"There's a record store called Rub-a-Dub," said the revered techno artist Claude Young in a 2004 interview, "and they're like a Detroit away from Detroit. Everybody goes and hangs out at the shop and drinks coffee all night, listening to new stuff."

When Young said this, Rubadub was already kind of legendary. Opening in 1992 in the town of Paisley, and subsequently relocating to nearby Glasgow, Rubadub became a key Scottish node in the dissemination of US techno across Europe. Famously, co-owner Wilba Sandieson travelled to Detroit in 1994, forging direct connections with artists and labels, so that Rubadub could stock records otherwise hard to come by across the Atlantic.

Rubadub's story isn't just about importing a culture, though. It fast became both a product and a driver of the flourishing scene in Glasgow, a small city with an outsized impact on global electronic music. Many influential artists (Hudson Mohawke, Jackmaster, Denis Sulta, Lanark Artefax) have roots in the city; quite a few have worked at the shop. 

Over three decades, Rubadub has become a kind of focal point for the Glasgow music community. As the fortunes of vinyl have fallen and risen, owners Sandieson and Martin McKay have cannily diversified, branching out into music technology and developing a sizeable distribution operation, run out of a large warehouse in the Glasgow suburbs. Crucially, the company has kept the core Rubadub feel: passionate, unpretentious, and above all accessible.

"That's one thing Rubadub was always good at," recalls Richard Chater, who joined the staff in 2004 and co-runs the business's distribution arm with McKay. "It was always welcoming. The records were never behind the [sales counter], so if you were scared to ask for a record you didn't have to do that, you could just go to the wall."

Like many Rubadub staff, Chater was in the shop's orbit before he became an employee. He promoted parties at 69, the notorious club run by the Rubadub team, which would host the likes of Underground Resistance and Autechre. Eventually he was adopted into what he calls a "big dysfunctional family": with a degree in E-commerce, his job was to work on the shop's website. Somehow, though, he ended up as a record buyer, before switching to distribution.

Around that time he also co-founded Numbers, a hyper-influential collective, clubnight and label, with a crew of Rubadub employees and associates including Jackmaster and Spencer. Like many others, he looked to the shop's founding generation for cues. "If it wasn't for hanging out at Rubadub, seeing the music and speaking to Martin, I would never have done it," he says of running a label. "It's the same for everyone really. Rubadub's kind of the seed, the inspiration for us to do stuff. We were inspired by how they did it."

Like Chater, many of the shop's employees have been working there for years, and keep a stack of musical projects going on the side. Dan Lurinsky, who manages Rubaub's retail arm, has been working at the shop for 20 years and co-runs the Dixon Avenue Basement Jams label. Mark Maxwell has done "probably almost everything apart from accounts" in his eight years at the company; he DJs as Mother and previously ran the Heated Heads label.

The two of them speak via video chat from the shop counter, with Lurinsky periodically ducking out to let customers in: the door is kept locked to comply with social distancing rules.The pair admit that the pandemic has made their role as a space for the Glasgow scene more difficult. "It's definitely had an impact on the shop as a hub and a meeting place for people," says Maxwell. "We were doing quite a lot of in-stores last year, which were great. We'd have the shop rammed, it would go into the night. That was great fun and that's obviously now totally impossible."

In other respects, though, Rubadub is well-equipped to weather a difficult period. It helps that the shop doesn't just sell records: alongside vinyl, you'll find an enticing selection of music production kit, from software through to synths and modular gear. Rubadub started seriously stocking this stuff in the early 2000s, around the time of the first wave of digital DJing, and it helped them through a dip in vinyl sales. "We had to make ourselves flexible to survive," Lurinsky concedes. 

But the real motivation for selling gear was simpler: the staff were all using it. "Our ethos when it comes to selling vinyl is, we sell stuff that we like. We've always been a shop with a fairly curated selection. It's the same for the equipment that we sell. We all make music, or we all DJ - so that was why we tarted selling the stuff to make music, too."

Like Rubadub's employees, its customers are often interested in both records and gear, and a curiosity in the music can soon develop into a full-blown addiction. "We've had people coming in buying in the odd record or two," says Maxwell. "Then they buy more records - then they start asking about Ableton or something."

"Then they get the bug," Lurinsky laughs.

Equally crucial to Rubadub's longterm stability is its distribution business, run out of a warehouse in the suburbs of the city. By Chater's account, this part of the business "came about by accident," as a result of Sandieson's trip to Detroit in the mid-'90s, where he met and bonded with Underground Resistance's Mad Mike, among other pillars of Detroit techno. "Wilba spunked all of Rubadub's money on records, and then had to sell them all. So he ended up selling them to other record shops, and it kind of grew from that."

These days, distro is Rubadub's largest department: they work with almost 100 labels across North America, the EU, Japan, and elsewhere. The staff's adventurous and refined taste has placed them at the cutting edge of successive developments in global dance music. In an earlier era, under Jackmaster, big successes came from the likes of Night Slugs and Objekt's white label series. Under Chater, Karenn, Vancouver's Mood Hut and the Planet Euphorique crew have all worked with Rubadub distro.

The operation is marked by its personal touch. P&D deals - in which the distributor takes a more active role in the process of pressing and releasing a record - are common, and Chater is on hand to offer advice and guidance. "It's very hands-on and very personal. You make lots of connections, lots of friends, and it makes the world a much bigger place for you. That's one of the most rewarding things about the job.

During the peak of the pandemic in the UK, while the Rubadub shop was shut, the distro and online retail continued to operate out of the warehouse, albeit at limited capacity. Since August, Chater says, things have got more complicated, with a pandemic-induced bottleneck leading to long waiting times at pressing plants, and the UK's impending exit from the European Union causing further uncertainty.

Still, "we're in a good position to navigate it," he says. In particular, the Rubadub warehouse has "future-proofed the business", allowing work to continue in a socially distanced way.  

Meanwhile, there are hints of new initiatives, in line with Rubadub's ethos of making underground culture accessible. Maxwell mentions the idea of offering production workshops, in partnership with institutions around Glasgow. "A lot of this stuff, when it comes to tech, can be pretty intimidating. It's about developing an environment where people can be more open, feel less scared about asking basic questions." Rubadub, a one-stop-shop for underground electronic music, is a natural place to turn to.