We visited Blitzrieg, one of Glasgow’s most renowned East End record shops.
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00:00I'm Tony Gawkin and this is Blitzkrieg's shop and I'm directly opposite probably the best
00:05famous music venue in the world, the Barrowland Ballroom. I kind of fell into retail. I had
00:11actually a pop-up shop in a shopping centre in Glasgow and the pandemic came along and I moved
00:19on and I had a shop in London Road and we had quite a few successful events in there. So I was
00:25looking actually for somewhere a bit bigger and a bit closer to the Barrows, the Barrowland Ballroom
00:31in particular and this one came up so we can do more of what we're doing which is going to be
00:36it's a kind of hub and we're going to have book launches, we're going to have live events, we're
00:41going to have just you know different events within the premises. I'm an old punk rocker
00:52you could say. So a lot of this stuff originally came from my collection, stuff that I'd had.
00:59There'd been a real kind of scramble for original punk records and also I run a record label and
01:06I had quite a few guitars and stuff like that hanging around so we started off down that road
01:13but eventually we got to the level where we became a record store day shop and I signed up with all
01:18the big majors, you know the Warners and the Universals and some of the independent ones like
01:24Southern Records Distributors and Cargo and started getting in some new vinyl that
01:32people were asking me for and we also have a lot of secondhand vinyl and all of it's cleaned
01:38because we offer that service, a vinyl cleaning service. I've got a massive collection of
01:43cassettes as well and believe it or not cassettes probably will be the next thing to come back in
01:48again. I get kids in here every single day asking me what cassette tapes I've got but
01:53vinyl, there was a massive revolution with vinyl. I think people possibly got a wee bit fed up with
01:59the CDs and wanted to go back to having the original artwork in their hands where they
02:03could see it, not just this tiny little reflection of it. So you know if you've got the lyrics and
02:09stuff like that in a piece of vinyl you can read that rather than trying to look at a tiny
02:14CD sleeve. So yeah there's been a big scramble for vinyl. I felt as if I had to be more than
02:24just a vinyl shop so that's why I sell guitars, that's why I sell artwork. I do fine art printing
02:29and I offer so much more than just one shop and I think that's what really is the kind of
02:36successful model because if you look at big department stores they don't just sell one thing
02:42they sell a few things. So that's how I've seen Blitzkrieg moving forward was to offer people
02:50something you know a book or a record or a t-shirt or a piece of art or a piece of memorabilia.