Criminal records

A casual stroll through Covent Garden recently left me in a state of shock. Visiting central London’s only chain record shop, my eyes were assaulted by the price of vinyl. Somehow, and since Christmas, there were ‘regular’, single-disc albums priced as much as £34.99. Thirty-five quid for a record - when did that happen?

To be fair, there was no real rhyme or reason for any of the pricing. Looking across current best sellers on the HMV website, Aurora by Daisy Jones & The Six is one of those with the £34.99 price tag, while the pink vinyl version of Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (which also comes with a poster) is £36.99. The new remaster of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon: Live at Wembley 1974 is £22.99, but that old staple, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is £24.99. For reasons best known to someone, Radiohead’s venerable OK Computer is £29.99.

Even allowing for some releases being on coloured vinyl, there is nothing musically obvious to warrant a difference of almost £20 with CD versions, and yet vinyl continues to outsell CDs, to such extent that the format has largely been marginalised in record shops in much the same way that, ironically, vinyl virtually disappeared as the new digital system got going back in the late 1980s. 

What makes vinyl’s pricing more remarkable is that younger consumers - somehow - appear to be buying records at prices that even I, with the salary to match, baulk at. So what is fuelling it? For a start, the CD is in terminal decline, 41 years after it was introduced by Philips and Sony. 

Last year some 33 million CDs were sold but, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, that was an 18% decline on 2021 when - probably driven by lockdowns and people discovering that they still had a CD player - the CD had enjoyed its first annual increase in 17 years. Vinyl, on the other hand, has continued to grow, with just under a billion pounds’ worth sold in 2022, amounting to just over 41 million records. Today, it represents 71% of all the revenue made from physical music formats. 

Why, is still an intangible. Music executives talk about the better sound quality of vinyl and almost everyone who had converted - or reconverted - to playing records again will talk up the tactile experience of putting a needle on the intro groove. 

That, certainly, drove the return of Baby Boomers to vinyl, having been previously converted to digital formats. Tentatively, they ventured into hi-fi shops and electrical departments and bought cheap turntables and discovered they could recreate their teenage years by digging out albums long consigned to the loft. However, their children also cottoned on, finding greater affinity with those 12-inches of plastic and the ever-increasing marketing ingenuity with which labels peddle exclusives, reissues and cute gimmicks like coloured vinyl.

Here in the UK, vinyl hit a 30-year high last year, according to the BPI, led by the cross-generational appeal of Taylor Swift, whose records seem to be bought by dads and daughters alike. It even led to the beleaguered HMV chain being revived, having almost disappeared completely before being bought by private investor Doug Putman, who also owns Fopp! record shops. “Walk in today, and it’s unbelievable how many ten, 15, 18-year-olds are in the store,” he told the BBC recently. “I’m telling you, that’s good for us long-term.” 

But even so, given the cost-of-living crisis affecting every age group, one way or another, the suddenly exorbitant price of vinyl must surely be impacting demand. But why is it so expensive? Firstly, there are some boring reasons for how a vinyl record is priced: the economics of pressing up records plays a huge part, wherein record labels and artists need to meticulously plan demand to ensure the pressing process is as efficient as possible. There are increasing costs with the raw materials, too, with the cost of shipping the lacquers used to master discs nearly trebling in the last year or so - another expense passed on to the consumer.

During the pandemic, where records were being ordered online, often on a whim, manufacturers struggled to keep up as they, too, were impacted by staff shortages, but some of these haven’t yet recovered, leading to records taking three to six months to get pressed, often leading to limited supplies, and higher demand, especially for premium editions. Metallica - the sixth-highest vinyl-selling act in the US - have even bought their own pressing plant to help with manufacturing their own records. 

