At the edge of Kingston upon Thames’s extensive shopping area lies Banquet Records. To the untrained eye, this record store in south-west London appears to be like any other independent seller of vinyl. But the counter gives a clue as to why its strapline proclaims it “more than your local record shop.” Hundreds of polaroids lie scattered beneath a glass countertop, featuring artists who have performed for Banquet over the past two decades. One, from more than a decade ago, catches my eye: “Charli XCX 16.04.13.”
Banquet is the unofficial kingmaker of the UK album chart. Forty per cent of artists who have secured the top album in 2024 have played live at a Banquet gig in Kingston this year. Mums’ favourites Michael Ball and Alfie Boe, whose sixth album as a duo, Together at Home, went to number one on 15 November, played two gigs in the town during the week of the album’s release last month. Banquet has aided several albums to the top slot this year, including ones by Shed Seven, Snow Patrol, the Last Dinner Party, Kasabian, the Libertines, and Rod Stewart and Jools Holland.
Why might Stewart, who will play the Sunday “legends” slot at Glastonbury next year, choose to perform to a few thousand people at Pryzm, the Kingston nightclub used for Banquet’s largest shows? “Because we’re a record shop putting on the gig, we can give them album sales,” the store’s owner, Jon Tolley, told me. We sat in Spuds, an old-school café selling jacket potatoes, next door to the record shop, with the sound of the oven buzzing while we talked over cups of builders’ tea. “We made a conscious effort to link the person who goes to gigs with the person who buys records,” Tolley said, “because often they’re the same people”.
Here is how it works: Banquet gigs are intimate (Pryzm has a capacity of 1,350), shorter than most – around 50 minutes – and far more affordable. Tickets are limited to one per transaction unless punters choose to buy the album the artist is promoting, for a few pounds extra. A ticket to one of Ball and Boe’s recent sets cost £16; a ticket and a CD, just £20. “That’s the business model, which has been working for 20-odd years now,” Tolley said. Through this model, I have seen the Who, Stormzy, Snow Patrol, Elbow, Bastille, Biffy Clyro, Manic Street Preachers, George Ezra, Keane, Marcus Mumford, and Gary Barlow in Kingston over the past few years.
“It’s often quite special because it’s a unique set of performances around the new album; the artist gets either a bunch of cash or a bunch of album sales or both. The customer’s happy, the bands are happy and it’s something which is profitable for us. So, it’s win win win,” Tolley said.
Physical album sales matter so much because of the way the charts are calculated. Since March 2015, the Official Charts Company has included streaming, taking account of the shift in our music listening and buying habits. “Streaming makes it more complicated,” Paul Williams, former editor of Music Week explained, “but given streaming represents something like 87 per cent of the UK recorded music market, it obviously is a very important part.” The chart counts the 12 most-streamed tracks from an album. It then down-weights the top two songs in line with the average of the others to make sure an album’s popularity isn’t skewed by one popular song. But one paid-for download or physical album is equivalent to 1,000 streams. This is, according to the Charts Company website, to “reflect the broad difference in value between a track stream and the price paid for an album.” It also means that physical sales can still be key to chart success.
According to the UK label trade body the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), last year about 86 per cent of albums debuting at number one had more than half their sales from physical formats. The trend continued into 2024. Williams, now a consultant to the record industry, told me official chart data shows that only five of the year’s 38 number-one albums had less than half of their first-week chart sales from physical formats. In many cases, number-one artists are securing 80-90 per cent of their total sales from physical formats.
When Rod Stewart and Jools Holland’s album Swing Fever topped the charts in March 2024, 91 per cent of its 23,950 sales were attributable to physical formats or digital downloads. Close to 20,000 CDs were bought. In the run-up to release, the pair played four sold-out sets at Pryzm. Not all 5,400 fans who attended would have bought an album along with their ticket, but according to Tolley a little under half will have. Roughly one in eight album sales contributing to that number-one spot were, therefore, bought by people attending the Kingston shows.
Banquet offers more than live music, too. “If we’ve got the artists in town for two days, we’re going to make them work,” Tolley laughs. They’ll do a signing session in the shop, as well as leaving behind a stash of signed albums for others to buy. Take another chart-topping album this year, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade by the Libertines. Alongside their three sold-out Kingston gigs, they shifted a further 600 signed albums through Banquet. It is likely that one in six of their all-important first-week sales went through the record shop. “We’re used to that now,” Jon Tolley said modestly. “And we’re trusted within the industry to do that. But if you think that we had the Libertines for two days of promo that week… we should be doing at least one in six of the sales.”
