Rough Trade store set open in Paris next year

Matthieu Pigasse - "the self-marketed rock star of finance", who owns Les Inrockuptibles and part of VICE France - revealed at this year's MaMA Festival (a bit like SXSW or The Great Escape with live shows and industry events) that a new branch of the iconic record shop would be flinging open its doors sometime before summer 2017.

Franck Vergeade, a French journalist (former editor of Magic RPM, a mag which closed this year but is set to reopen in January) and the head of MIDI Festival, attended the event at MaMA, reporting Pigasse's revelation (excuse the typo - presumably it should say 2017, not 2016).

#MatthieuPigasse confirme @MaMAevent la réouverture d'un magasin @RoughTrade à Paris avant l'été 2016. #MaMA16

— Franck Vergeade (@fvergeade) October 14, 2016

It's an exciting development in Rough Trade's history - but one that doesn't arrive without its sceptics.

At Rough Trade's height, there was a store in Paris (plus Tokyo and San Francisco), but as The Guardian noted in 2013, around the time that Rough Trade launched in NYC, the French outlet didn't go exactly to plan - it almost forced the end of the business as a whole

"Rough Trade operated a second branch in Covent Garden for almost 20 years," writes Dorian Lynskey. "...but branches in Tokyo, San Francisco and Paris all closed. The failure of the Paris outlet a decade ago brought the whole company within days of collapse before new backers saved the business."

Rough Trade has returned to Paris a few times since it imploded over a decade ago, with pop-up stores at Pitchfork Festival Paris in 2012 and Record Store Day 2013.