The night I went to see Nanci Griffith at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall with my daddy was the first night I ever felt like a grown-up. I was fourteen years old and I felt impossibly grand in that beautiful venue on my father’s arm, talking to some of his colleagues in the bar at the intermission like I wasn’t the youngest person there. I was wanting to hear “It’s A Hard Life (Wherever You Go)” – my favourite song in those days, in which Nanci sang as a “backseat driver from America” taking a taxi through Belfast during the heart of the Troubles. The women all seemed to be waiting for “Love at the Five and Dime” – I didn’t really understand lovesongs at that age, but I could empathise with those songs that called for social change.
“Love at the Five and Dime” [YouTube link] tells the story of Rita, a sixteen-year-old cashier who “made the Woolworth counter shine” and her love for Eddie, a steel guitar player and a “damn good dancer”. In the song they meet, fall in love and grow old together although not without plenty of heartbreak along the way. The version I listened to most often as I was growing up, taped from my dad’s Greatest Hits CD and listened to on my old single-deck Alba cassette recorder, was a live take from the One Fair Summer Evening concert, which Nanci introduced with a tale of her first visit to London. She got off the bus in this strange, foreign city – “and, by golly, there was a Woolworths store.
“Woolworths stores,” she continues in a speech I can recite by heart having listened to it so often growing up, “smell the same all over the world – like popcorn and chewing gum rubbed around on the bottom of a leather-soled shoe.” I can’t say that my local Woolworths featured either a popcorn machine or an elevator which pinged with the high note of the top string that punctuates the song, but it did have a reduced to clear cassette bin that performed the same function as that old record bin did in a small Renfrewshire town in the mid-1990s.
Woolworths has not been the first victim of the credit crunch on the high street, but reports of its lingering demise here in the UK have been met with a wave of nostalgia I doubt many stores could command from a dwindling clientele. From my own perspective, I can’t help but regard Woolworths with a level of affection that I think might seem like an overreation to those who lived in or near a larger retail centre – the big names went to nearby Paisley (before it became suffocated by Braehead) and Glasgow; so Woolworths was the biggest, most recognisable name on Johnstone High Street. Indeed, it was the only recognisable name; with the exception of a couple of bookmakers, the usual banks and a Greggs. It was certainly the only place locally where you could buy chart music, and was the place I picked up the first cassette tape albums I bought with my own money – a crisp £20 note in a brown envelope, cash in hand for appearing as an extra in a film.
[The albums, if you're curious, were Ocean Colour Scene's Moseley Shoals and Alisha Rules The World by Alisha's Attic.]
Woolworths was also a source of fascination for its Pick n Mix counter, which I was never allowed to partake of because the sweeties harboured germs (and I see from yesterday’s Snowmail that I was not alone in this). Pick n Mix is an illicit thrill even now, and I feel as if I should have some in case by the end of the week it’s too late.
I remember buying my first CD in Woolworths. I also have a fond memory of my gran having given me £5, which was a lot of money, and my purchasing a purple set of rulers and protractors and set squares in a swish box (I think it was made by Helix?) from there. It’s funny, because I thought I must have been starting secondary school, but my gran died when I was about 10/11, so evidently my sense of time was askew. I don’t remember my gran herself at all, so I suppose that’s one of my strongest memories associated with her, because set squares were very grown up and purple was funky.
I also love pick n’mix. Especially foam bananas…
xxx
Woolworth’s has been gone from this country for about ten years. I was tickled to see it in Glasgow last year and am sorry to see it disappearing.
Nostalgia for Woolies is hard to muster when you’ve been overcome by the fumes from kids’ wellington boots in the stockroom. Plus, your mother was right to keep you from the pick n mix- I could tell you some stories about those. But I won’t, because you want to treat yourself. (Go to the Haribo stand at the Christmas market instead!)
xx
fitting revenge, as the one in walsall was built on the grave of the towns old cinema. that’ll teach em.
course, it does mean wednesbury just went from a three shop twon to a two shop town….
I remember buying my first albums in Woolies too. Tragically I think one of them was by 2Unlimited. Oh, the shame! I used to love their bargain bin and came home with many a single that I didn’t need, want or, in most cases, even like.
Motherwell had a Menzies and a Woolies, clearly a cultural metropolis. Although I think it’s all pound shops and an Asda nowadays.
I love that Alisha Attic album Indestrutable get me thought some very hard times in my teens
Pick ‘n Mix is also precisely what I remember Woolworths for in my formative years.
Bobby, I’m convinced that open-air Haribo in the middle of Argyle Street will be even LESS hygenic!
MMMM Woolies, I forgot bout you…… le sigh
AND spontaneous pub nights are little gems that make the world go round. Okay, well at least MY world! lol