A conversation with Chris Senior
A life with music and Dead Sea Records
My musical life - Chris Senior
Introduction
Soon after initial launch of this Ziggy’s Lament blog, I spent a day – Record Store Day 2024 – at Dead Sea Records, a tiny record store selling vinyl in the smallest city of St Davids in Pembrokeshire. Chris (Christian) Senior started Dead Sea Records as a mail order business a year or so ago, and then opened his tiny shop in St Davids in April – just in time for the day itself, and the first of a series of #microgigs at the shop. This coming Saturday (12th April) is 2025’s Record Store Day, so it seems a very apt time to be putting up this post, and Chris is opening the shop with live music, together with a bar and browsing the RSD titles – so get along if you can…
Chris is not just a record shop owner, he’s a graphic designer, surfer, dad and bassist with local band, Honey Fungus. I’ve spent several hours in the shop talking with him about our mutual musical (and other) passions, including surfing beaches in the North East of England, and learning to skate at our respective local ice rinks as teenagers. And of course, I’ve bought some records…
He has a great eye for music. When I first came across Dead Sea Records online, I was impressed by the range and depth of music Chris curates, with such a small budget and stock. because of this the record shop is slowly becoming the heart of the music scene in the area, with links to the now annual Boia Festival, and Chris also publishing an occasional music zine.Â
Chris seems a great person to start my 2025 series of Musical Lives with. Ziggy’s Lament is about great music, but also the people who are passionate about it, and whose life is tied up with listening to, playing and discovering great records and tracks – old and new. In this series I’ll be interviewing some people, inviting guest posts from others and, as in this post, having an online conversation. I hope you enjoy it!
Our conversation
Steve:Â
Hi Chris, we’ve been talking about doing this conversation for a while, haven’t we? The only thing is that when I come into the shop there’s always something to chat about – music, skating, surfing – and we never get round to recording it!Â
This changes now!
Over the time I’ve been coming into the shop, I’ve loved the vibe, your welcome and, most of all, the music you curate. It is like looking at my own record collection – including the albums I hadn’t owned, but loved and wanted to! I’ve had to be quite disciplined, though I’ve had some gems already from your crates!
I don’t know about you, but music has been a constant passion of mine since I was small. It’s probably sixty years or so since I got my first record (it would have been a Beatles single, no doubt), and I remember listening to my Mum and Dad’s middle-of-the-road collection, but even then discovering some gems – like The Nat King Cole Story that I wrote about in one my early posts. It went on through my teenage years: Slade, Bowie, Mott the Hoople and a whole load more – and then on into adult life. It’s been like having an ever-changing soundtrack to my life.
I’ve got a feeling that you might have a similar story! And you’re also a musician yourself. I played in a band in my late teens, but wasn’t a particularly good player and got chucked out of the band when they decided to go and play Country Rock in local clubs, whereas I was more interested in punk and soul…
So where do you start, Chris? Where does your story begin and what were the early influences that started to take you into your musical life?
Chris:
We have been talking about doing this for a while, and like you said, we have had this conversation a thousand times, we just don’t have any evidence!
It's interesting that you ask ‘where did my musical life begin’, it feels a bit like you have asked me when I started talking or walking. I don't really remember a ‘moment’. It's just something that’s always been around. And I know everyone says that. My dad played the piano so we always had that in the house. I didn't really appreciate it at the time because all he played was jazz. I love it now but as a kid I wasn’t quite tuned in. Jazz wasn't for me… yet. And of course we had records, like people did back then. Somehow having records in the house just made you play music. Not like streaming where you have to think about what you want to listen to and all that. With records you had a limited selection and that just made it easier. Too much choice kills the vibe for me sometimes.
I’m of the era when hip-hop was ‘invented’ if that’s the right way to say it? Me and my friends used to hang around on street corners listening to rip off cassettes supplied by my friend's big brother who could get his hands on the latest releases of Electro - Street Sounds albums (and remember this is way before the internet so that wasn’t an easy task). So my childhood was spent listening to the likes of Doug E Fresh, Roxanne Shante, Marley Marl and World Class Wrecking Crew (which for the non hip-hoppers is where Yella and Dr Dre started out before changing the game with NWA).Â
We would hang around under lamp posts at night so we could see the badly photocopied cassette card and read the lyrics. We got extra pleasure from the track if there was an F word and even a C word dropped in. There was no other music like it and it felt liberating for us. This music was ours, it didn't belong to the ‘grown ups’. Of course we liked other bands like The Smiths and The Sex Pistols and Black Flag but any dad wanting to be cool would say ‘I used to be a punk’ or ‘I used to be a mod’ or whatever. Hip-hop was something they couldn’t talk about so they couldn’t claim it, they didn't know anything about it.
