Grey and Pink
There was a record shop on Brooke Street in Chester called Grey and Pink. I worked three shops down. I was a Liverpool lad commuting to Chester for work, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like a punchline until you've lived it for long enough that it just becomes your life.
And there was this other fella. Same name as me. Williams. Also from Liverpool. He'd get the train over — about 45 minutes, door to door if the connections worked — just to go through the racks at Grey and Pink. Proper dedication that. Nobody travels to Chester for the nightlife. But for records? Aye. That makes sense.
We got talking. Once. Then again. Then it became a thing. Every week, my lunch hour, we'd meet up. Talk music. Talk Liverpool FC. Talk absolute nonsense. Two blokes with the same surname and the same obsession, meeting in a city neither of us was from.
That was over 20 years ago now.
Robbie is 60. I'm 47. And the thing about a friendship like this is it doesn't have a beginning. There's no day you can point to and say "that's when it properly started." It just creeps up on you. One day you're talking about a record. Next thing you know, you've been doing it for two decades.
He's not just a mate. He's family. We share the same surname but it's more than that — we share the same brain when it comes to music. He's the oracle. Tens of thousands of records. The reason this site exists. If I hadn't met him in that shop, none of this would have happened. The site. The archive. The whole thing.
But time doesn't ask permission. Robbie's mobility isn't what it was. He can't get to record shops anymore. So I'm his link now. His legs. His eyes. I go to the shops. I send him photos. I pick up the things he needs. It's the least I can do for a man who spent years teaching me what to listen for.
I think about that sometimes. Two lads from Liverpool, standing in a record shop in Chester, having no idea they were building something that would last a lifetime. We weren't trying to. That's the thing about the best friendships. You don't set out to make them. They just happen because you keep showing up.
And you keep showing up because there's a bloke on the other side who's worth showing up for.
Some people have mates they go to the pub with. Some people have mates they go to football with. I've got a mate I met in a record shop 20 years ago who taught me that the stuff on the B-side is often better than the single.
That's enough.