We are, of course, mainly talking here about the new production of records, but the second-hand market has also experienced inflationary pricing (much the same as for cars, interestingly enough) as people have resorted to Discogs, eBay and market stall box digging to buy ‘authentic’ originals, with their scratches, blemishes and all. However, another factor affecting the supply of new vinyl is the actual length of records: in the 1960s and 1970s it wasn’t uncommon for an album to last no more than 35 minutes or, at the very most, 20 minutes a side. When the CD came along, artists could fill an album with up to 70 or even 80 minutes of music on a single disc. Vinyl’s resurgence has brought back the physical challenges, that a 12-inch album can only contain so much music within its grooves - even less with so-called ‘180 gram’ audophile releases which present a tradeoff of higher quality, usually to appeal to older consumers buying a classic album for the second or even third time in their lives. 

Marketing will have another affect on the cost of an album: record companies have become ever more inventive with the use of coloured vinyl, but each vivid, thematically-relevant colour requires additional materials and dyes to work, unlike the simplicity of dull old black. Vinyl’s resilience is, then, ultimately the result of clever salesmanship mixed with fashionable appeal. While manipulating a piece of software code to play an album on a phone or a home hub device is as simple as turning on a light, vinyl has managed to keep its cool. Which record companies are perfectly aware of. Desire is more impactful than mere demand, and the economics at play here shouldn’t be rocket science. 

Inflation is also impacting the price of an album, but the question is whether deflation will bring prices down as well. There is certainly little evidence that the vinyl revival is just a fashion craze - in fact, the format’s resurgence has been going for the last 15 years at least. But given how financially squeezed everyone in the record-buying demographic will be right now, inevitably, it remains to be seen whether a £35 impulse purchase is being deferred, especially when a new album can be conveniently ‘tasted’ on Spotify for £10 a month.

It’s going to be interesting to see whether pricing has any affect on this year’s Record Store Day, taking tomorrow. As was its intention, the initiative, founded in 2008 to drive traffic away from online vendors and into independent shops, had the effect of vinyl fans young and old (me included) splurging on the day’s limited edition releases. However, the trend for providing a sales bonanza for ‘legacy’ acts reissuing venerated albums and rarities, has come in for some criticism, with smaller labels and their lesser known acts often struggling for attention (and, also, feeling relegated by record manufacturers prioritising money-spinners like Taylor Swift).

Not that the major record companies will be complaining. At the end of the day, they know that consumers remain willing to pay a premium for vinyl - and not necessarily to experience the supposed “warmth” of a record. In 2022 the American industry body Luminate, found that half of vinyl buyers even own a record player. A similar story has been spun with the revival of cassettes, with acts like the Arctic Monkeys and Harry Styles selling thousands of tapes despite there being no clear idea on what they’re being played on. 

But sell they are, fuelled by teenagers wishing to own something kitsch, turning the cassette into a youth fashion, along with the revival of 1980s-style baggy clothing. “Growing up, cassettes were a rite of passage as we listened to our favourite artists,” Sophie Jones, interim chief executive of the BPI told The Times this week, though she pointed out that tapes represented a minuscule segment of music consumption. “Like vinyl, a number of contemporary artists are warmly embracing the cassette as another way to reach audiences and on occasions it has even helped them to achieve a No 1 album.”

For those of us who remember cassette as the original cheaper alternative to vinyl, we will have some fondness, but not much. Taking music on holiday was never much fun when, along with the Walkman, you had to lug a large box full of tapes to listen to. 

And, yes, there were the occasional disasters as tapes became wound around the deck’s playback heads (leading to the now lost phenomenon of roadside hedges ‘decorated’ with discarded magnetic tape, along with…er…mysteriously, porn magazines…).  

Make no mistake, physical formats are in the relative minority, whatever hipsters venturing out tomorrow for Record Store Day might think. Streaming remains by far the leading means of hearing new music and old alike, even if a ‘free’ listen on Spotify does lead to a physical purchase. 

But for all the convenience of streaming and, like so many one-click aspects of our now-digital lives - from ordering food to buying books and paying bills - there is something reassuringly old school about taking a record out of its sleeve, putting down a needle on its first groove, and listening to the artist’s intended track order before having to get out of the chair and flip it over. In a small way, it’s a reminder of a slower, less instant time, before the mouse or the remote control. I just wish it wasn’t so bloody expensive.