Like I said, this was a time when knowing what was going on outside your town let alone your country required a bit of real effort. So if the music wasn’t on Top of the Pops or in Smash Hits you had to go looking for it. Lucky for us, my friend's big brother did go looking for it.
I'm still a big hip-hop fan but I've done that thing that old people do where you get stuck in your era a bit. I love new music but I would still choose Public Enemy over Kendrick Lamar.
I've been through various ‘phases’ of music. Everyone uses the word ‘eclectic’ when you ask them what music they like (and it's probably the only time they will ever use that word!). They will say they like everything except country and bagpipes. And that’s the easy answer isn’t it? We all enjoy various types of music, but it's not about the music, it's about how you feel at that time.Â
When I was at school I was walking around in oversized jeans listening to Happy Mondays1 and Bridewell Taxis and The La's. I was riding around on a scooter when I was 16 years old, so I was amped on bands like The Selecter, The Beat and The Specials. Then at night we would go to the student bars (though I was never a student) so we could mosh out to Rage Against the Machine. It's all about the feeling at the time.Â
Actually, an interesting observation from the record shop. I've seen that with the revival of vinyl records, it seems that people don't buy into a genre these days, they buy into the format. They don't buy a Clash record because it's punk or a Chemical Brothers record because it's dance. They buy it because they want to hear it on a record. I'm as likely to sell a Taylor Swift record to an 80 year man as I am a copy of Rumours to a 17 year old girl.
I still listen to all of my music phases and they all have different feelings now because there will be some song or album that revives a memory or an anecdote. Like when I hear Panic by The Smiths, I can almost smell the 20 pack of Benson and Hedges that we would smoke one after another in my mate’s cellar pretending to be Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke when we were supposed to be at school.
While I was part of a certain ‘scene’, I was listening to certain music, I didn't really notice it at the time. When you’re in the thick of it you just get on with it. It was when I started playing in bands that I really noticed these different tribes of people moving in different circles. We would play venues around Leeds and there would usually be 2 or 3 bands on each night so you would play with other bands that were doing something completely different to what you were doing. And their audience would be completely different too. They would dress differently and dance differently and have a different attitude. So sometimes we would come away from a gig thinking we wanted to introduce a bit of something we had seen into our music. Changing our music, of course, influenced how we dressed or acted as a band. Mostly for the worse, not very often for the better..ha ha!
It's a cliche but it really is true that music shapes who you are, it really does. Would I have been sniffing poppers around the back of the youth club when I was 12 if I hadn’t been listening to Bad Brains? I'm not sure…
Steve:
That really resonates! Youth clubs were seminal places weren’t they? The record player in the corner was always blasting something out. When I was a kid it would have been either early heavy rock and Bowie or the cooler end of glam… We also had a record player in our sixth form common room a bit later, but it needed someone to be curating the tunes. There was a right battle between noodly progressive rock fans and cheesy disco girls as people vied for attention for their particular favourites. And there was some crap around in the mid-seventies!
My thing - as you’ve probably noticed from my time in your record shop - has always been variety, and it was like that back then too. When I got to Uni, it was great because there were so many different bands swirling around the City (Newcastle, and later Liverpool), and for a while I got to write reviews for the student newspaper, though they never gave me any of the good stuff - crap albums and crap gigs, they thought - but I actually got to see some good stuff. I remember seeing a jazz pianist one evening, and being mesmerised. I’d love to have been good enough to do that, and it’s really influenced my listening over the years – I loved the ‘liquid’, jazzy drum and bass, back in the day, and the more funky hip hop and soul, as well as the classic post punk and indie that was the staple. In Liverpool, I remember some very sweaty nights, at Erics, various clubs, and particularly the Undertones at Mountford Hall in October 1979, which might be one of my favourite gig memories ever!
You mentioned your scooter. I was teaching when ska blew up and there were loads of little ska boys literally dancing through the corridors at the school I worked at. They thought they were right cheeky monkeys – and they were too. My own flirtation with mod came back at the end of Uni when I got into Secret Affair and the Merton Parkas. There were some real battles back then between skins and mods – and anyone else really!
Anyway, this kind of rambling is kind of how we got to do this chat in the first place! We both have lives that have wound around music, and I guess, like me, you can’t imagine life without it all! For you now, that’s the band you’re playing in, and the record shop. I could ramble on a lot more about record shops, but I’m really intrigued about how Dead Sea Records came about and what it means. What was the passion behind it and the reasons for turning it into a physical space where people like me can come and browse through vinyl like the old days; especially in a tiny place like St Davids?
Chris
And ‘you’ are exactly what it's about! I'm not a big record collector myself, I don't have thousands of records like some people do, but I've always listened to records. And appreciated them and what they represent. The record listeners will understand the ceremony that comes with putting a record on. Records come with intention. Streaming and digital listening, that’s like putting the radio on. It can be on in the background while you’re doing something else and that’s cool, there’s a time and place for that. But taking the vinyl disc out of its sleeve and placing it on the turntable, that’s an intentional act to pay attention to the music that’s on it.
