Fat City. (Store Of The Week).

"Speaking from the perspective of the music scene with which we're involved, which is seen as underground, everything seems very healthy. Acts such as Mr Scruff, Rae & Christian and the Unabombers, who have been associated with this scene, are breaking through and this reflects well on all of us. When someone from Manchester wants to get something in this vein--hip-hop or beats--they tend to come to us.

We've been trading for 10 years now and there's much more to us than just the shop. We have a club night, Friends & Family, that runs every week at the Roadhouse in Manchester and every two weeks at the Embassy in London. We run the club in conjunction with Mark Rae, who parted amicably to set up Grand Central Records, and this brings a lot of attention to both the shop and the labels.

We've also just gone online with phase one of our website. It's only been up for a month and the response has been great. We've taken our time setting it up: it's a very competitive area and I think you need to get it right and offer a good service from the start. The problem with a lot of independent retail sites is that so many people rushed into them, never really maintained them and offered a dreadful service that it put people off.

We sell a lot of imported hip-hop in-store, which is a lot of work. It's very much about tracking the material down and finding the right distributors for that right sound and the best price. Where we need to, we deal direct with labels, if the costs make sense for both parties. This is something which is prevalent in the UK hip-hop scene. Over the years it has suffered from poor distribution but now that the genre is becoming more popular there's a greater demand for it. As a sound it's got much better and the people making UK hip hop are finally finding their own voice.

Hip hop has exploded over the ...