‘Have you heard this?’
In honour of Record Store Day, former till jockey Richard Betts sings the praises of bricks and mortar music shops
Imet a woman in a record store. More accurately, I met one woman three times in three different record stores. The first time was in the HMV shop on the corner of Queen St and Vulcan Lane, a megastore that disappeared in the early 1990s, where I was doing a bad job of managing one of its three floors. She wanted La Traviata on tape. I tried to sell her something else. She was insistent on the Verdi, which was not in stock, so I ordered it for her, requiring me to take her name and phone number. You can imagine what happened next. Actually, what happened next was that I didn’t see her for another 18 months.
When I did it was at Broadway Records in Newmarket, a classical specialist that disappeared in the mid-1990s, and where I was doing a better job as deputy manager. She wanted Nigel Kennedy playing the Four Seasons. I sold her Jacqueline du Pre playing Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I also remembered her from the La Traviata incident. Crucially, I recalled her name. We got to talking, I asked her out. We dated.
It’s hardly surprising. Music shops were gathering places for the like-minded, where imagined communities bonded over the reggae section. Staff dated each other and even married, but I also had customers who would talk to each other about their likes, dislikes, hopes and dreams but who never met away from the shop. It’s harder to do that on Spotify.
That’s not necessarily a criticism, by the way. Streaming services are wonderful for consumers and have made obscure musical worlds more accessible than they’ve ever been
(the less said about what they do for artists the better, at least that seems to be Spotify’s position). However, algorithms and big data-curated playlists don’t give you the thrill of discovery, the triumph of flicking through a pile of albums and stumbling across that discontinued record you’ve been after for years. You don’t get the excitement of the person behind the counter casually throwing a disc in the player and it sounding like the best thing you’ve ever heard.
Moreover physical music is multi-sensory. You can hear it, of course, see it and touch it. If you’re in the mood you can taste it and smell it, too (ah, the aroma of mouldering LP sleeves . . . ).
It’s harder for a disc to be background music because you engage with it in several ways. It’s also harder to ignore something you’ve paid for. In the digital age, music is essentially free, literally worthless. At best it’s an all-you-caneat buffet; its merit as likely to be measured by how much you can consume as your enjoyment of what you’re served.
Which is where record shops, and more specifically record shop workers, come in: they are living filters. Even in a time when you can stream just about everything, “Have you heard this?” is one of the most tempting sentences you will hear in a record store. Skilled staff will give you that left-field recommendation that just might change your life.
The flipside of that is record store workers’ reputation as gatekeepers from hell. In the old days, when there were lots of customers, music till jockeys were everything you imagined or which the movie High Fidelity would lead you to imagine: surly, sneery, cooler than thou, we saw ourselves as minimum wage holders of the keys to the musical kingdom.
Sadly, we didn’t realise how ephemeral the industry would turn out to be. Almost as ephemeral, in fact, as my relationship with the woman I met in the two record stores. She soon ditched me for a guy who had a haircut like Nigel Kennedy’s.
We met again a decade or so later, this time in Marbecks classical store in Queens Arcade. The last of its kind, Marbecks still clings tenaciously to life, held afloat by the knowledge of its staff and the loyalty of its customers. The woman and I are married now. She still has the Jacqueline du Pre tape I sold her.