Neil Brown’s Camden Market records and a Soho shop opened in 1989.

Sister Ray is a record shop on Berwick Street in London’s Soho, and its name comes from a song. Long Live Vinyl, in a profile by Huw Baines published on 31 March 2020, said the shop was named after the closing track of The Velvet Underground’s album White Light/White Heat. The shop’s own history says the same in fewer words: Sister Ray is named after the Velvet Underground song.

The founder was Neil Brown. Long Live Vinyl described him as a glam-rock fan who had started out selling records at Camden Market a couple of years before he opened in Soho, and the shop’s history says Brown had been selling vinyl from a market stall in Camden before he took over premises on Berwick Street in 1989. A second Long Live Vinyl feature, a guide to Soho’s record shops published on 31 May 2019, said Sister Ray had been selling records on the street since 1989 and that it began life as a stall in Camden.

The street already had a name of its own in the trade. Long Live Vinyl wrote in 2020 that Berwick Street was at one time known as the Golden Mile for the number of record shops it held, and listed Selectadisc, Vinyl Junkies and Kubla among its neighbours, with Reckless Records as a fellow survivor. The shop’s own history names more of the shops that once traded nearby, among them Daddy Kool, Ambient Soho, Black Market and Vinyl Junkies.

In the 2020 profile, Phil Barton, who later became the owner, remembered calling at the new shop as a sales representative for a major record label, and said it had become a hub for indie, metal, techno and ambient music. He also recalled that the shop took advertisements in the back pages of the NME. Barton had worked behind the counter at the Nottingham branch of Selectadisc before that, and the same article said that, in his spare time, he began turning up at Sister Ray to help out.

An Oasis sleeve, a Selectadisc merger and a new sign.

Berwick Street gave Sister Ray its widest audience in 1995, when it appeared on an album sleeve. English Wikipedia says the cover of Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? shows two men passing each other on Berwick Street, the London DJ Sean Rowley and the sleeve designer Brian Cannon, with the producer Owen Morris in the background, and that the street was chosen because it was then a place for record shops. Long Live Vinyl wrote in 2020 that the sleeve shows Selectadisc on one side and the present Sister Ray on the other. The shop’s own history adds that the photograph was taken very early in the morning to avoid the traffic.

The next change came through Barton’s old employer. Long Live Vinyl reported that Barton had taken over Rounder Records in Brighton around 2000, and that in 2003 Brian Selby, who ran Selectadisc, was heading for retirement and asked Barton whether he was interested in the business. Barton told the magazine that he and Brown decided there was no point in both shops continuing, so they closed the original Sister Ray and moved into the old Selectadisc shop on the same street. “We changed the name, put up a new sign, moved all the staff,” he said. The shop’s own history describes the same step as a merger of the two shops by Sister Ray and Barton, who also owned Rounder Records.

The 2019 guide put the same events more briefly: Barton, a former EMI representative, joined the business in 2003, when he and Brown bought the former Selectadisc premises. Selectadisc did not disappear entirely. Long Live Vinyl noted in 2020 that its name lives on in shirts and slipmats sold at Sister Ray.

The shop kept a guitar-band reputation through the decade. Long Live Vinyl said Sister Ray was early in stocking the Arctic Monkeys’ debut EP in 2005 and that bands still came in to play in-store sets.

A song title on a sign and a basement of records.

A record shop’s identity is carried less by a logo on a screen than by the objects that pass across its counter. The carrier bag is the object many customers keep: a printed bag sized for a twelve-inch sleeve leaves the shop under an arm, travels on buses and ends up in wardrobes holding records for years, so the mark on it does the work that a billboard does for other retailers. Inside, the browser bins set the grammar of the room. Dividers and genre cards, often cut from card and lettered by hand or with a stencil, tell a visitor where reggae ends and soul begins, and their lettering becomes as familiar as the sign above the door. Price stickers work as small typography too, with their colours, codes and handwriting telling regulars how a shop sorts new and used stock.

Much of the rest of the visual language comes from events. In-store gigs bring posters, flyers, wristbands and listings boards, and a shop that books bands into local halls and churches builds a printed calendar around its name. Some shops run their own record labels, so their name also appears on sleeves, centre labels and catalogue numbers, where it reaches listeners who have never been through the door. Record Store Day adds a yearly set of exclusive releases, queues and window displays, and shops often make their own posters and bags for the day. Taken together, the bag, the bin card, the sticker and the gig poster give a shop a recognisable look that is built from use rather than from a single brand book.

A 2008 restructuring, a third address on the street and Record Store Day.

The shop entered administration in 2008, as Long Live Vinyl reported in 2020, and was restructured afterwards. Barton told the magazine that this was the point at which Brown no longer wanted to own the shop, though he wanted to keep working there, and that Barton chose to carry on. The 2020 profile names Barton as the owner, and the 2019 guide called him co-owner.

A further move followed. The 2019 guide said that when the lease on the former Selectadisc shop ended, Sister Ray moved to its present premises, its third location on Berwick Street, and the shop’s own history says it moved across the road. Both Long Live Vinyl features describe the layout: CDs on the ground floor and a basement given over to vinyl, new and second-hand. The 2020 profile said the basement walls carry stencilled names referring to David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, Kiss and Kraftwerk, and Barton said in the 2019 guide that the shop has always been known as an indie shop, with more funk and reggae on the shelves than before.

The shop also tied itself to Record Store Day. Long Live Vinyl said Barton became involved with the event in 2012 and sits on the board of the Entertainment Retailers Association, and the shop’s history says Sister Ray became a force behind Record Store Day, with Barton acting as a spokesman for the event.

For a design guide, Sister Ray shows how a shop can take its name from a single song, keep that name across three addresses on one street and carry a closed neighbour’s name on its shirts and slipmats. Compare Reckless Records, a fellow survivor on Berwick Street, and Rough Trade, a London shop that grew into a label. For this guide we use Berwick plum, shop-sign yellow and sleeve paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sister Ray’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.