PAT Boone, Solomon Burke, Louise Cordet: these were some of the artists represented in the substantial array of LPs on sale when the venerable Glasgow music store, Alexander Biggar, reopened in November 1963 after being modernised and enlarged.

“The arcaded frontage, finished in marble,” said the Glasgow Herald, “leads into the new record department. There, in self-service boxes of sapele mahogany, bright jackets from a stock of 20,000 gramophone records are displayed.” At number one in the singles charts that week, incidentally, were Gerry & the Pacemakers, with You’ll Never Walk Alone.

The article said the store had been founded almost a century earlier when Alexander Biggar left his post as a music teacher at Rothesay Academy to open a music shop at West Regent Street, in 1867. The business relocated to Sauchiehall Street in 1952, with a small number of other branches in the city centre.

The 1963 extension saw Biggar’s advertise itself as “Glasgow’s new supermarket for home entertainment”, with more than £50,000 of “musical and radio merchandise” across eight specialist departments. Its range included TVs, radios, radiograms, tape recorders, musical instruments, pianos, organs, sheet music, and records. There was even a recording studio, the Herald noted – “a large salon with double-glazed windows to ensure silence, and a boudoir grand in the corner.”