SCOTLAND’S second-oldest record store has unveiled plans to open another shop in the town where it began almost 50 years ago, as its owner hails the so-called “vinyl revival”.
Europa Music, an institution for music connoisseurs in Stirling, will not only be celebrating its 50th birthday in November but also the opening of a second store.
The shop’s owner, Ewen Duncan, told The National that he plans to open the second shop just two doors down from where Europa Music first opened its doors in Alloa in 1976.
With Europa Music filled to the rafters with tens of thousands of 7” singles, LPs, CDs, DVDs and band t-shirts, along with two containers full of stock also waiting to be sorted, Duncan said he thought now would be the best time to launch the second venture.
“I have more or less two container units, and I was basically paying for stuff lying there, doing nothing, so I just thought, stuff this,” he told The National.
“It was the case that there's so much stock and there's an awful lot of stuff that was needing sorting and just needing sort of exposed.
“So I just thought might as well do something with it, give it a try in Alloa again, see what happens, and then we can take it from there.”
Duncan, who took over the store from Adrian Wightman in 1982 before relocating the shop from Clackmannanshire to Stirling in 1992, said he was very much looking forward to returning Europa Music to Alloa’s high street.
“We're moving into the shop two doors down to where we were 34 years ago,” he said.
Duncan said the announcement that he was planning to open a second shop has been “very positive” among Europa Music’s following, although as the news spread along the grapevine, he joked some folk panicked thinking the Stirling store was going to close.
“They were concerned, because they were like ‘oh, you're moving everything from the Stirling shop to Alloa’, and I was like, oh, I obviously didn’t announce this properly, so hence I had to clarify,” Duncan said.
He added: “Europa Stirling is definitely not closing.”
The National can reveal that Europa Music’s Alloa store is aiming to open its doors on Primrose Street on November 2, the day after the business turns 50 years old, with a grand opening scheduled for November 7.
With a backshop of tens of thousands of second-hand records, Duncan is pretty certain his business has the largest collection of records in Scotland - and he’s looking forward to being able to offer more for customers spread over two stores.
“The Alloa shop will probably be used as a kind of sorting center as well as obviously open for business,” he said.
“I'm hoping in say six months, everything will be alphabetised, categorised and priced.”
“Then we'll be moving a certain amount of doubles or multiples in the Stirling shop over there.
“In the meantime, we're still sorting through a ton of stock. We're sorted through about 12,000 singles in the Alloa shop at the moment, and about 6000 CDs, followed by DVDs, which are still to sort out.”
He explained that the store will be “properly open” on Thursday, Friday, Saturdays and by appointment Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
When asked if the store will be open selling records and not just a sorting centre , Duncan said: “Of course, I mean vinyl is the most important part of the business. I mean we can't have a record shop without records.”
He went on to explain how Europa Music has grown from strength to strength after disaster struck the store 30 years ago, after its locally famous backshop filled with records was burnt to the ground.
“We lost all the vinyl and previous to that, vinyl had been probably 60-70% of business, so it took 10 years to kind of properly recover from that and then 15 years before we were actually probably the biggest final shop in Scotland.
“We are definitely the biggest vinyl shop in Scotland now.”
But it’s the Alloa regulars Duncan is most looking forward to seeing again, as he said the town still has a lot of nostalgia for the business.
“The amount of people that say, oh, I remember getting the first record there and which record they got.
“It's good in lots of ways because, well I would say there's definitely still a good feeling for the shop in Alloa, so much nostalgia from a certain generation, but we are getting, should we say, second and third generations from that generation coming into the shop at Stirling so it will be good to see them back in the Hillfoots.”
