Featured Essay: A Trip to The Really Strange Record Club

by Kate Bugos

There aren’t a lot of places in London where you can go for a pint and expect to hear a 1950s record called ‘My Pussy Belongs to Daddy’, but Dreamhouse Records is one of them– at least it is when the Really Strange Record Club is in session. Really Strange Record Club is a music social for ‘adventurous listeners’ which runs bimonthly at its East London home. It is the brainchild of Matt Nida, a Leyton local who has been running one of London’s wackiest music nights for the last couple of years. Matt started the Really Strange Record Club in 2023 with the aim of fostering a real and physical community for music lovers. After sadly losing a couple of his close musical friends in the years surrounding Covid, Matt realised that he missed ‘having those kinds of conversations where you’d mention something and then they’d go, you should check this out, and spray off four or five different records or artists’. He approached Jon, the owner of his local record store Dreamhouse Records, and Jon was immediately on board with the idea. ‘I wanted to do something around music that was just getting people in the room and hanging out, socialising. I was really clear that I wasn’t looking to do anything that could become any kind of online content.’

I entered Dreamhouse Records on a very balmy Thursday evening, the warmest so far in London this year. There are children drawing in chalk on the streets outside, and picnic benches out on the small cobblestone plaza in front of the shop, populated by a few record shop patrons with pints in hand enjoying the last dregs of sunlight. The shop inside is very pared back, with chipboard floors, pegboard walls, and another picnic bench indoors. There’s a few quirky touches, like a vintage Chinese exit sign hanging above the door, but the minimalist decor leaves the records on display to speak for themselves- and speak they do. The walls are decorated with signed records from British musical legends as diverse as Rhoda Dakar, Loyle Carner, and The Pretenders. While it’s only existed for four years, Dreamhouse Records has built up a reputation for itself, listed as one of London’s top record shops by TimeOut. 

The evening begins with a brief welcome from Matt before jumping into the music. Each patron gets fifteen minutes to play their strange record selection, which they can fill however they want, whether that’s a few different records or just one. The first man up to the plate plays two records that he describes as ‘guitars and not guitars, but not in the way you’ll expect’, which proves to be apt. I’ve brought a record too tonight, an ambient field recording called Sea Organ that I found in the basement of Islington’s Flashback Records. I am simultaneously worried it will be too strange and not strange enough. 

Record collecting can be a solitary hobby these days, and there’s definitely an acknowledgement of that here. One regular tells me that ‘in the era where record shops close down a lot it’s nice to have places like this, with a bar and these events.’ As we’ve all felt the dawn of the digital age and the closure of beloved music venues make music feel like a more individual pursuit, spaces like this are crucial to building community. When I mention this to Matt he agrees enthusiastically. “I think it’s also become very siloed. I think it’s very easy, particularly with the way that Spotify invents a whole load of new genres every year just for the purpose of categorising people into neat boxes in the Spotify wrapped playlist thing. You can get a sense of the walls between different types of music being very solid, but actually, to meet and talk to people and see how the music and the records as artefacts kind of fit in with their stories and their lives, yeah. You realise there are so many more ways that music fits in.”

That sense of community is also a fantastic avenue for discovery. Someone tells me about a Japanese-focused record store in London called VDS where the expert staff are the key to crate digging in a language you can’t understand. This is a problem I often have as a fan of Japanese ambient, so I make a mental note to check the place out. My mental note soon becomes a physical one as I accumulate an ever-increasing list of record stores to visit as I make my way around the room to the tune of Skatemaster Tate and the Concrete Crew (the man playing this record says ‘there’s lots of ideas in it. it’s an ideas record’). 

My favourite display of the evening came from Paul, a local who played an elaborate mix around the theme of ‘ritual and sacrifice’, fitting for the folksy mayday evening. Paul’s mix ranged from Moroccan folk music to a field recording of a seance to Stravinsky’s rite of spring. Paul tells me about a whole room in their house that’s home to over 5,000 records, painstakingly curated over the last 20 years, sorted geographically by country and US state. ‘I spent a lifetime buying records and then suddenly you have a feel of it where you can pull things out, you can think, oh, I want to do ritual and sacrifice, and there it is’. 

Later in the night, I went around the room asking punters what draws them to the really strange. Answers ranged from a straightforward ‘I love learning about different genres and cultures’ to one man who told me, ‘​​You know when you hear the Jaws theme song and you just go yeah… that’s a shark. It’s like that. You just know it’s right.’ To me though, the heart of the Really Strange Record Club was unlocked by a regular who told me, ‘Sometimes it’s not good, but that’s a good thing too. It adds to that collage of weirdness. It’s that Susan Sontag thing of what camp is.’ 

Susan Sontag says that ‘the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’, and that is certainly relevant to enjoying some of the Really Strange Records– William Shatner’s Christmas LP, for example, is undeniably camp, as is the aforementioned album My Pussy Belongs To Daddy, also featuring hits such as ‘I Tried It Everywhere’ and ‘Tony’s Got Hot Nuts’. But even moreso than the campness, I felt a resonance with the phrase ‘collage of weirdness’. The music of the Really Strange Record Club was a vast mishmash of everything from African folk to Belgian techno to great American band leader Johnny Otis’s secret X-Rated project ‘Snatch and the Pootangs’. There’s a genuine appreciation from everyone here for weirdness in all its glory, regardless of the genre. I receive many nice comments on my Sea Organ record, and after the event Matt sends me a link to a very cool fog horn based field recording that it reminded him of. 

That enthusiasm and passion provides the perfect climate for a real and thriving community of record lovers. Events like this keep organic music discovery alive. Music is a social thing, and having physical spaces to share your passions, your knowledge, and your strangest records is what keeps that community spirit thriving.

You can find out more about Really Strange Record Club at their website, https://reallystrangerecord.club/. 

Bio: Kate Bugos is a writer and historian from London. She is an avid collector and occasional DJ of ambient records, especially Japanese. You can find more of her work at katherinebugos.com, and more things that are not work @pulpy_fiction in Instagram, Twitter/X, and Bluesky.