Piccadilly Records. (Store Of The Week).

JOHN KERFOOT, MANAGING DIRECTOR & JOINT OWNER

"We had an earth tremor yesterday (Tuesday), but I didn't feel anything. I was in San Francisco about four years ago and there was a quake about three times more powerful than the one in Manchester and no-one moved a muscle.

The thing that is really moving at Piccadilly at the moment is the website and weekly e-mail list we have developed in the past year or so. We review every single item, put it in an e-mail and send it to around 8,000 people all around the world. We now have orders from Cambodia, Romania, Australia, Scandinavia, even the Maldives, where people are aware of what we do.

We now have two dedicated workers on the mail-order side and have regular orders sometimes of 150 [pounds sterling] per week from someone in Abu Dhabi. I think a lot of indie dealers have gone to the wall over the past two years because they haven't found a niche. We are not a chart shop and it has made us fit and lean and we have cut out the lines that make no money. If Tesco is doing it, we won't.

More than 50% of our stock is vinyl. That's what we specialise in. I think indies have to, they need to provide something else. And we get more than the normal allocation of new vinyl than a lot of other stores.

We have eight staff and they all know music and we all write reviews and cater for all sorts of genre. We stock deep house, funk reissues, obscure seven-inches, new hip hop and classic hip hop.

We've always had a good reputation on the indie side and one of the best-selling areas in the CD is the punk and nu-metal section. For every Linkin Park and Korn album that HMV sells we are selling records by the smaller bands such as Kids Near Water or This Girl from Rotherham. The ...