Oxford and the surrounding area ...

the one remaining (?!) secondhand rekkid shop is just off george st in oxford, i think.

Yeh, Avid Records is pretty good. There's also Vinyl Frontier down the Cowley Road, which is less good but hardly rubbish. Also down there is Polar Bear Records which is a damn fine independent.

Venues: The Zodiac (great venue) has been bought by Carling and they're turning it into an Academy (opening in a month or so I think) - expect big acts there, although they seem to be pretty keen in keeping the local scene going. Lots of other venues in town, some better than others, but you'll soon see.

Available for free in lots of record/youth shops is esteemed Nightshift, a monthly magazine to do with all things Oxford music. Use it as a reference and 1st port of call, it's very good indeed and will give you a hint of where to go.

Polar Bear shut last year, sadly. I have a feeling Vinyl Frontier is gone too but I'm not sure.

Not a good time to move to Oxford looking for record shops or electronic music. There was a dance 12" specialist but it shut last year, turned into a Fopp, and now Fopp's dead; Polar Bear had a reasonable selection of Warp-type cd albums but shut about the same time; and Avid is going to close at the end of the year after the council charged it a huge amount of backdated rent increases, and the guy who did dance vinyl in the basement packed up and left already.

Anyway, Avid is on Gloucester St (little side street between Gloucester Green and George St), between pubs the Goose and the Cock and Camel. Lots of battered slightly expensive vinyl, some fairly cheap CDs. If you want to dig through the dusty crates of stuff too weird/rubbish to be put out, ask if you can look at the upstairs stock.

There's a record fair at the town hall the first Saturday of every month but you have to pay to go in. It's years since I went so I don't know what it's like; the big stalls used to be not much good but with more interesting stalls round the edge, but those were dying off a bit when I last went. And some of the charity shops have a fair bit of music but few bargains (CDs several quid regardless of what they are, tatty 7"s at collector's guide mint prices).

Go into a music shop around the last few days of a month or the start of the next one and pick up a copy of Nightshift. It's the free local music magazine and should give you an idea of what's on and where it happens. Or you can go to http://nightshift.oxfordmusic.net/, read a pdf version, and bitch and whine with the locals on the messageboard. http://www.oxfordbands.com/ may be worth a glance too but it's a bit dead these days.

Oh yeah, venues and dance and stuff.

Oxford's a fairly indie-centric sort of town. A few promoters used to put on sparsely-attended small electronic gigs but I haven't heard of any lately (I've been out of town though). There's never been much on clubbing-wise either (disclaimer: my bus home is at 11pm on a good night and I'm a corny Smiths-listening club-phobic nerd), but here are a few leads:
Simple/Slide - long-running house nights. don't know what they're into these days, but Holden used to be a resident before he moved to a more appreciative city
Baraka - psytrance nights at the Coven (II), between the icerink and the station
Fresh Out The Box - various styles, mainly breaks. usually at the Cellar (off Cornmarket, next to Lush)
Blunted presents... - mainly hip hop, I think, but this might be what some of the drum&bass nights that used to be around ended up as

Mainly it's student-aimed "cheese" nights. Oh, and a Po Na Na.

Oxford Contemporary Music - what I can only - but affectionately - describe as chin-stroking Wire music, including some electronic stuff. I always mean to but forget to go to their events. Doesn't help that their website is always out of date.

Gig venues: these days the Exeter Hall right where the Cowley Rd turns into Cowley seems to be the place for local bands to play, which is annoying because it's just that bit too far from my bus stop for me. I prefer the Port Mahon (small room above pub on St Clements) or the Wheatsheaf (off High St, near Carfax) for your local band and small touring band needs.

Watch out for Audioscope in the autumn, it's usually the highlight of my gig-going year.

Oops, Slide lives at http://www.slideuk.com/ and is not actually the same thing as Simple, they've just done so many joint events I thought they were. Sorry, I'll stop monopolosing your thread now...

Avid is going to close at the end of the year after the council charged it a huge amount of backdated rent increases

:(

Vinyl Frontier definitely no more, it says so in the new Nightshift which is now up on the website. The instruments + sheet music shop on St Aldates is gone too, so nowhere to buy guitar strings in the centre.

So now there'll be no second-hand record shop in town soon and there's already nowhere independent to pick up new releases. Which is kind of odd when you think that there's an independent CD shop still surviving in Witney (just in case this is yr "surrounding area", don't get your hopes up; it's much as you'd expect for a small CD shop in a shopping arcade behind Waitrose in a smallish countryish town, but it has a rack of local releases and I got myself the Wire on the Box: 1979 DVD there nice and cheap, so clearly someone's trying). Strange times for music retail I guess.

This is going to be like the ILE Oxford thread where I talk to myself, isn't it?

yo dyou know if folly bridge got much flooded?

Oxford's best band now, dedicating their first album cover to the city's recent troubles:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002LNM.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

whoops
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002LNM.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Not sure about Folly Bridge. I know further down Abingdon Rd was hit badly (including power cuts after the substation flooded) and Osney was flooded so I'm guessing that end must have been at least a bit but I didn't hear so much about it.

If you (are bored enough to) go to the Oxfordshire county council website there's a gallery of flood photos with some of Abingdon Road but most of them are either at the Donnington Bridge end or I can't place them.

I was going to out-contrarian LJ's Ride-over-Radiohead stance by picking some never-signed local band with watery artwork but, oh, it's all too much work.

in a couple of years, youthmovie soundtrack strategies will have eclipsed both :-D

or as they are now known, merely 'youthmovies'

i don't know what that means

it is a band

That shop in Witney - the name escapes me - seems pretty good considering ... Not up there with Pelican Neck, Phonica and so on but worth a potter.

Avid finally closes on Decemer 28, after a couple of years of threatening. Everything in there is half price right now. For promoters to look out for, you want http://www.myspace.com/swissconcrete (who do the Port Mahon) and http://www.myspace.com/vpop (Wheatsheaf). The Jericho has magically become a pretty OK venue in the last 12 months or so and is worth keeping an eye on. Zodiac is now a Carling venue and some of the more interesting Zodiac gang have moved to The Jericho.