My husband, Geoff Davies, who has died aged 80, was an influential figure on the Liverpool music scene during the 1970s and 80s as an owner of a record shop and record label and as a promoter.
Geoff opened Probe Records in Liverpool with his first wife, Annie (nee Leadbetter) in 1971, a shop which, according to Paul Du Noyer, the author of Liverpool, Wondrous Place, functioned as “the semi-official control room of Liverpool music”. From 1976 onwards, along with the nearby club Eric’s, it became the centre of the local punk and post-punk revolution that transformed so many lives, including those of three Probe employees: Pete Burns, who became lead singer of the band Dead Or Alive, Pete Wylie of Wah! and Paul Rutherford of Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Geoff was born in Liverpool to George, a docker, and Ellen (nee Dorn), a seamstress. His mother took him regularly to local cinemas when he was young, fuelling an enduring love of music and film.
Having left Rathbone school at 14, for many years afterwards Geoff took on various jobs – including working for a tailors, a jewellers and a carpet manufacturer – before leaving them when he had accumulated enough money to go travelling. He had a lifelong love of travel and made his first appearance in the press in 1965 when the Liverpool Echo reported on his 35,000-mile hitchhiking round trip to India, telling an interviewer: “I was told I could never cross the Great Syrian Desert … but I did. After that you realise you can achieve what others can’t.”
Back in Liverpool, Geoff’s determination and drive led him to open Probe in Clarence Street, envisaging it as a place where he would want to shop himself, where visitors could get “new and secondhand titles and non-mainstream stuff”. The shop stocked imported music from the US, blues, jazz, folk and classical music, as well as rock music and underground magazines. Instantly successful on its own terms, it continued to attract the city’s hipper music fans, and in 1976 moved to larger premises in Button Street, where Geoff also started the Probe Plus record label, which, among others, released material from Half Man Half Biscuit.
When Geoff’s marriage to Annie ended in divorced in 1986, they agreed that she would take sole ownership of the shop while Geoff would keep the record label.
We married in 1999 and Geoff continued to bring out and promote music that he loved from bands of all genres until illness led to his retirement in 2018.
He is survived by me, his sons Jesse, from his first marriage, and Zach, from another relationship, my son from a previous relationship, Jack, and grandchildren Heather and David. His eldest son, Steven, died of motor neurone disease in 2016.
