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He called the shop Fopp after a track by a group called the Ohio Players and because it rhymed with pop, hip hop and be-bop.

But taking on the lease turned out to be an expensive mistake. He said: “I was desperate to get a shop, so I took over a lease that had six years left. But I didn’t realise that at the end of the lease I would be responsible for all the repairs and maintenance of the building, which was in a state of dilapidation.

“There would be urine coming down the walls from the Chinese restaurant upstairs because their toilets would flood all the time. I arrived one morning and the whole floor was covered in it.”

In the end, Montgomery had to pay £40,000 for the cost of repairs and managed to find the money only when the bank agreed to extend his overdraft.

He hit another setback when he opened a second shop, in Edinburgh. “I tried to copy what I had done in Glasgow, “ he said, “but it took a long time to establish itself and was a complete failure for the first year. It lost money for the first 15 months but I didn’t have the funds to advertise it, so I just had to sit tight and wait for the reputation to build. I used to get very depressed about it.”

He persevered and eventually the Edinburgh store started to make money, encouraging him to open another three stores.

In the mid 1990s, however, a crisis in his personal life threatened to derail the business altogether.

Montgomery said: “My wife wanted to move back to Coventry to be near her family. I liked living in Glasgow but I didn’t want to be an estranged father, so we moved to Leamington Spa.

“I opened a little shop there and started to expand the business in England. My wife didn’t want me to do that and urged me to spend less time at work. But a business is like a juggernaut — you have to keep it going forward or at some point it’s bound to start going the other way.

“I tried to reason with her, but then I did something bad. I did a deal to open a store in Sheffield and didn’t inform her. She found out about it and we ended up at loggerheads.”

They split up and Montgomery found himself living in a bedsit again.

He eventually decided to form a limited company to spread the risk — and ownership — of the business with three Fopp directors, keeping a 60% share for himself.

The business now has 16 shops, including one in Edinburgh with an in-store bar, making it Britain’s first licensed record shop. This year Fopp is expected to have a turnover of £30m.

Montgomery, now 47, said: “Debt is a great motivator. You can get very lazy if you don’t have debts. When I was a kid I used to be told to hide under the table when the man came round to collect the money every week.

“My personal life is a complete mess, but I’m rather chuffed with what I have done professionally.

“I always wanted to build a business that had some substance to it. I have always been driven by the desire to succeed."