Located at 209 Mansfield Road (about 10 minutes walk from Nottingham city centre), Anarchy Records is a fantastic second hand record shop, & along with Rob's Records (see my previous article), ranks as my equal favourite of all the second hand record shops I frequent throughout the U.K.
The shop originally opened circa 2004 in a different premises a few doors further up the road. Around 2010, it went through a difficult patch involving problems with the rent & the lease, & it shut down a couple of times. At one point, the shop & all it's stock was sold to a person who turned out to be an absolute crook. After a short period of running the shop, this crook grabbed all the best stock, & did a runner (leaving the original owners with a huge bill, as it turned out he hadn't signed over the lease & the rent to himself, which meant the original owners ended up being held responsible for paying all the arrears).
However, after these chaotic few years, the shop opened again circa 2015 (with its original owners), & has been happily serving Nottingham music lovers ever since.
There are many things that make this shop great. First of all, there's the fact that it's not just a record shop. Though records are it's primary stock (& the majority of what fills up the shop), it also caters to collectors of other 1960s /70s 'cult' items & oddities - pulp paperbacks, music biographies, film books & magazines, obscure films on dvd & old 'big-box' video, kitsch 1960s /70s ornaments, small pieces of furniture, & a few items of retro clothing & band T-shirts.
When they had the previous shop (a few doors up) there was a basement or all this additional stuff, & there was a lot more of it. However, in the new premises (despite not having a basement) there's still a surprising amount of all this 'other' stuff. The shop is a great example of how you can get a lot of stuff out, without the shop becoming chaotic, & customers having to climb over boxes of tat etc. If you visit the shop, you'll be amazed at how how much great stuff they've managed to get into such a small space.
The second thing that makes this shop great is the diversity of record stock. Too many second hand record record shops just focus exclusively on western Pop & Rock genres from the last few decades, & don't stock other kinds of records (jazz, comedy, spoken word, sound effects, novelty records, children's records, world music etc). Anarchy records has good sections for all this other stuff. A lot of it is in a big section called 'Weird & Silly', which, along with the 'World Music' section, is the section that most appeals to me. If, like me, you have very eclectic musical tastes, & appreciate vinyl 'oddities', you will love Anarchy Records.
There's a great variety of records in the shop, & the owners seem to go out of their way to look for unusual & offbeat stock, so even in the more straightforward genre sections, you will often find odd records you've never seen before.
Unlike some second hand music shops that tend to specialise in one format over another, here there's a good mix between vinyl albums, C.Ds, 7" & 12" singles.
There's a large stock of 7" singles. In most second hand record shops, I don't bother looking at the singles, as I'm more of an album lover, & usually the singles section will just be hundreds of bog standard chart records from the 1960s -90s. However, Anarchy Records is a lot more selective about the kind of 7"s they stock, & the 7"s are all from more specialist & unusual genres (divided into sections) - soundtracks, world music, punk, jazz, reggae etc (& of course 'Weird & Silly').
There's a 'New In' section for all the music formats (albums, C.Ds, 12"s & 7"s), where new stock is put out, residing there for about a week before being placed into their respective genre sections. This means that regular customers don't need to root through everything each time they come in, but instead can just go straight to the 'New In' section.
The last thing that makes this shop great is the prices. Prices are very good, & are a lot less than you would pay almost anywhere else (other than an old-fashioned charity shop or car boot where all albums are a pound). Most weeks I get some fantastic albums in there, & they are rarely more than two or three pounds. The shop doesn't tend to have major expensive 'rarities' (i.e - albums that are in the Record Collector Price Guide for 'Big Money'). I've only ever twice seen any albums in there that were more than £10. However, there's still loads of very unusual records, which even though they may not have an 'official' high price, are still incredibly rare (after about 30 years of collecting obscure records, I can still find things in this shop, which I've never come across before).
Trying to be objective, I wondered if there was anything I could be 'critical' of. However, after much thought, I realised that there wasn't a single aspect of this shop that warrants any criticism. I can't fault it in any respect, & that is a very rare thing for me to say about any second hand record shop.
Anarchy Records is a wonderful shop, which has served me well over the years, I've had so many great record finds there (all of which have been at the best prices), & also tons of other stuff (books, dvds, videos etc).
This is one of the two best second hand record shops I've ever found, & I hope it continues for many years to come.
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