Record Store Owner Offers Up Iconic Gig Posters: 'They Shouldn't Go To Landfill'
Lizzie French, the owner of Marrickville's RPM Records & Memorabilia, details the highlights and difficulties of managing an extensive collection of concert posters.
Lizzie French of RPM Records (Courtesy of Lizzie French)
Lizzie French isn’t the type of person who likes throwing things away.
She hates waste and always has – something she credits to her upbringing in the countryside of Canada. “We don't waste anything,” she admits over the phone. “You fix it, MacGyver it, you know, do something else with it; reuse it or something. You don't just get rid of stuff. It’s art!”
That’s how she describes her expansive collection of concert posters that she’s accumulated over many years. Lizzie French owns RPM Records & Memorabilia in Marrickville, selling your favourite albums and memorabilia and showcasing her mean collection of posters. Even Michael Gudinski took a photo in front of one of her favourites, that Rolling Stones poster you see above.
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However, there’s something unusual about that poster: it lists a tour date that was postponed to November 2014, but Lizzie has the original poster with the original date. It’s that unusual and likely quite rare that someone who worked at Frontier Touring questioned its authenticity upon seeing it at RPM Records.
“One time, a really tall bloke came in my shop probably five or six years ago when we first had them [the posters in the store], and I had the Rolling Stones poster behind the counter like I do now,” Lizzie says, “He came in, he looked at it, and he pointed at it. He said, ‘Where did you get that?’”
Lizzie explained that the poster – and many more in her collection – were bought in bulk by a good client of a printing house named Spence – and she bought them from him.
The unnamed figure replied, “Oh, okay. I know Spence. That's a real one, not a fake one. Carry on.” Lizzie asked why the person cared, to which he responded, “Well, I worked for Frontier, so I just wanted to make sure you weren't just bootlegging new ones second-hand.”
Initially, Lizzie thought, “Ooh, what did I do?” but called her love and display of the posters “second-hand goods recycling.”
On the subject of Frontier Touring, she recalls, “There's a famous picture of Michael Gudinski taken in front of that same poster, back in the day when it was originally announced that the Stones were touring.”
Lizzie has moved the posters “half a dozen or more times” over the years through the shop and into storage. “They shouldn’t go to landfill,” she says. Someone is going to see what I see in them—they’re worth money.”
The posters feature international and local names, from Metallica to Bodyjar, with tour dates ranging from 2005 to 2016. But Lizzie is keeping the Metallica poster.
“There's two or three in each roll [of posters],” she explains. Most of them are about shoulder size, but some are more billboard size, where you put two and three parts together. They're like wallpaper for a room; they're huge.”
And the size of said posters has been a problem. Lizzie is trying to sell many of them, as she simply doesn’t have the space. But she’s run into logistical issues when it comes to shipping concert posters of the size we’re talking about: Australia Post won’t send anything over a meter long, and trying to find couriers up to the task is also tricky.
“That's been a problem. I bought them with good intentions, but it's so difficult to store them when they’re heavy and display them so that people can buy them. Then you get the added difficulty factor of the post office won't ship anything more than one meter wide. They can only be collected in person.”
Now, she has people rummaging through the in-store posters, and whenever somebody unrolls another poster, they get a little more damaged.
In mid-2020, Lizzie decided to open a posters division of RPM Records. “But as we know, we would be open for seven months, and then we got locked down again,” she notes. “We were just devastated.”
RPM Records is currently in a good building with a long lease, and after everything Lizzie has gone through – she planned to open a thrift shop between the Covid-19 pandemic and now – she can now focus on trying to get some posters to other homes.
Lizzie started calling local high schools in Marrickville about taking some posters but didn’t have any luck.
She found luck with the State Library of NSW, as the library was seeking New South Wales band art for its archive. Someone working at the library came into Lizzie’s ill-fated posters shop, bought many, and it was all fantastic. Sadly, Lizzie says she’s been rejected by the Powerhouse Museum and other museums.
One of her friends and loyal customers of RPM Records, Virginia Wheway, recently quit her job and has been helping out as a volunteer. After a miscommunication in which Wheway advertised giving away the posters for free on Facebook, Lizzie had to insist that they weren’t free unless they were going to the local high school.
Since she’s been on board, Wheway has been in touch with members of the music-loving community who have shown interest in the posters.
“A band member from one of the bands that she found called Bodyjar—[one of the posters] is going to go to him because he was in the band, so that's obviously a good cause,” Lizzie says.
The posters are also attracting interest in Melbourne. Desert Highways, a Reservoir-based skate shop, is looking to wallpaper its roof with posters from her collection.
“We've had a big response from Melbourne, and yet we can’t post them because they're more than a metre,” Lizzie notes. “I mean, sure, you could oversize courier these, but that's a lot of work.
“Virginia has spent hours trying to figure all this out [with me]. I say that my full-time job is working in my shop and that I do all my other record shop stuff. As long as she's having fun, that's great. But for me, it's kind of like a necessity. I can't keep them forever.”
You can check out the posters and purchase some vinyl at RPM Records & Memorabilia at 163 Marrickville Rd, Marrickville, NSW 2204. The store is open seven days a week. If you’d like to know which posters are available, email Lizzie at sales@rpmrecords.com.au.
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