Opening hours: 3.30pm to 8pm Monday 10am to 8pm Tuesday to Friday 10am to 7pm Saturday Cast’s 2015 reissue of their 1995 All Change – the highest-selling debut in the history of the Polydor label – costs me less than a tenner, and I pick up Suede’s Coming Up reissue for €15, too. The megastore on Rue Sainte-Catherine, the city’s main shopping street, is following the international direction of multimedia retail – rows of CDs and DVDs being replaced by racks of records – and vinyl is priced keenly, so there are bargains to be had for Brit travellers. This French chain is always worth a mention, and has some great deals. Opening hours: 10am to 7.30pm Monday to Saturday 11am to 7pm Sunday How smug I felt – until I found out the hotel I had booked hurriedly for that evening had fallen through… She thought I was headed for ‘Bourdeau’ in south-eastern France and knew there were unlikely to be record shops there. I’d headed off to the airport and got an anxious text from a friend, suggesting I was wasting my time. But Bordeaux isn’t Bourdeau either – just make sure you go to the right place. Germany is the best country on the continent to go record shopping, but French picture sleeves and pretty good prices on the whole make France a very close contender.īordeaux isn’t Paris, but is definitely worth spending some time in. If you’re staying for longer, a drive around the region after my day here offered up loads of dépÔt-ventes (those French institutions selling second-hand goods on commission) and there were some interesting finds here, too. Still, with a buoyant music scene, this city is the home of electronic duo Kap Bambino, and a selection of great bars makes this an excellent weekend away. A couple of stores appeared to have closed recently, which is part of the sad inevitability of this type of expedition, despite vinyl’s recent revival. I wasn’t able to be there on a Friday or Saturday, so missed the well-regarded but lightly opening Bam Balam Records (29 Cours Pasteur ) but visited everywhere else I could find. There are all manner of vintage shops springing up here and I found some records in a handful, suggesting there’s a steady amount of welcome gentrification underway and, with luck, more attics getting cleared of long-lost used vinyl.
There’s not an over-abundance of shops, meaning you can get round the list in a day quite easily, with time for a long leisurely lunch (if you can’t beat them, join them) and an evening of sampling the local speciality! Tucked away down charming shopping streets, this can feel as though you’re walking through a guidebook, with an amazing array of churches and fine buildings around every corner of this UNESCO World Heritage site (although the ugly corporate hub on the edge of the historic quarter is a 1960s eyesore). Most of the venues are situated in the Saint-Paul district and you can reach them all within about 20 minutes’ walk of each other. Who honestly takes a regular lunch in the 21st Century? Or is that the voice of the painfully pompous metropolitan elite you can hear? Whatever your views on the values of an hour away from the grindstone, this is definitely an afternoon venue, with the majority of the shops here only getting into their stride in the second half of the day.
Some of the shops here still formally shut for lunch. Wine is what Bordeaux is really all about, but as France’s sixth-biggest city, there’s a reasonable amount of crate digging to be done here, provided you get the opening hours right. The intrepid Mark Elliott jets off to the southwest of France in search of 7″ picture sleeves…
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