I used to go into the indoor market in Mold every lunch time for a quarter of Kop Kops or American Hard Gums. I've always been a proper greedy bastard.

The indoor market had a strange population: wombling old ladies doing old skool shopping and whooping schoolkids after a confectionary fix. It smelt of bleach and raw meat. And I always walked through the big double doors with trepidation because Butty had punched me in the stomach there, once. Right in the middle of all the stalls. And no one had done anything about it.

It felt a bit lawless. Which added to the excitement.

It was weeks before I plucked up the courage to check out the shop I was really interested in. I'd peer through the confectionary jars at the stall immediately behind it. It was more a box than a stall. It can't have been anything more that 10ft square. But it held more allure than all of the training bras of Mold and the outlying villages combined.

Every square inch of It bristled with music. Picture discs, twelve inches, CD's and album sleeves that were way beyond my meagre pocket money seemed to float in the store's ether. There were T-shirts loud with band names I'd never heard of hanging from the ceiling. A few posters hid the chainlink that was the back wall. One was that picture of Robert Smith with his back to the camera, guitar slung low. I yearned to have that on my bedroom wall. I needed something to put over the poster with the dinosaurs on it. Charlotte had laughed at it and that laugh had been a real tiny dick laugh.

The stall was like Smaug's treasure hoard.

Smaug was a big, loud Mancunian.

You could hear him bellowing from the sweet shop.

"Have you got any money, then? You've been flicking through me rekkids for an hour. You never bloody buy anythin'!"

He seemed to say most of these things with some kind of smile on his face. He looked like Black Francis, if Black Francis had come from Salford and had psoriasis.

Of course, I didn't know who Black Francis was, then. Smaug hadn't introduced us, yet.

Other than this ogre bending space and time so that he could fit behind the counter, the store was patrolled by the kind of people who made me feel the most uneasy: slightly older, weird looking kids in black with outlandish hair, flicking through the records in plastic boxes with studied indifference.

They were the ones who put the weird shit on the 6th form stereo. I'd known most of them since I was 11, but it felt like I'd forgotten their names, they'd morphed so much.

I envied them their confidence, their oddness, their insouciance.

They were The Lost Boys and I was Dougie Howser.

Anyway, one day they can't have been there because, paper bag of Cough Candy Twists in hand, I found myself standing in front of the hallowed record boxes. Smaug had his back turned, struggling to hang up a couple of t-shirts.

My whole being was writhing, some strange combination of excitement and fear that I was about to be found out.

"I know you."

He'd turned round while all these wildly melodramatic thoughts were pumping around me.

"You go the sweet stall."

I blushed mute.

He leaned forward conspiratorially.

"She never washes her hands, you know."

I must have looked perplexed, or stupid.

"After she's had a piss -" he nodded towards the toilet sign in the corner "never washes her hands. All those kids who get the trots, it's cos of 'er."

And thus a friendship was forged.

I might have asked him about a Robbie Robertson album, or a U2 CD single, that first time. I can see his expression in my usually un-cinematic mind as I type this. It's an expression peculiar to record store owners: a mixture of disdain for the customer's appalling taste in music burnished with the knowledge that a new source of regular sales has been found.

From that first visit, Smaug became 'Woofer' became, eventually, Russ.

He introduced me to the Go-Betweens, the Hoodoo Gurus, Ice T, The La's, The Pixies, lots of Brit psychedelia, Cowboy Junkies, the Boo Radleys, thousands of songs from hundreds of bands whose music is as much me as my bones and my blood.

But one band rules over all of those discoveries.

I remember, pretty vividly without having to use too much bullshit to colour between the numbers, getting to his stall breathless one lunchtime in April 1989.

"Bad news, that."

I nodded. I knew what he was talking about. He might have been a season ticket-carrying red Manc but he knew I was a Liverpool fan and that the past weekend's events at Hillsborough had been a tragic affront to proper football fans everywhere.

"Yeah, fucking horrible. I heard something on the radio. Stone Roses?"

I can see the rather smug smile crack open his face.

"You're a sheep, Walton. I bin telling you about them for ages. You wouldn't listen."

I hadn't liked the sleeve to Sally Cinnamon.

"Have you got it? The new single?"

And, there it was, all of a sudden. He had the 12 inch in his chubby fingers. It was his finest magic trick. And despite over ten years of having to deal with people demanding "The Roses" in various states of drunkenness *every* Friday night when I'm DJ'ing, despite the plodding imbecilic drivel that they inspired, despite standing in a field in Reading in 1997 feeling embarrassed for my memories, despite all those things I still love that song.

More than any other, it's the one that pulled me along in its cosmic melancholy slipstream to where I am, now. [Although, ironically, it was another 12" I bought off Woofer that became the first tune I ever played on the radio -- Indian Rope by The Charlatans].

So, at a time when I've been lucky enough to talk about these quiet heroes running their independent record shops, I thought it would be a good idea to remember Russ and Crocodile Records.

I never bought another U2 CD. Or anymore sweets off Piss Hands Confectionary. Russ saved my life.

Tight-fisted get owes me £100 but I owe him a hundred times that in kind.

Not that that is a legally-binding IOU, Russ. If you do read this, drop me a line. Back to the top of the page...