Michael Moynihan: Cork record shop spinning a real sense of community spirit

A lengthy silence on the other end (though more for the affront of listening to a Dublin band than anything else, I think).

For someone — me — whose musical tastes were set in aspic around September 1982 this seems quite a leap forward, but there’s a context. We learned about the listening party on a previous expedition to the shop, out in the Deanrock Business Park, and while we were there (purchased: albums by Elliott Smith and Cigarettes After Sex) we got chatting with the staff about their posters. One of the research assistants expressed an interest in a Fontaines poster, shop owner Ray O’Brien mentioned the listening party, and we chatted some more after the last strains of the F DC album died away.

Music Zone wasn’t always in Togher.

“We started in Carrigaline in 2001 and we had ten years there, then to Douglas Village Shopping Centre,” said Ray.

“That flooded in June 2012, we moved to Douglas Court for a while and then back to Douglas Village. Then there was a fire on the 31st of August, 2019 which shut the place down for a year.”

Anyone else facing two different acts of God might have packed up, but not Ray. He moved to Togher.

“It’s different out here, but it’s great. It’s a destination: people who come out here want to come out here.

“But we worked on keeping customers as well. We started a newsletter around 2014 and that pulls people in as well.”

On my visits the shop always has a few customers roaming the aisles, and some of them are clearly serious record collectors hunting particular gems. But that doesn’t rule out the casual visitor.

“We don’t take the whole thing too seriously in the sense that it’s laid-back here,” said Ray.

“That kind of High Fidelity situation, that’s gone, long gone.”

Fair point. Readers may remember the film Ray mentioned, in which record shop workers mock customers for not making cool choices (Jack Black’s breakout role, if I recall). Not the vibe in Music Zone at all.

“Someone wants whatever they want, if they get something out of that music, great — no matter what it is.

“We don’t judge anyone on their tastes, not at all. If someone likes what I like, great. If not? I’m not telling them they’re wrong — how can your personal taste be wrong?”

What I’ve noticed is a mix of people in the shop, particularly in terms of age.

“It's refreshing to see kids there, and to see them buying some physical media and being interested in it.

That's great to see, because there was a time when that wasn't there at all, and there's a bit of that coming back now. We see more of that all the time

“Much as people like the physical items — the records and CDs — they’re also kind of a soundtrack to your life. People can tell, ‘I bought that record the day the dog died’ or ‘I was with this gang of people when I listened to this first’.

“There's a bit of randomness, too. You can see in the shop outside there are nooks and crannies, merchandise, singles here, posters there, and bits of books, and there's all sorts of everything. It’s a real traditional old-school record shop.”

People travel from far-flung parts to Togher for their vinyl: “We’d have regular customers from all over Munster, and one chap comes from Gort in Galway — he’d be down four or five times a year.

“And they touch base — ‘Can you keep that for me?’ ‘Yeah, keep this for me’. Then they come and collect.

“We don’t have footfall here, but we do okay. We know everyone who comes in.

“These kinds of shops are kind of a kind of dying out because it’s such a corporate world everywhere else.

“We'd be kind of the opposite to that and that's what probably makes us stand out a little bit.”

So does the local connection. It’s no accident that Ray namechecked Cork artists first: “We love supporting the local musicians anyway and nearly everyone out of Cork has played in the shop. Mick Flannery, John Blek, Jack O’Rourke, the Frank and Walters ... we have our little community so we're exposing someone to our community.

“And often customers say ‘that band was great’ and buy the CD and start going to the gigs, so it’s a little ecosystem and everyone is playing their part in it.

“There was a train of thought ten years ago along the lines of ‘what’s the place for record shops in the world’, and there's an awful lot of direct selling going on.

“But there's value in this too. I'm not sure what the exact percentage of sales is made up by physical music but I think it's still above 15 or 17%, which is considerable enough.

“And record shops in a small way would help to break bands. Fontaines DC would always have been supporters of record shops, and we would have pushed their records to people and so on.”

Ireland punches above its weight for record shops, said Ray, who produced the stats to prove it.

“We had a man in the shop recently from Milan, which has two million people, and he was saying they had five or six record shops in the city. But there are five or six record shops in Cork, which is one-tenth the size of Milan.

Obviously I think record shops are important, and we do have a community. We have maybe 300 to 400 regular customers and we’d nearly know them all

The personal touch, knowing the customers, the sense of a community: all of that sets a place like this apart. Not every shop can have that sense of being a special place, of course, but how many places put in the work to try to achieve it in the first place?

Music makes those emotional connections anyway — ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,’ said Noël Coward all those years ago — but a place like Music Zone leverages those connections in an organic way.

The work still has to be done, of course. Even as I was leaving Ray was telling me about the events coming up. “Lazarus Soul tomorrow at 4.30pm, Friday sixth of September, John Blek releases a new solo album here at 6.30pm, John Spillane will launch an album, The Legend of the Lough, at the Lough - we’ll be at that, Susan O’Neill in late September.

“But we’re here all the time anyway. Me, Adam and Shane are always in the shop.”

Good to hear. Just call me when the next copy of The Queen Is Dead lands.

For the newsletter and more: https://musiczone.ie/