Vinyl: "Sound It Out"

Were it not for the fact that vinyl sales have witnessed a pronounced uptick in the past twelve months, you could approach Sound It Out as a memorial for a dying artform. The filmmaker Jeanie Finlay set her camera up amid the racks of Sound It Out Records, an independent record store in Stockton-on-Tees, to observe the staff - dedicated, knowledgeable manager Tom, his softly-spoken assistant David, backroom dynamo Kelly - and their customers, everyone both before and behind the camera trying to pick up whatever they can from those quiet Tuesday and Thursday afternoons anyone who's ever worked in retail will know only too well.

For a particular type of male (and your correspondent counts himself firmly among them), the filmed foraging that results will be as manna itself: if nothing else, Sound It Out will introduce musos and tapeheads everywhere to an entirely new genre in makina, a high-energy dance form that suddenly makes gabba house seem staid, but then this is one of those films that can warm and win your heart with any one of its cutaways to the store's massed ranks of album and singles sleeves, the physical remnants of a culture that's shifted decisively into the realms of the virtual, with consequences both good and bad for record shops such as Sound It Out.

The idea Finlay's film starts from is that your independent record store - in the spirit of all things Peel - seeks to impose no distinction, save those between individual genres; that it does its very best to stock everything, whether it shifts or not. (Poignant still lives of Bon Jovi's mid-80s barnstormer "Slippery When Wet" and the Flash Gordon soundtrack suggest these latter fall into the "probably not" category; one particular corner - and I'll resist the urge to add the words "of hell" - is reserved for Ray Parker Jr.'s "Ghostbusters" and the 12" of Eddie Murphy's "Party All The Time".) The customers, bless, make for an equally unique and diverse assortment. Take the bedenimmed Shane, whose idea of heaven is "continual Quo", and has some unusual burial plans to help him get there. Or the pair of amateur DJs who, while they wait for a gig at Pacha, operate out of a shed in their back garden. Or the mere boy with the legend "PISSCHRIST" sewn to the back of his jacket, who insists on the validity of something called DB Crust as a genre, while his mate, sitting alongside, proclaims Sound It Out "the last bastion of sensibleness".

Finlay's film updates the High Fidelity conception of record shops for a post-2008 world, and - more specifically - for a region that's been hit harder than most by the recession, and which needs the pounding release of heavy metal and hardcore dance to jolt its inhabitants from depression and despair. (The store probably stocks it, but I suspect there's not much need for Vivaldi in these parts.) Sound It Out is modest and unassuming in form, but you nevertheless watch it with the broadest of smiles on your face, aware we couldn't need a film like this more than we do right now: among its numerous achievements, it's a very timely reminder of what we might lose as a society if the independent retail sector is allowed to wither and disappear from our high streets. Do we really want to make do with the homogeneity of the Tesco CD chart, or the excessive mark-up on titles at HMV? Tom'll do you Dire Straits on CD for a fiver, which sounds like a good deal to me.

Sound It Out is touring selected cinemas nationwide; for further information, check the film's website.