Mail order will continue but the shops are going/gone in Nottingham. I always loved the album shop but hated the singles shop.

My first port of call on my occasional trips to Nottingham. It's one of the fast disappearing number of shops where I am guaranteed to find something I didn't know that I "needed".

The dust is mud, so much of it is being bitten by music shops, old, new, stand alone or chain. My sense of distress is becoming enormous.
What will replace this source of solace? I am increasingly drawn to the recent words of one of our compatriots, ringing ever and increasingly true:
"I suspect the likes of you and me use the internet and it's various musical hideaways in the same way as the old cosy little record shops that used to be tucked away all over the place. Get your fingers dirty on the racks, listen to some tunes, get some inspiration, buy a few records." Simon L 24/2/09 3.22pm

wow that pretty accurate!
I moved away a while ago, but still made a point of going there when i got back,and silly as it seems [and it is, but it isn't] It did make me feel good, just to be in there, the little helpful notes on the plastic wallets of the CD covers, all seemingly in the same handwriting for the last, what? decade and a half for me at least.

I can remember this from my student days in Nottingham - early/mid-eighties.

My abiding memory is the trips to concerts they used to arrange - concert ticket plus seat on a decent bus, usually to DeMontfort Hall Leicester. Sad to hear this news.

My weekly trips to Selectadisc when I was at school in Nottingham (1978-85) were a highlight. Sitting on the bus looking over and over and over again at the cover of whatever I'd bought that day; reading the track list; putting the disc back into the yellow plastic bag; rushing upstairs, without even saying hi to my mum first, to play the thing: all integral parts of my youth.

I wondered round Zavvi in Liverpool 1 at lunch time today looking for bargains. The difference really couldn't be any more stark.

I know they got rid of the store in London a year or so, but thought the Nottingham one would be round forever!

Went in a couple of weeks ago and picked up a few cds, and it seemed pretty busy then, just goes to show.

Bet it won't be long until Rough Trade East is the only indie record shop left in the UK, sad days indeed.

the lovely people that frequent this site are not the ones the owners of the stores are targeting. They want the pimply youths to buy the latest xbox game or whatever is the latest trend and their slightly younger girlfriends to buy the latest Beyonce/Girls Aloud/Leona Lewis cd while they are waiting for their blokes to decide on what it is they want. We must seem like fucking aliens walking around HMV these days and to be honest for me the experience is entirely soulless. It was only about 3 years ago I vowed I wouldnt buy anything online and now look at me - less than 5 percent of my purchases are bought in store in this country - completely different when I go overseas where you can usually find good independent record stores. Problem is that unless you are selling millions and increasing sales year on year you are viewed as an economic failure over here.

Surely this can't be true. I've been going there as long as I can remember. At least 20 years. I thought Selectadisc was bulletproof, it's always seemed busy, even recently.

This leaves me with Fopp for my ocassional visits to Nottingham. I assume that's still limping along is it?

I was in Nottingham today for a conference just around the corner, walked past and saw the sign. I just stood there outside at 8am, a bit stunned. Other people started to do the same, sharing reminisences of when it was in the Meadows (I'm too young to remember that, but remember it in Bridlesmith Gate). I wasn't the only one who felt that a little bit of them had died.

I haven't lived in Nottingham for 20 years, but always spent a wedge when I went back, for fear of such a day. I bought a couple of things from the desultory stock selection they were flogging off today, just for old times' sake. It was heaving - more with people paying respects than looking for bargains. The youths behind the counter didn't really get why all these people were coming in just to flick mournfully through the racks.

I've accepted every other consequence of change with a shrug and/or open arms. But that's it, I've crossed the nostalgia threshold. In one small way at least, things will ever more have been better in the past.

