The Berwick Street independent named after the Velvet Underground's seventeen-minute noise piece · an open, deeply-stocked Soho shop that outlasted most of its neighbours and remains an anchor of central London's independent record retail.
Sister Ray is the Soho survivor, and I keep it as the standing independent at the centre of London. It sits on Berwick Street, the short Soho street pictured on the cover of Oasis's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? and long the heart of the city's independent record trade, and it takes its name from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray," the seventeen-minute 1968 noise-rock piece, a declaration of taste embedded in the shop sign.
For decades Berwick Street was a destination in itself: Sister Ray, Selectadisc and Reckless within a few doors of each other, the underground end of a record-shopping circuit that ran up through the Oxford Street megastores to Tower at Piccadilly. Sister Ray was the open, browsable anchor of that cluster, respected for the depth and seriousness of its alternative, independent and electronic stock across new and used rather than for cheap prices. It is the city-centre shop with a genuine range, the middle term between the megastore's scale and the specialist's narrowness.
What distinguishes it now is simply that it lasted. As the Soho and Camden record shops closed through the 2000s, casualties of rents and downloads, Sister Ray kept trading on Berwick Street, becoming a Record Store Day fixture with queues stretching around the block. I note the survival without sentimentality: a knowledgeable, well-stocked independent in the centre of a major city is exactly the kind of point the underground relied on, and most of them are gone.
I keep Sister Ray at RWest Berlin as the surviving independent anchor of central London: the Berwick Street shop, named for a noise-rock landmark, that carried alternative and electronic music seriously through the decades and outlasted the district that grew up around it.