I received an email from my mum this morning, advising me that F L Moore's, Dunstable's only record shop, is closing down. This is a great shame. When I was 15 or 16, I would spend many hours in there, looking at the same records over and over again, week in, week out, pondering whether to fork out £2.99 for, say, a copy of “Bedrock” by the Foetus All Nude Revue, purely because the sleeve looked good. (I did, in the end. It was a bit rubbish.) They stocked a very limited range of independent releases, but they'd willingly order stuff in for you. This entailed a lengthy browse through an enormous red Music Master catalogue, which was supposedly the Bible of which records were currently available in the UK, but, like the Bible, was full of staggering inaccuracies, the odd crucifixion and one or two fatted calves. You'd wait for weeks for the arrival of some long deleted Bogshed record, before finally admitting defeat and claiming back the £2 deposit you'd put down.

Shortly after I moved to London I was at Porky's mastering studio on Shaftesbury Avenue, cutting a 7″ single by the particular no-commercial-potential band that I was in at the time, when I saw pinned to a noticeboard a double page spread from The Sun, featuring some woozy shots of some familiar faces. It was the staff of F L Moore's. For some reason, the Sun journalist had chosen this small Dunstable record store to expose the practice of chart rigging, and he recounted at length how Mark and Kate would ring up sales of particular singles several times in order to propel them towards the No 1 spot. I remember thinking how unfair it was to pick on them. It's like grassing up the weedy boy at school for spitting down the stairwell of the Science block, when everyone's been doing it for weeks on end and he only joined in that lunchtime.

Farewell, F L Moore's. I bought 12″EPs from you in abundance. You can't buy 12″EPs any more.