Sound It Out – review

A cheap and cheerful documentary about a properly endangered species: the record shop. The one featured here is not some vinyl-junkie hipster emporium in central London, but a rickety outpost in a Stockton-on-Tees backwater. The shop provides a lifeline for a very disparate collection of music nerds, ranging from a Status Quo worshipper to a garden-shed DJ. Director Jeanie Finlay is happy to take everyone as she finds them; her camera follows key customers home to their record collections and lets them expand on their specific obsessions. One thing everyone agrees on is that this cataloguing and squirrelling away of hard copies is a very male pursuit; it's unlikely, to say the least, that anyone could have anticipated the digital age making cultural heroes out of this particular subgroup.