Mixed signals: buying records on your high street

Barely a fortnight after Sainsbury’s announced that it will stop selling CDs and DVDs in the face of streaming services dominating media consumption, and just a few days after the second Record Store Day ‘drop’ for 2021, dear old HMV has celebrated its 100th birthday by announcing that it is planning to 10 new shops this year.

While this is hardly a raging endorsement of physical media continuing to enjoy rude health, it at least is a positive sign that the oft-predicted death of such formats is being kept at arm’s length. Sainsbury’s said that its decision was the result of consumers increasingly getting their music and films online, although conversely it added that it would continue to sell vinyl records in some stores, a reflection of vinyl’s hipster appeal amongst everyone from teenagers to the middle-aged getting back into the format and succumbing to impulse buying while out doing the weekly grocery shop.

Notably, Sainsbury’s supermarket competitors are continuing to sell CDs and DVDs, so the decision isn’t necessarily the shock headlines might suggest. There is no denying that CDs, DVDs and even Blu-ray Discs are in long-term decline: I’ve blogged before about the minor conflict this has placed me in, having worked for Philips on the consumer electronics industry’s launches of DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the company having co-developed the CD with Sony in the decade before, starting the rise of the 12cm ‘optical’ disc as a multi-faceted carrier of digital entertainment and media content.

But, progress is progress. The irony of all this is that the CD and its various offspring were meant to kill off the vinyl record, and yet that format has enjoyed a resurgence, with UK salesreaching 4.8 million in 2020. Indeed, the BPI says that LP sales will eclipse CDs this year for the first time since the late 1980s. “Demand [for CDs] has been following a long-term trend as consumers increasingly transition to streaming,” a BPI spokesperson told the BBC. “Resilient demand is likely to continue for many years, enhanced by special editions and other collectible releases. If some retailers now see the format as less of a priority, this will create a further opportunity for others, such as independent shops and specialist chains such as HMV, to cater to the continuing demand.”

While I rarely buy a Blu-ray edition of a film or a box set these days (I now share a house with my family and don’t have the space for masses of media as I had in my single days, so online services make a lot of sense) I do still buy music, with a combination of vinyl, CDs and digital copies, depending on my mood, collectability (e.g. special editions) and even whether I’m purchasing an album on spec, as opposed to a must-have I might want to have on display. I wouldn’t be the only one who sees vinyl collecting as much as an Instagram fetish as about music appreciation. I am also of the High Fidelity mentality, one of those middle-aged men who still derive pleasure from rifling through racks in musty independent shops staffed by ever-so-slightly intimidating cooler-than-you types. It’s an age-old tradition and long may it continue.

There is, though, still a place for the HMVs of this world. When the chain went into administration in December 2018, threatening anyone with entertainment media on their Christmas lists, it cast a pall over the future of buying and owning records. One of HMV’s attractions, from a mass consumer point of view, was that it made ‘supermarket’ shopping for entertainment easy, with multi-buy bundles (e.g. “2 for £10” offers) a cunning ploy to part cash for more than you might have entered a shop in search of. My CD collection is certainly the beneficiary of deals like that (along with regular holiday raids to American chains like the now defunct Tower Records and Amoeba, particularly during the days of more favourable dollar-pound exchange rates).

News that HMV will open 10 new outlets this year is a glimmer of hope on a couple of counts: firstly, COVID-19 has hit the ‘non-essential’ retailing sector hard thanks to high street lockdowns over the last year and a half. This has been accompanied the double- or even triple-whammy of media sales shifting to core online retailers like Amazon for home delivery convenience, along with the continuing growth of streaming services. Doug Putman, the Canadian entrepreneur who bought out the HMV brand from administration in 2019, and has since reopened 107 sites, has warned that the future of on-premises retailing in the UK is still not guaranteed.

