Jon Tolley put Kingston on the live music map. Bruce Millar meets the man for whom life is one big song and dance.
Banquet Records is a scruffy-looking shop on the edge of Kingston’s central shopping zone – from the outside, every inch of window plastered with posters; inside, worn wooden floorboards, rack after rack of vinyl records and CDs, with no decoration beyond record covers and band T-shirts.
It’s a look that has said “indie record shop” for about as long as indie record shops have existed. Indeed, apart from the ever-changing stock, little has altered here since the current proprietor, Jon Tolley, plucked up the courage to venture in as a schoolboy 30-odd years ago.
“It was a bit intimidating,” he remembers.
“But record shops have to look cool – that hasn’t changed. We try to be friendly too, though, and there’s no room for snobbery about musical tastes. It’s one of the things we’re really big on – instead of ‘up-selling’ we do ‘up-telling’. We tell our customers everything we know about the records we stock, sharing our enthusiasm and knowledge.”
Jon’s own enthusiasm and knowledge have taken him – and Banquet – a long way since he bought what was then a failing business, 20 years ago now, in February 2005.
These days, the record shop is just the visible tip of the iceberg of a multifaceted music operation with more than 40 staff – an outfit which has turned Kingston, very much against the odds, into one of the best places in Britain to watch live music.
A big claim, to be sure, but where else can you regularly watch arena artists and Glastonbury headliners play to an audience of just 1,800 in a small local theatre?
Already this year, Banquet has hosted concerts by Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai and Manic Street Preachers at Pryzm, opposite Kingston station, with which it has a close working relationship. Billie Eilish and Stormzy have also played at the vibrant nightclub in recent years, along with rock royalty from Rod Stewart to The Who – for whom it was their smallest-scale London show for 50 years.
The concert listings on Banquet’s website reads like a non-stop, year-round festival, with more than 30 different live events each month. Nor are the acts confined to the harder edges of the music scene: later this year, there’s a concert by octogenarian crooner Barry Manilow, and Jon is delighted that this will connect with a very different, considerably older local demographic.
“We had Alfie Boe in for a Q & A, and he was heckled by a 93-year-old who demanded her favourite song from Les Miz,” says Jon. “It was brilliant – and Alfie sang the song for her!”
So how is it that a small independent operator is regularly able to attract such heavyweight acts, when big players such as Live Nation – the multinational entertainment company – can wave much heftier cheques in their direction?
The answer is broadly twofold. First, Jon is a true fan and has cultivated artists, bands, and their management for years. In addition to the Pryzm concerts, there are also tiny shows squeezed into the shop, pub-scale gigs at The Fighting Cocks in Old London Road and, when appropriate, concerts in churches.
“These smaller concerts, sometimes with audiences of less than 100 people, are just as important to me as the big ones,” says Jon. “And people remember you – if you treat them well when they are just starting out, they’ll return the favour when they are successful. Artists and music managers talk to each other. So if you have earned a good reputation, that will stand you in good stead.”
Secondly, Jon has pioneered a unique package with Banquet, selling a combined concert ticket and record or CD – especially for new releases. This suits the real fans, who are happy to buy both, and it also suits the artist: selling several thousand extra records for two consecutive concerts in Kingston can push a record to number one in the charts – a very attractive proposition.
Yet, Banquet’s leap to music industry prominence did not happen overnight. When the opportunity arose to buy the shop for just a few thousand pounds, Jon was working there part-time while also putting on concerts and DJing after returning to Kingston with a degree in retail management from Loughborough University.
“I’m not sure how much it helped,” he shrugs, “but at least it gave me the vocabulary to speak to bank managers.”
Bobby Vasilev
The first few years were tough
“I lived in a flat above the shop and literally slept on a bed of CD boxes covered by a mattress. Staff would come upstairs to use the toilet on my days off. It wasn’t great, looking back – but I was in my 20s, and it was what I wanted to do.”
Record sales had been severely dented by changes in technology, and only Jon’s income as a successful club DJ kept the shop afloat. But nothing dimmed his faith in music.
“I always believed that young people wanted to own their own music and that they wanted to go out dancing.”
Now record sales are up again, thanks in part to the vinyl revival of recent years. How does Jon account for that?
“There’s still something special about putting a record on and listening to the tracks in the order they were intended – even my four-year-old picks up on that. But it really doesn’t matter what the current format is, so long as we are aware of it and respond. A few years ago, it looked like MP3s were taking over, but who has them now?”
These days, the record shop pays its own way, but it only accounts for about 10% of Banquet’s business. Alongside the shop and the live concerts arm, there is also a thriving mail-order division with more than 1.5 million sales under its belt. All of which makes Banquet an incredibly busy operation for a hands-on boss.
“But nothing is as exhausting as childcare,” says Jon, in his words a “comparatively late” father, at 47, of a four-year-old girl and one-year-old boy. “By Sunday evening, I’m really looking forward to getting back to work!”
He is still every inch the music fan he looks, in his band T-shirt and jeans, but his greatest professional satisfaction comes from promoting acts that are not to his taste.
“If I love the band I’ll get lost in the music, but when the music doesn’t grab me, it’s interesting to watch the audience. There’s nothing like seeing a hall full of people singing along.”
Has his own taste changed?
“Well, some of the purely rebellious music is no longer quite right for me,” Jon admits – he was, after all, a Lib Dem councillor for several years and is plotting his return to local politics.
Still, he keeps his hand in as a DJ at Bacchus in Union Street (also part of the Banquet empire) and is always on the lookout for new favourites. His picks of the past year are October Drift – three young men who attack their instruments with old-school ferocity – and Dolores Forever, two young women self-styled as “Fleetwood Mac without the husbands”.
Nothing is forever. People do lose interest in music, Jon admits, and end up moving on from Banquet. Of one thing, however, we can be pretty sure: it won’t be happening to him any time soon.
For further information visit: banquetrecords.com.
