Counter to catalogue: how record shops became record labels

Jamaican-Chinese retailer and producer who ran the counter at Aquarius Records in Half Way Tree from 1969, having earlier kept the One Stop shop at 125 King Street; his forward-thinking Aquarius productions and instrumentals (later compiled as 'Aquarius Rock') shaped early-1970s reggae, and he is credited with giving Augustus Pablo his stage name. He was the first to record a young Horace Swaby, later famous as Augustus Pablo, and is credited with pioneering the melodica as a lead reggae instrument as early as 1969, anticipating Pablo's later "East of the River Nile" sound. His 1969 LP "Aquarius Dub" is cited by Bradley as among the earliest true dub albums, emerging around the same time as the first dub experiments coming out of Randy's studio.

Downtown Kingston record shop opened by producer Winston Riley around 1971 at Chancery Lane, off North Parade, doubling as the retail front and A&R base for his Techniques label; Riley ran it until his death in 2012 and dreamed of turning it into a museum.

The London label that began as a record shop in Shepherd's Bush in the mid-1970s and became one of the two or three most important reggae catalogues outside Jamaica. It carried roots through the late 1970s, was central to the dancehall boom of the 1980s, and its Ragga Ragga Ragga compilations were how much of the world heard each year's rhythms. VP acquired it in 2008.

The Chin family label and distributor, grown out of Randy's Record Mart on North Parade in Kingston and rebuilt in Queens, New York after the family emigrated in the late 1970s. VP became the largest independent reggae and dancehall operation in the world, and for decades the primary route by which Jamaican records reached an international audience — its Strictly the Best compilations functioning as a running record of what the dance was playing. Discogs dates the family's move from Jamaica to 1977 and puts the first shop at 170-03 Jamaica Avenue, then 170-21, which sits two years earlier than the 1979 founding most sources give; a move and a company are not the same event, and the archive records both rather than choosing. Billboard named VP its reggae label of the year in 1999. The Greensleeves purchase took the group past 25,000 titles, and it runs fourteen imprints of its own, among them Riddim Driven, Dub Rockers, VP Classics and Randy's Records, the last carrying the Kingston shop's name back into the catalogue.

The three are constantly confused because in Jamaica they were usually the same people. A shop sold records, a label issued them and an imprint was often just a different name on the same label for a different kind of record — a way of keeping a producer's roots output separate from their dancehall output. Attributing a record correctly means knowing which of the three a name refers to.

In Jamaica the shop counter did the job a label's A&R department does elsewhere. Shopkeepers heard what people asked for, what sold out and what stayed on the shelf, and many of them started producing on the strength of it — Randy's, Aquarius and Rockers all worked this way. The distance between knowing what the public wanted and making it was one room.

Derrick Harriott is a Jamaican singer, producer and label owner, leader of the Jiving Juniors before a long solo and production career. During the early-1960s Jamaican soul boom, roughly 1963 to 1964, he fronted a backing band called the Mighty Vikings and used his own record shop and a car to get newly imported American soul singles to his band fast enough to rehearse and perform them almost as quickly as the sound systems exposed them; he describes that Motown, Curtis Mayfield and Otis Redding-influenced soul era as the direct forerunner that eclipsed ska and fed into rocksteady. He dated the early-1970s wave of "sufferah" protest songs to his own 1970 production of the Kingstonians' "Sufferah", and stressed that many of the young artists making such records were genuinely poor rather than performing hardship for effect, recalling one specific account of a bailiff repossessing a singer's bed between royalty payments.

The record shop Vincent "Randy" Chin and his wife Patricia opened in 1958, selling used jukebox 45s from a small shop on the corner of East Street and Tower Street in downtown Kingston and named after Randy's Records of Gallatin, Tennessee. It moved to North Parade around 1960 and in 1962 into a former ice-cream parlour at 16-17 North Parade, where it became one of Jamaica's leading retail outlets and, with the studio the Chins built above it, the commercial and creative centre of the North Parade record district. The Chins left for New York in 1977 and opened VP Records — Vincent and Patricia — in Queens; the 17 North Parade name survives as VP's reissue imprint.

The West Ealing record shop opened by Chris Cracknell and Chris Sedgwick in November 1975 that grew into the Greensleeves label; moving to 44 Uxbridge Road, Shepherd's Bush in 1977, it turned counter demand for Jamaican imports into one of reggae and dancehall's most important catalogues.