Record Store Day no parlez

No Parlez/Record Store Day in joke turns into a reality!

Record Store Day comes once a year complete with an avalanche of vinyl, a collectors paradise and a pay day for the stores themselves. It also comes with its own in-jokes and arcane references, which this year have been turned into some kinda reality with an in-joke within an in-joke. 

Largely because it was so popular on its initial release, Paul Young’s 1983 album, No Parlez is famously easy to find in second hand record stores and charity shops. For reasons lost in the mists of insider record shop humour, this album became a kind of shorthand for unwanted abundance i.e. hardened crate-diggers might refer to a shop with large reserves of undesirable vinyl as having “plenty of No Parlez”.

As Record Store Day evolved from a helpful initiative to stimulate demand in a dying industry to a bloated behemoth prioritising wasteful nostalgia and obliging stores to invest potentially ruinous sums in acquiring a range of often expensive and entirely pointless limited edition vinyl re-releases on mango and pistachio-coloured vinyl, No Parlez was meme-ified (if not mummified) as a totem of resistance.

Record store owners who had opted out of this annual circus of anal retentive conspicuous consumption might signal their dissension by circulating photos of their shop with No Parlez on the front of every stack of records (see photo below) or perpetrating lovingly crafted April Fool’s jokes about imaginary lost alternative versions of the album

Imagine their delight on finding out that the title song’s original author has repurposed it for a new age of protest, with artwork and video drawing on UK hip hop pioneer Mr Thing’s unique photo archive of shots of No Parlez ‘in the wild’.