A record shop that books over 200 gigs a year.
- Shop
- Banquet Records
- Address
- 52 Eden Street
- Town
- Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom
- Established
- 2005
- Formats
- Vinyl, CDs
- Crates
- Indie, Punk, Rock, Electronic, Metal
- In the shop
- Mail order, In-store gigs, Ticket outlet
- Opening hours
- Mo-We,Fr-Sa 10:00-18:00; Th 10:00-19:00; Su 12:00-17:00
Banquet went independent in 2002 after splitting from the Beggars Banquet retail chain, and in February 2005 Jon Tolley, Mike Smith and Jane Unwin bought the failing shop for a pound and took on around fifty thousand in debt to stop it closing. It now puts on more than 200 shows a year across Kingston, plus in-stores played inches from the till where the amps are barely necessary. Polaroids of two decades of those sets sit under the counter glass. The logic Tolley describes is simple: a record shop promoting the gig can hand the artist album sales, and the person who goes to gigs is the person who buys records.