Shropshire vinyl heaven for all music tastes

"I was doing an art course at Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology. Then I heard they were opening an HMV in Telford. I just wanted to work there, so I applied for a job and dropped out of art school."

Haddon's passion for music, however, goes back even further. He was born in Willenhall and later moved to Telford. He would listen to the chart show, recording his favourite tracks each Sunday evening, before he started a collection of his own. His dad would routinely knock on his door saying: "Turn that racket down".

The Beatles – Abbey Road: I love the way the last piece segues into different snippets of songs. It's an amazing summation of what they did.

Love/Hate – Black Out In The Red Room: This selection from the American hard-rock band is mainly for sentimental reasons.

Miles Davis – Bitches Brew: This studio double album is just an amazing record. The sounds the jazz musician Davis pioneered were amazing.

Ty Segall – Manipulator: Ty Segall is an uber prolific pop psyche genius from the West Coast of America, playing 60s/70s garage punk.

Gwenno – Y Dydd Olaf: I found this just last week. It's basically kind of Kraut rock, that's tinged with a 1970's sound, in the Welsh language.

Haddon laughs: "My first memory of music was of my dad playing Queen records when I was a kid. After that, I was one of the kids who was listening to the Top 40 rundown on a Sunday night.

"I'd have a tape recorder to record it and I'd get two minutes of a song before they started talking over it. I was like that from an early age."

His dad, however – perhaps like all dads – didn't approve of young Andy's taste in music. "One of the things that's stuck with me, which is almost my maxim now that I own my own record shop, is that my dad would come in and say: "What's that racket?"

"I'd say 'Love/Hate'. And my dad would say: 'Never heard of them'. It would be a really dismissive thing to say, as though the fact that he'd not heard of a band meant they were rubbish.

"So my shop, Left For Dead Records, is all about stocking records that my dad might have said that about. Yes, there's loads of Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen in the racks. But there's also loads of interesting stuff that some people might not have heard of unless they read The Wire or Uncut.

"Just because people haven't heard music doesn't mean it's not any good. I don't stock rubbish. I had a guy come in the other day and he said: 'Mate, it's almost as though you're curating a collection, rather than running a shop.' It's a bit like that, I suppose. If it's good, it's in."

Andy opened his record shop on Shrewsbury's Wyle Cop less than two months ago. He'd previously run a shop at Birmingham's Custard Factory, in Digbeth. But why on earth Shrewsbury, when there are bigger cities nearby like Wolverhampton and Birmingham.

"I used to work for a company called Rise, I managed the shop. It was great. They had a store in Worcester and a store in Cheltenham. You wouldn't think those places wouldn't have a big music scene. But you find the opposite. In the smaller market towns, people are frustrated because they have to go online to find stuff. They have to work so hard to get decent music."

Vinyl sales are the strongest that they've been since Britpop. Five years ago, the UK's vinyl industry was worth around £3 million a year. Today, the figure is nearer £20 million. Paradoxically, in an age in which people can download music for free, people would rather pay.

"There's a great ceremony to playing a record. You know, you had the CD era, where people would say 'I like track seven' but not know what track seven was. And then you've got the digital download generation, where people treat music as a commodity. It's download and deleted, rather than listened to and loved.

"I think with vinyl, people get a greater appreciation and respect for what the artist does. An artist spends months or years of their life writing and naming a song, sequencing an album, creating artwork and so on. When you lift it out of its sleeve, you get a sense of that. It's like listening to music in a completely different way."

Nick Hornby famously wrote about a record shop in his novel, High Fidelity, which sold more than a million copies. It was adapted to a feature film in 2000, starring John Cusack, Tim Robbins and Catherine Zeta-Jones. So is Andy's record shop similar to that? Is it a place where anoraks converge to chew the fat about obscure b-sides by Norwegian ambient bands?

He laughs.

"High Fidelity is definitely not what we're about. Things have changed a lot. In the era of High Fidelity, independent record shops were dark, dingy and smelly places. You'd go in there and if you'd buy something that the guys behind the counter didn't like, they'd take it out of you. They were shops that people didn't feel comfortable in. The modern shops are the opposite. It's not exclusive, the idea is to include everybody.

"We get all sorts of people in here. The average age is probably about 30. When we were growing up, you pay money for an album, so you invested a little bit of yourself into that music.

"We're not just a shop for musos. We're looking to open the first floor and have a coffee den, so people can hang out with a coffee or tea and sit down and read a book, while listening to music. At some point, I'd like us to start putting on small gigs too."

In many ways, owning Left For Dead is a busman's holiday for Andy. He gets to do what he's enjoyed most of all throughout his life. In his teen years, he listened to Northern Soul and Motown, these days, he's just as likely to listen to punk bands from Rotterdam. "Actually, I'm thinking I ought to investigate the Rotterdam punk scene a whole lot more.

"We're trying to get music fans a sense of the way things used to be. Back in the day, you'd hear something on John Peel then you'd go into Our Price and find a tape, if you were lucky. That would lead to finding other tapes or other bands who were similar.

"That whole way of finding music has stayed with me. So, you know, one of the things here is that people come in and have a chat. We talk music. Music is so important. It's the soundtrack to people's lives."