To some this might sound like cheating. “Promoting an album release and sale is legitimate and important marketing,” Jo Twist, chief executive of the BPI, countered. “[It’s] the kind of promotion which has been part of music consumption since the very advent of recorded music.” Jon Tolley accepts that while there is a game being played, there’s no guarantee of winning. “Try telling that to the Courteeners, who did a week of these shows recently, and ended up with number two because Tyler, the Creator released a digital-only album and pipped them to the post,” he said.
Tolley and others know not to push too far, however. The rules and regulations of the chart get reviewed continuously. “The aim is to reflect the market as it currently is… it’s not set in stone,” Paul Williams explained. For that reason, Banquet limits the number of shows a band can perform to a maximum of four, even when they could sell out many more. “I don’t want to kill the goose that lays a golden egg,” Tolley said. “This thing is working really well for us: we get our favourite bands playing in our hometown. But if we were to, say, book ten gigs, then the charts would say, ‘Hang on, this isn’t fair, this is wrong.’”
For those who, like me, grew up in this part of south-west London, Banquet has long been a fixture of the local music scene. Once part of the Beggars Banquet group of shops, it became independent in 2002 and rebranded as Banquet Records. Tolley and his business partner Mike Smith took over in 2004, buying the store for a pound and taking on the mountain of debt left by the previous owner. Jon had worked in the shop as a teenager and then again after graduating. “I found that there was a whole subculture of music that I didn’t know existed before,” he said. “I fell in love with that place.” It became his social life, his identity.
Even in the Nineties, Banquet was never just a record shop. Beggars Banquet has always put on gigs – albeit on a much smaller scale. The London alt-rock band Hundred Reasons played its very first gig, courtesy of Beggars Banquet, at the Peel, a sticky-floored pub on the edge of a Kingston housing estate, in January 2000. Later, in the Banquet era in 2008, Converge and All Time Low performed at the Peel.
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Some dismiss the importance of a number-one record in today’s musical climate. “The album chart to me is a relic of a bygone era,” Alex Hardee of the live-music booking agency Wasserman Music told the Guardian in July. “It is purely now a battle of record labels manipulating physical sales to get to number one.”
Others disagree. “You try telling Shed Seven that their number one doesn’t matter,” Tolley countered, “because they are stoked. Twenty-five, 30 years into their career and they’ve got two number ones [in 2024]. They’re living off that.” In a world where global competition is more intense than ever, BPI’s Jo Twist argues, “having a number one is rightly viewed as a remarkable achievement and should be celebrated as such”. It is also a marketing tool, good PR, and can help drive touring success. All bring in more money for artists, record labels and promoters.
Jon Tolley insists that artists and their labels aren’t fixated on the top spot for its own sake. “The difference between being a top-ten artist and being a top-20 artist might be a higher place on the next festival. The difference between top 40 and top 75 is… getting higher up in Spotify playlists.” Sometimes it’s more about optics, he said: for an artist who’s had a previous number-one album, there is pressure to return with another hit. Other times, record labels want to show an album did better under them than a previous album on a different label.
Banquet’s success is only possible because of the resurgence in sales of physical music formats. According to BPI’s Twist, 2024 is likely to be the 17th consecutive year of growth for vinyl LP sales. It’s also anticipated that the year will mark an increase in CD sales after years of decline. The BPI expects this trend to continue for the foreseeable future.
A new generation of fans is turning to traditional formats. Just look at the biggest-selling LPs and CDs: “Although there are those so-called heritage artists, a lot of it is now being driven by newer artists,” Paul Williams pointed out. “There’s Taylor Swift, there’s Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan – so, very contemporary artists.” Younger people will no doubt be streaming, too, but buying an album is different. In a world where so much is disposable, where you have “access to every song in the world on your phone”, Tolley argued, there needs to be a way to mark the songs you really love. “This is a record that means a lot to me. I own it not because I need to own it. I own it because I want to experience it.”
Tolley confirmed Banquet has already booked at least 60 dates for 2025. He tells me a couple of headline names, in confidence. I’ve shared far too much of south-west London’s best-kept secret already.
[See also: Chappell Roan’s war on fandom]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024