Honest Jon's

Honest Jon's is a British independent record shop on Portobello Road in Ladbroke Grove, London, operating since 1974. It is owned and run by Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield, who took over from original proprietor "Honest" Jon Clare. The shop sells vinyl and CDs across genres including jazz, blues, reggae, dance, soul, folk, and outernational, and runs a mail-order business. Its record label, formed in 2002, is run in conjunction with Damon Albarn. The label has released compilation series such as London Is the Place for Me, which excavates music of young Black London after World War II, as well as collections of British folk, Port-of-Spain soca, Afro-Cuban jazz from the Bronx, Jamaican dancehall, and retrospectives of artists including Moondog, Maki Asakawa, Bettye Swann, and Cedric "Im" Brooks & The Light of Saba. It has also released original music by Candi Staton, Actress, T++, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Mark Ernestus, and many others, and recorded musicians on location in Algiers, Bamako, and Lagos. In 2008, the label began a run of compilations of early recordings from the EMI Archive in Hayes, Hillingdon, covering the early twentieth century and regions from the Ottoman Empire to 1950s Beirut, late-1920s Baghdad, and 1930s East Africa.