The four-floor Tower Records flagship at Piccadilly Circus, whose ground-floor alternative section, well stocked with imports and run by people who knew the music, made a megastore a serious destination for the underground through the mid-to-late 1990s.
Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus is the entry in this section that proves a megastore could matter to the underground. Opened in 1985 in the grand former Swan & Edgar department-store building, it was Tower's UK flagship and one of the largest record shops in London: four floors, open late. The basement held videos, soundtracks and books; the ground floor carried rock and pop, metal, an alternative section that was its own department next to the metal racks, and a separate singles department; the mezzanine was given to dance; and the first floor to classical, world and specialist music. It is that ground-floor alternative section that is the reason I keep it.
That alternative section carried imports and rarities other London shops did not, and through the mid-to-late 1990s it was run by staff with a real grasp of the electronic and alternative undergrounds. For a buyer chasing an industrial or noise import, Tower was often the only London shop that had it; the megastore's scale and import budget did something the small shops could not, even as the small shops did something Tower could not. It was the last stop on the classic record-shopping circuit, after Sister Ray, Selectadisc and Reckless on Berwick Street and the Oxford Street megastores, you went on to Tower for the imports.
I keep it without pretending it was an underground shop. Tower Piccadilly was major retail, the haunt of what the writer David Hepworth named the "fifty-quid man," the middle-aged enthusiast filling gaps in a collection. But major retail that takes the underground seriously on one well-run floor is part of how the music actually circulated, and the alternative section's competence is the documented reason the shop is remembered fondly by people who bought difficult records there.
Tower Records collapsed in the 2000s and the Piccadilly shop closed; the building passed through Virgin Megastores and Zavvi before becoming other retail entirely. I keep it at RDüsseldorf as the major-retail counterpart to the section's underground shops: the megastore whose ground-floor alternative section, across the mid-to-late 1990s, was where London's industrial and electronic imports actually turned up.