A Slow, Lingering Death

The news this week that the number of independent record shops in the U.K has reached such a low number* that scientists have yet to work out what to call that number is no real surprise. The download revolution has well and truly taken hold over the past five years and people are now buying online in such huge numbers that it is inevitable that the biggest casualty of the digital revolution would be the very shops that introduced anybody over 40 to the world or record buying.

I used to love browsing through the record racks on a Saturday afternoon, even when CD's came along there was still a thrill to be had holding something physical in your hand that connected you the punter with the artist you were contemplating buying. These days if you buy online, as I tend to for the music that is going on my mp3 player, all you have is a folder on your hard drive, nothing you can hold, stroke or sniff.

My favourite record shop wasn't a shop at all to be honest, it was a stall in Newport Street market. In the words of Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner) in the introduction to This Is Spinal Tap, "don't look for it, it isn't there anymore." Newport Street itself doesn't exist, consumed by Chinatown during the 1980's all that remains is an NCP car park in what is now referred to as Newport Place. The market used to take place on Sunday mornings and it really was part of some sort of counter-culture scene, all sorts of weird magazines (including Oz), tie dye t-shirts, velvet loons and the smell of 'herbal' cigarettes filling the air. I loved it, you could spend hours browsing the racks of albums, singles, comics, magazines, I had died and gone to heaven as far as I was concerned. Once the market had disappeared a record shop was opened about a hundred yards away in one of the passages leading down to the Charing Cross Road, this has since been replaced by a sex shop, one type of plastic based entertainment replacing another.

Talk to people who were in and around Bournemouth in the mid to late seventies and they will nod sagely when you mention downstairs at Dereks Records. This is because Derek's had listening booths, those things you see in films about 1950's Americana, where you and three or four of your buddies could squeeze in and listen to the latest album by the Mighty Groundhogs or some reggae track that had been recorded with the bass up past eleven which made your ears bleed.

I also used to hang out at a shop called Generation Gap records which was owned by a woman who seemed incredibly old at the time but in truth was probably in her thirties. I used to ask her for the displays the record companies used to give her to advertise their wares, I had some weird stuff in my bedroom pre-punk: life size cut-out of Rick Wakeman, life size Pete Townshend, Peter Gabriel era Genesis promotional posters, Pink Floyd stuff. As soon as I started work that lot disappeared to be replaced by Marilyn Monroe and Debbie Harry.

Bringing things up to date I now live and work in towns which don't have any outlets at all for vinyl or CD's. The nearest independent record store (excluding one secondhand shop in the old town at Poole) is in Southampton, 25 miles away. There is an HMV at the nearest 'retail park,' but to be honest they are so expensive as to be uncompetitive, unless of course you want to buy the entire back catalogue of Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Abba etc which you can do at a reasonable price.

The old saying of 'use it or lose it' can certainly be applied to record shops but I think that in this case it has been a matter of technology overtaking the shops. Last Saturday I purchased sixteen tracks online, most of them 'world' music which I couldn't have got even in my local HMV, the downloads took less than a quarter of an hour and cost me less than twelve quid, consumer wins.

* The actual number of independent record shops is now under 300 and is estimated to reach under three figures within the next two years as more club DJ's become CDJ's.