Those of you who know us will know that we have run a second-hand Classical music shop in London for many years.

The term "Classical Music" is one of those wonderfully vague and imprecise modern terms used by the general public to encapsulate a large and complex topic in which they have little or no interest. Much like saying something is "foreign", to say music is "classical" actually says more about what it isn’t than what it is. People say "Classical music" when they mean music that is not Pop music. "Pop music" has of course come to refer to the tradition of mainstream music that has its origins in the mid-Twentieth Century. Classical Music can mean almost anything written in the past eight hundred years (anything that isn’t popular, presumably).

Nowadays this seems to be true in more ways than one. Classical music is not popular music; most people living in this society do not listen to music of this kind, and have little or no interest in collecting it. More often than not, when a new customer would walk into our classical music shop, they would wander around vaguely for a few minutes, look up and down at the tens of thousands of LPs and CDs all meticulously arranged by composer, (Bach (J.S.), Barber, Bartok, Bax) by type (String Quartets, Piano Concertos, Opera Highlights) and eventually they would come to the counter and ask the infamous question, "Is it Just Classical in here?"

The question was usually innocent (even when followed by my favourite, "Where do you keep the Normal Music?") but it did highlight the fact that to most people in our society, Classical Music is something vague and undefined, much like the term itself. Many people found it hard to believe that an entire shop could devote itself to nothing but music of this kind.

To those of us who actually enjoy Music Of This Kind however, shops that deal in Just Classical are all too rare. Browsing the classical section of a High Street store can be a depressing experience, unless you’re a fan of scantily clad girls performing remixed versions of the Four Seasons. In a shop the size of a small city block, the Classical section is often a few meagre rows of dusty CDs in the back, in a bad light. The good news is that there is a vast and rich recorded legacy of music out there, if you know where to look for it, and it is to that legacy, in all its diversity that we are dedicated. You may like Charpentier or Stockhausen, Fürtwangler or Herrweghe. You may prefer SACDs, or you may feel that nothing can compare with analog vinyl. It is a rich and diverse field, and it is that richness and diversity that we mean when we refer to JustClassical.