For the record – does HMV’s demise matter?
The last time that I bought anything at HMV I came away with a box set of Sir Edward Elgar’s orchestral works and a book celebrating The Clash. “That’s an unusual combination”, said the shop assistant, as he took my debit card. “It’s all nostalgia”, I replied, absent-mindedly.
Walking away from the shop, however, I was overwhelmed with a sense of sadness. There was a time in my life when employees in record shops were the epitome of cool. Lowly paid, shop-working Saturday-staff, they might be, but with their sculptural hair cuts, improbable piercings and knowing air of detachment, they were as hip as you could find – at least among the retail units on the average high street.
The significance of my purchases was entirely unwitting. The Elgar was a gift for my father. But by some fluke, the grandly moustachioed Edwardian composer was the one who cut the ribbon at the opening of the very first His Master’s Voice music shop – back in 1921 in Oxford.
The Clash book – a sort of photo-montage of the band’s glory years – was an impulse purchase which tempted me with a remainder-shop price. My favourite band, its true, but so pathetic is it for middle-aged men to wallow in manufactured memorabilia that I resisted, at least until the price drop. For all their punk fury, however, The Clash are emblematic of an age when signing to a label and selling lots of records was the only route to mainstream success – even though their songs complained about those who ‘turned rebellion into money’.
Replaying my conversation, it struck me that record-shop employees were surely going the way of the coal miners, printers and ship builders alongside whom I had once, long ago, stood shoulder-to-shoulder on picket lines. There was a difference, however. By the time I was demonstrating in support of workers in our iconic heavy industries, those sectors were already long past their peaks of production and employment. With hindsight, the bitterness of the industrial struggles of the 1980s look more like cadeveric spasms than sustainable threats to the social order.
By contrast, my record-buying life coincides with the high-water mark of mechanically reproduced analogue culture. Top Of The Pops attracted 15 million viewers a week during the 1970s, the music press revealed a secret and magical world in even the most hum drum valium online with no prescription provincial outposts, and a quick inspection of a person’s record collection, related all that you needed to know about their taste and cultural bearings (or lack of them).
The HMV ‘in town’ was for years my first stopping off point on a Saturday. Oftentimes, with no money in my pocket, soaking up the atmosphere, hearing the new sounds and leafing through the racks of albums was enough to justify my bus fare.
But, wistfulness aside, is the demise of nipper and his trumpet a real cause for sadness? On balance, I think not.
I am fairly certain that I have bought my last CD. Apart from charity-shop finds, I am never going to buy another album. Despite that, I listen to more new music now, than at any other time in my life – even the headlong rush of teenage enthusiasm that wove songs and their singers into the very tapestry of my being.
The reason for this is simple – for a monthly subscription I have an extraordinary galaxy of music available to me streamed into my computer or iPhone. If I am minded to buy music to download, there is the Apple store. To hear more esoteric material I turn to YouTube and Myspace.
Nor does listening to new music necessarily mean surrendering to big business. Because of the internet, artists such as Joe Pernice have been able to carve our reasonable livings from recording and playing exquisite, occasionally hilarious, music without recourse to big studios, big labels or, big record stores.
I feel nothing but pity for those who have lost their jobs, and I worry about the sustainability of high-street shopping as a dizzying succession of anchor-retailers pull down their shutters for good. But technological advance has been doing this to music for decades. Records and their shops did for the big bandsmen of the 30s and 40s, just as surely as pipe organs and pianos narrowed musicians’ employment opportunities by allowing one person to emulate an orchestra.
When it comes to real nostalgia, then, I will devote myself to the artistry of the music itself, rather than mourning the changing arrangements for its distribution. Where my children will find to hang out on Saturday afternoons remains to be seen. I suspect that it would not have been HMV, though, even if the administrators had not been summoned.