Foyle Street. Derry's oldest and only record shop, and it has never stopped backing local bands.
- Shop
- Cool Discs Music
- Address
- 6 Lesley House, Foyle Street
- Town
- Derry, United Kingdom
- Established
- 1996
- Formats
- Vinyl, CDs, DVDs, 7"
- Crates
- Indie, Rock, Folk, Punk, Electronic, Jazz, Soul, Pop, Country
- In the shop
- Buys collections, Mail order, In-store gigs, Ticket outlet
Lee Mason was working in a Derry record shop when his employer sold up as Virgin Megastore arrived in the city. He took a small bank loan and opened Cool Discs on Foyle Street in August 1996 with not much stock and one idea: quality back catalogue at a price that beat everyone, picked by someone who actually knew what it was. Thirty years on it is Derry's oldest record shop and its only one, running to more than 12,500 titles across vinyl, CD, DVD, books, turntables, gig tickets, shirts and memorabilia. In 1999 it was the only shop in the north stocking David Gray's White Ladder, then unavailable in the UK; playing it in-store turned it into the shop's best seller and mail orders went worldwide. Gray came back later and played on the shop counter. Cool Discs has taken part in Record Store Day since the very first one in 2008 - one of a handful of Irish shops asked that year, longer than any other shop in the north - and it promotes gigs across the year and gets records by Northern Irish artists into independent shops elsewhere. Which is the actual job: not selling records so much as making sure the ones made here get heard