I bought a shed-load from there in the 80s while at Uni in Leicester

On Friday, I was in Nottingham for the first time in a couple of years
Through circumstances too convoluted to describe I lived in Nottingham from around 2002 to 2005, aged mid-40's, the first time I'd resided anywhere but in my native Lancashire
My wife, once a teenage sweetheart from oop North but who had been around Nottingham far longer than I had, intoduced me to Selectadisc and for the short period we lived there together, Nottingham seemed like a mini record shop heaven. There was even a little place in an alley nearby which sold bootleg CDs and when Fopp came to town, my joy as occasional "50 quid bloke" was complete
When Fopp went bust and was swiftly revived, I celebrated from afar that Manchester and Nottingham were among the revamped stores and a 2008 trip back to Notty to visit old friends was for me simply a few annoying social obligations around a much more essential chance to go and browse for obscurities and cheap on-the-listers in that tiny triangle above Market Square
Last week we were back in the city and I could barely wait for that little moment to come along when the Mrs and kids say: "You go and have a look at Fopp and Selectadisc, we'll meet you in the Victoria Centre in an hour."
Perhaps in an ironic metaphor for what's happened, I headed for Fopp first, and ended up spending the entire hour there. Michael Bracewell's Roxy Music book (£2), a fancy book of REM photos (£3), a handful of CDs (Complete Stone Roses £3, REM 39 Songs at the Olympia £4, a couple of Tom Waits CDs I'm sure I have already but can't find, a Richard Hell compilation...), a Vic and Bob DVD, and all of a sudden it's time to rendezvous with Mrs Preston74 and the children.
Oh well, Selectadisc, maybe tomorrow if I get an hour after breakfast, maybe next time.
On Saturday I was working covering the football at Northampton when the phone went. I knew it must be serious for my wife to call me during the game.
“Selectadisc’s gone...it’s gone,” she shouted.
I was crestfallen.
"Gone? Moved?" "Shut. Shut down. The building's there but the racks of CD's and the people aren't. It's gone."
Somehow I’d missed any mention - lord knows there are enough column inches about the demise of record shops how’d I missed that?
So no more finding Modern Lovers re-releases for £4.99 No more Associates albums I’d forgotten I ever had on long-discarded cassettes. No walking in and finding the latest Clive Gregson or Boo Hewerdine after months of pointlessly checking in HMV.
Selectadisc in the mid-90’s gave me a similar almost unrepeatable thrill to that I experienced going to Manchester - it really was as grim as all those Joy Division documentaries have you believe - as a teenager in the seventies.
I remember a strange little place named Paperchase, near what’s now the Royal Exchange...imports....bootlegs, allegedly (though I couldn’t afford the rumoured prices and was far too scared to ask in case the police burst in)
I recall coming home with The Stooges first album and A Fugs LP -(I’d read all my Bowie/Reed interviews far too closely and slavishly) vinyl in shrinkwrap with little holes punched in the corner to authenticate them as imports
I imagined that they were smuggled onto ships and hidden in the hold among the legitimate cargo by hip rock n’rollin’ sailors who wanted spotty pale-faced glam rock afficianados in Northern milltowns to hear them and was sure the dangerous, edgy content (a bit of swearing and some leaden but wonderful riffs) precluded them from general sale in the UK
Of courser they were great but the reason they were imported - on aeroplanes presumably - was surely the more prosaic one that nobody except aforesaid handful of oiks wanted to listen to them
But discovering Selectadisc gave me the nearest feeling I’ve had to that teenage rush of handling what we thought was forbidden fruit or uncovering the musical equivalent of Tutankhamun’s riches
Ispent far more hours (and cash) in there than a newly-wed middle-aged guy with a young family ought to buying stuff I had ina lot of cases, already had in several formats in buried old suitcases or storage units I had since failed to pay for
Pan forward a half-decade or so and I recently kind of re-acquainted myself with Action Records, a splendid little indie shop in Preston
I hadn’t been in for a decade or so but was delighted that it’s manned by practically all the same staff as before - they continue to ignore me, I’ve never had a word of conversation (surely even a little fat chap who comes in and buys albums by Gram Parsons, the MC5 and a cheap compilation of Bulgarian choirs deserves his existence acknowledging beyond a curt “£14.97 please,” at least once in 20 years) but it was possibly even better stocked than ever and the prices were down to Fopp level
Finding out that Selectadisc is no more has made me kind of determined to go in and support the grumpy fuckers whenever I can. I had a £2 off HMV voucher yesterday and almost bought Stevie’s “Inner Visions” and “Songs In The Key of Lif” (two for a tenner) in HMV
But I will go to action this week and see if they have them.
That’s assuming it’s still there of course.

So it never did reopen as this article from the local Nottingham paper suggested last year??

http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/news/Selectadisc-set-return/article-94...

As another poster says above, such shops seem to always be heaving and, certainly with regards to the one in Berwick Street which is now a Sister Ray, the percentage of actual buyers in these stores as opposed to browsers much be huge.

I might be going to Brighton for the day next week.....last time I went the book/record shop scene was pretty encouraging, will I be greeted with 'closed down' signs?