Blitzrieg record shop has moved from Glasgow’s London Road to the Gallowgate, right across from the Barrowland Ballroom

We visited Blitzrieg, one of Glasgow’s most renowned East End record shops.

Transcript

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.