struck up a bit of a chat. I don’t think we’d agree on much (he was not the biggest fan of the Dandy Warhols, and according to him, liking Big Black’s EPs over their full-lengths is a pretty hipster take), but that’s what you get with music fans. It was fun! Fun having people out in the wild recognize the bands I like, even if it’s to tell me they suck.

Kellys Records

Spillers isn’t the only record store in town, though–Caby told me of the wonders of Cardiff Market multiple times, filled with tiny stalls of people selling all manners of food and trinkets and taking only cash for any of it, and especially of a different record store with a different kind of prestige, Kellys. Apparently, people from all over the world visit Kellys, even yearly, because their stock is just that good. Unfortunately, the first time we went into town to check it out (with Caby’s brother Cramble in tow) fell on a bank holiday, and both Kellys and Spillers were closed. That was highly disappointing, given the distance we traveled, but we were determined and returned the very next day.

Kellys has so much stock, they not only have two storefronts on the upper level of Cardiff Market, but their discounted stock spills out into the walkway. I dutifully scanned through the 45s, but I’m sure all of you know there’s usually nothing good in the cheapie bin. No, the real finds started happening once I went inside. Their rock and indie sections were split up, and while the rock section was really only mildly interesting (I did pick up the Black Keys’ debut, an old torrented favorite of mine, as well as a 90s reissue of Who’s Next), the indie section was a goldmine of stuff I wanted to buy and stuff I just found absolutely fascinating to chat about, and all going phenomenally cheap. We’re talking £2-4 for most of it. (At the time of writing, £1 is $1.25, so $2.50-$5.00 roughly.) Caby and especially Cramble were often in and out of the store, owing to it being tiny, quite hot, and probably pretty boring for them, but I was hooked.

Outside of just plain finding several albums I’d wanted to listen to for a long time from old favorites (Counting Crows’ Recovering the Satellites was going for £3, Wilco’s Summerteeth £2), I also took a chance on some bands I was less familiar with. Ash’s early big singles are big favorites of mine (it’s crazy imagining a teenager writing “Goldfinger” or “Girl From Mars”, I was eating fucking paste), so 1977 was an instant pickup. Ironically, it was the oldest CD in the bunch that wound up being the most expensive, a copy of the Sonics’ Psycho-Sonic for £7, but I like 60s garage rock when I hear it and the Sonics are quite the influence on a bunch of bands I like (Kurt Cobain lauded their drum sound, and “Shot Down” was what the Black Keys were listening to when they wrote one of my all-time favorite songs, “Girl is On My Mind”). Plus those bands were all putting out singles anyway, so a big compilation of them seemed more fitting than an album.

I had another chance encounter with a fellow music person, though this one was a lot more pleasant. I discovered Rid of Me, the PJ Harvey album, mixed amongst the indie stuff, and I was telling Caby the story behind it, how it was recorded at Pachyderm, one of my favorite studios on the planet, and how Steve Albini sent Nirvana a copy of it to show them what In Utero might sound like, but let me let you in on a little bit of the Cammy secret sauce. I’m bullshitting you. I’ve read a lot more about music than I’ve listened to, so I’ll know everything about an album except what it sounds like. Not to say I haven’t listened to a lot of music also, but–Rid of Me is one of those albums. I think I mentioned that to Caby as we’re looking through CDs.

A guy scanning through the rest of the indie section looks over and goes “really good album, you should try it”. It was also £3.

If someone in the store is telling you to get it, you get it.

Yes, they took card, so I went nuts. I picked ten CDs out of the racks in all and the guy at the store let it go for £30, plus VAT. Not much of an exaggeration! He literally looked at the stack, started tallying stuff up, and basically said “screw it, we’ll call it £30”. (He actually gave me a slight discount, if I add up the prices on the CDs themselves.) On a high of a seriously good haul, I left the store, and Cramble finally got some relief from the heat and cramped conditions. Now the only challenge left was to figure out how to get it all home.

I’d highly recommend you go and visit these shops, if you happen to be in Cardiff. They need the business, they’re both a lot of fun to look through, I liked my little weird encounters with the other customers, and I came home with stories to tell and a lot of really good music I’ve been listening to and finding new favorites from. (Expect reviews of a lot of these to pop up on the eventually-renovated mari.somnol.) I’ll be visiting again next time I’m over there, I can promise you that–but first, I need to invest in more CD storage.