International day for fans of our merch and music - Kevin Buckle
Now Easter and the school holidays are over we are starting to get more international visitors and no more so than this week.
Probably the most unexpected was a gentleman from Indonesia who among other things came to the counter to buy an Avalanche T-shirt.
He explained that he has a record shop himself in Indonesia and in fact had started to organise Record Store Day there. He was clearly a busy man as he also puts on gigs too.
I was wearing a Deadbeat Strawberry Switchblade T-shirt and he was very keen to know if one could be bought as they still have a following in his shop.
Deadbeat was an Edinburgh fanzine and we managed to track down the person who wrote the fanzine and got permission to reproduce one of the covers which had a drawing of Strawberry Switchblade.
He was very happy when we pointed him to the rack which housed the shirt and picked out one in his size immediately. I have said that if he gets requests for the shirt when he gets home, bearing in mind he will be wearing it in the shop, we will send him some more shirts over.
A couple of days later we had several more customers from abroad. One lady from Oregon in the States had come in especially to see the Butcher Billy Taylor Swift exhibition, which is now officially closed but the images are still hanging on the wall. I was able to take her in to see them and she wandered up and down the stairs taking photos, very happy indeed.
As far as I know there will be one last chance to visit before the exhibition is taken down but as yet I don’t have any dates. There may also be a chance to win some of the large fly posters that were used.
Another French couple were in again having especially visited the shop as they were looking for Simple Minds T-shirts. I explained that my understanding was the only official shirts that could be bought were from the band’s website.
I knew this as we had once had the guy who runs the Simple Minds fan club in the shop and he had got into trouble just for doing a fan club T-shirt. The gentleman settled for buying a Thin Lizzy T-shirt instead.
Soon after we had a father and daughter from Norway in the shop looking for Butcher Billy posters and after looking through the selection on our poster table they picked out their two favourites and we were able to find them a tube to keep them safe on the journey home.
The most surprising customers, though, were a couple with their daughter who bought mainly pop CDs including some from One Direction. They were very kind about how much they had enjoyed being in the shop as there was nothing like it back home.
I asked if they were on holiday and they said yes it was their young daughter’s birthday so they had taken a trip to celebrate. I asked where they were from and did not expect the answer, Cancún in Mexico!
A truly international day ended with me recommending Biffy Clyro to a Spanish couple looking for something that was more rock than indie.