Rhino had all the music I needed

My old home town of Timaru has never really been big enough to call a city, with the population hovering under the 30,000 mark - the most generous possible definition of a city. But that's still enough people to support a fucking good record store. For a while.

When I was becoming musically aware, we had Rhino Records, owned and run by the most excellent Warren Prentice. It opened in one of the quietest corners of the CBD in 1989, but had the best sounds in town.

I was 14 when it opened and just another dumb little shit who didn't know anything about anything when it came to music, but I was keen to learn. So Rhino was my school - the place where I got something I'd glimpsed on Radio With Pictures the night before, or where I'd go to fill in the Pink Floyd knowledge. 

When I went though a big soundtrack phase, that was where I would find the Twin Peaks and Mystery Train tapes that I needed, and it was the only place I ever saw DAD 's most excellent No Fuel Left For The Pilgrims for sale to the general public

A place like Rhino was indispensable in pre-internet days, before everything started coming down the wire, and lasted for well over a decade. Warren also owned a shitty little basement bar in the Royal Arcade for a while and put on the best bands, and it was the first time I ever saw my best mates play for a crowd.  My best pal Anthony worked in the short-lived Dunedin off-shoot store, where we would slam tequila and listen to Britpop too loudly in the back room. I still have the video tape of Jean Rollin's wonderful Fascination that I bought for an unspeakably good price the day before it closed down.

At a time of music megastores, filled with racks of shiny new tunes under harsh neon, there was still lots of money in the business, even for niche providers like Rhino, especially when it was the only place in town you could get a Cure tee-shirt ,or an Ennio Morricone box set

So it shifted down Variety Lane a couple of times and then, 10 years later and near the new millennium, it was in a cramped little shop in the busiest part of town. I was going through a desperate search for new music that saw my and my mate Bri get a new CD each every payday and heading to Rhino to find something new, something that Warren thought was cool, was a pleasant ritual.

It turned into a place called Radiant Records for a while, moving into an old dairy on the main street out of town, but I had moved on again, and while it looked like a lovely store, it was never my local. And that faded away too, years and years ago.

I dropped so much money into the gullet of Rhino over the years, and still have a lot of the tapes and CDs I happily swapped my minimum wage cash for. There were a good investment, and I can still play them. Rhino is long gone, but the echoes still linger, pumping out of the stereo.