Featured Store: Skeleton Records

Graham Jones travels back to the first record shop he ever bought from, Skeleton Records, Birkenhead and asks manager Ben Savage about the amazing history of the shop.

Skeleton Records has been infecting the musical tastes of the good people of Birkenhead since August 1972. The shop was opened by two 20-year-olds, both called John who had nothing better to do.

Founder John “Man” Weaver ran Skeleton Records for fifty years until his passing in early 2022. He remains a bona fide Birkenhead legend. The other John, John Poole, escaped to Essex in 1980 but still reappears once a year to make sure his legacy has not been ruined.

Skeleton has always specialised in the unusual and the obscure. The shops best-selling artist of all time is Hawkwind, while second-placed Half Man Half Biscuit fall a little further behind with every passing year.

By 1976, Skeleton had enthusiastically embraced punk, coinciding with John Weaver branching out into gig promotion. Some remarkable stories followed. Motörhead once spent six hours after a Birkenhead gig browsing the shop’s second-hand LPs until 6am. Ian Gillan kindly rescued a nervous member of staff by writing an entire interview himself questions and answers included—for publication in a fanzine.

The best-known Skeleton tale is that John booked the Sex Pistols three separate times. Every concert was cancelled, twice by Malcolm McLaren and once by Wirral Council, who feared the possibility of a riot. Remarkably, John still made a profit on every cancelled show because so many fans chose to keep their tickets as souvenirs rather than claim a refund.

A complete list of artists promoted under the Skeleton Records banner would fill a small novel, but it includes The Jam, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Elvis Costello, Motörhead (three times), The Adverts, Fairport Convention, and countless others. Buzzcocks famously turned up, looked around the venue, declared it too “pokey” and graciously declined to perform.

Today, Skeleton Records is under the stewardship of Ben, who has been part of the shop almost his entire life. He first walked through the door as a 12-year-old customer, became a volunteer at 18, shop manager at 23, and has been custodian of this grand old institution since the passing of John Weaver in 2022. Ben jokes that he is asked around three times a week whether he is John’s son.

Thankfully, little has changed. The biggest act of modernisation has been introducing alphabetical order—something John Weaver famously described as “witchcraft.” Customers can now find Fleetwood Mac without rummaging through several hundred LPs beginning with the letter “F.”

The shop now stocks more records, CDs, cassettes, and DVDs than ever before. The last stock take counted well over 200,000 items.

In 2021, Skeleton Records unexpectedly made national headlines after deciding not to stock Adele’s album 30. The decision was not anti-Adele, it was a protest against the fact that half a million copies of the album were being pressed during a severe vinyl manufacturing backlog, while independent artists were waiting more than six months to have their records made. What started as a local stance was picked up by The Guardian, The Big Issue and even breakfast television in Canada. To extend an olive branch, Adele was invited to the shop’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2022. Sadly, she never made it. Ben suspects she is more of an HMV kind of girl.

Another modern addition to Skeleton’s story has been social media. Rather than using Facebook and Instagram simply to advertise stock, Ben created the hugely popular “Customer of the Day” series, which has accidentally attracted almost 7,000 loyal followers. The series perfectly reflects the spirit of Skeleton Records. As Ben puts it, “95% of our customers are absolutely lovely people—and we couldn’t stay open without them.”

When it comes to ordering from Proper Music, Skeleton’s shopping list is dominated by two names: Hawkwind and Half Man Half Biscuit. So, when asked to name his favourite Proper releases, Ben’s choices came as no surprise:

• Half Man Half Biscuit – The Voltarol Years (“Ben is on it!”)
• Hawkwind – the entire back catalogue, much of it sourced through Proper’s excellent wholesale department

More than fifty years after opening its doors, Skeleton Records remains one of Britain’s great independent record shops,a place where music, humour, history, and community have always mattered just as much as the records on the shelves.

The Vinyl Revival and the Shops That Made It Happen

Graham Jones is the author of ‘The Vinyl Revival and the Shops That Made It Happen’ which has features on over 200 independent record shops that he has visited. The book was made in to a film titled ‘The Vinyl Revival’ available on DVD. Both can be ordered from Proper, independent record shops, Amazon and other online retailers.

Read about the book, film and vinyl soundtrack here