And the way that we choose to buy a record comes with the same love and intention. I started out selling records online but it kind of goes against the grain of what buying records is about. Of course, there are certain albums that get released or re-issued and we know we want them so we can buy those things online, its easy. Look for record, buy record. Done.
But what I've found is that most record shoppers don't come into the shop knowing what they want to buy. They are lucky if they have a genre in mind. 99 times out of 100 the record shopper has no idea what they are looking for. They want to look. They want to flick through. See what there is. See what looks good, what feels good. They might see something they had forgotten had existed or see something they have never seen before but get tempted by the cover. Sometimes they will find something and sometimes they won’t.
You can't shop online in the same way. Sure you can flick through the images but you don't get a feel for the product. The gold embossing on the cover or the pictures in the gatefold cover. Shopping online you probably wouldn’t even realise it was a gatefold cover until it dropped on the mat. Buying a record is almost a romantic process.
I remember going to Blockbuster to rent a video (and later a DVD of course) and it wasn’t until that was gone that I realised how much I enjoyed that process, it’s a similar thing. These days I sometimes give up on Netflix before I've found anything to watch. That process of scroll, click, go back, scroll, click. It just messes with my juju. Record shops, books shops, video shops, its the only way to browse.
And I'm hoping it's just what St David’s needs as well. Yes it's a small city but there is a good scene around. We’ve got musicians and music lovers all trying to keep the dream alive. We’ve got the Boia festival now as well of course which brings the music folks from far and wide and it all helps to create that scene, that vibe, around St Davids. We just want to be the shop at the heart of the action. That place where you go just to see who might be in there and what music might be playing.
Steve
That might just be the most perfect description of why physical music works, from the browsing and buying in the shop, through to unwrapping and carefully removing the disc from the sleeve, to putting the needle on the record! It’s such a ritual, and a mindful act from start to finish!
I’d include CDs in there too. When they first came out, you could browse in the same way as vinyl, and there was some lovely packaging and artwork. I think they fell out of favour and sales fell away, when streaming took off. Now, the packaging is often very generic and cheap, and it’s rare to find a CD package that rivals vinyl. I do still buy CDs myself as it sometimes means I can afford to buy the music, and the ritual experience of listening can be similar – without, of course the moment when the needle hits the record!
The other thing that occurred to me when reading your piece about the shop, is that what’s unique about a place like yours is that there is almost always a conversation to be had. The browsing is great, but you know, because I did it the other day, I picked up a record and asked you what it was like and there – we’re sharing something, and I’m listening to your passion about this music, and I’m telling you about something I might have found - maybe online.Â
I do mourn the record shops that were around when I was in my twenties and thirties. There’ll never be quite an experience like it again, but I do like the way that now we can explore loads of different music in different places. It certainly works for me writing this blog! And it suits my personality to be looking for shiny new things, like a magpie! Though, the records, as you imply, bring me back every so often to just listening.
It think that might be loads more to talk about in future conversations, Chris, but to finish this one off, I’d be really interested in how you choose the records you have in the shop. My sense of walking into Dead Sea Records is always of something curated – which is a bit different from a vast shop floor of second hand vinyl that you might find in a place with more space! It’s small and perfectly formed, but you are able to find a sweet spot, I think, in the variety of the music you sell.Â
And I guess I’m also interested in the music that’s excited you most in the past couple of years. As you say, the Boia Festival may have had an effect (it certainly has on me), but we always have our favourites don’t we?
Chris
Its good to hear feedback about what’s in the shop, I would hate to wake up one day to find I have no customers and a shop full of shit records that only I want to listen to. So keep that feedback coming!
Like you say, we do have our favourites and I guess that is how I curate the music in the shop. I listen and then make a decision if I like it or not. Saying it out loud it sounds almost conceited but when I hear something I like, I assume that other people will like it. I hear something I dont like and I assume that people wont like it. I guess that’s how A&R works, right? Listen and decide if anyone will like it. Record shop owners are A&R for acts that have already been discovered.
It’s been good to see punk back on the map over the last few years with bands like Idles and Amyl And The Sniffers pushing it forward. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Americana recently such as The Delines and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. My random stand out would be the Arlo Parks record from 2023, it continues to rear its head in the shop and so does Loyle Carner. Oh and Ezra Collective, Sufjan Stevens, Rona Mac… I could go on forever. It just proves there has been some great stuff coming through over the last couple of years.Â
Well I think it’s great anyway, so I presume you will too…
Notes
Just as Chris was reminiscing about his baggy days with The Happy Mondays and the rest, this bloke popped onto the Deadsea Records Instagram feed. It would be rude not to post it…