Doug Putman
Picture: Joe Fiorino/Canadian Broadcasting Company

Putman says the government needs to urgently fix business rates, which are based on property rates but are notoriously slow to adjust to market levels, resulting in retailers and other high street businesses continuing to pay very high costs in the face of rising competition from online services with a lower cost base. “If the government doesn’t fix the rates, high streets are going to see a lot more vacancies,” says Putman. “Business rates just don’t make much sense. You can pay zero rent and not make a profit on a store as rates are too high.” 

As seen recently by announcements by Gap and other fashion retailers, in-store shopping is facing an existential crisis, and the pandemic hasn’t helped, even accelerating its demise. It is sad, says Putman. “Outside of the illness, when you look at people’s lives, a big part of that is walking outside and going to the high street and doing some shopping. When you see bookstores and coffee shops, and HMVs, closed and everything online it is not as much fun as it used to be. Hopefully people have seen this world where everything is Amazon and it is not all that great.”

Steven Wilson launches his album To The Bone at the HMV store in Oxford Street

One of HMV’s priorities will be to restore its flagship to London’s Oxford Street. The retailer opened its first HMV shop in 1921 when, as the Gramophone Company (which became EMI in 1931), it took over an old clothing shop at no 363. The shop was closed as part of the administration process at the end of 2018, but Putman has said he would like to find a new location in Central London. The prospects of that, however, amid continuing schism in both domestic and foreign tourism to London, might make it unlikely in the short term, given that the cost of commercial property in the city is driving retailers out, rather than drawing them in.

The other challenge for HMV will be market dynamics. While Sainsbury’s might be getting out of CD and DVD sales in the face of slowing turnover for the formats, others, like Tesco and Asda will continue to take “market share” by undercutting traditional music retailers - be it HMV or the independents. Industry writer Graham Jones has noted that supermarkets stick to a narrow choice of CDs from popular chart acts like Ed Sheeran, rather than back catalogues and more eclectic fare. Indeed, in 2008 Jones discovered an independent record shop buying bulk copies of the latest Coldplay CD from Morrisons, rather than wholesale from the record company because the supermarket offered them for less.

Speak to more hardcore music consumers, as opposed to impulse shoppers, and the love of physical media continues to drive behaviour. One of the pillars of CD and vinyl buying to begin with, over streaming, is the belief that it’s always available, a point that does suggest continuing Luddite sentiment that the Internet can go down, or that titles can disappear due to licensing windows ending. This conveniently ignores the fact that lugging 12-inch records and even CDs around isn’t so convenient if you don’t have anything to play them on. But there’s no denying the emotional bond that people - yes, like me - have to the physical format. “I can't imagine a world where media is not in your hands and not yours,” one seasoned consumer recently told the BBC in response to the Sainsbury’s news.

There are, then, two issues at work when it comes to HMV expanding, a little further, as it tries like so many other bricks-and-mortar retailers to remain afloat on the high street. Firstly, there is the inexorable rise of online shopping - regardless of the pandemic - which is a convenience that is now just an established fact. And secondly, in HMV’s case, there is the cultural shift away from physical ownership as the shift continues to digital.

“People obviously love going out shopping,” Doug Putman told the BBC this week. “They like touching and feeling and that’s something that online is not going to replace. He remains sure that the high street, despite increasingly gloomy predictions, will not become one long parade of charity shops and coffee chains, as so many have become. “I’m still very optimistic on the [HMV] business and business as a whole on the high street,” Putnam added. “I still think the high street is just something so special.” He has a point, but it’s one that flies in the face of convention, and that high streets have become centres of the service economy rather than the destinations of discovery they once were. I do know that if HMV were to open up round the corner from me I’d probably be forever in it, but I suspect that I - and perhaps my vinyl-loving teenage step-daughter - would be the exception.

Vinyl demand - again

It’s hard to comprehend that, over the last year or so, I’ve only been inside a record shop twice. I say “in” as I’ve done plenty of record shopping, it’s just that it’s been mostly via a browser. The two occasions in which I have crossed a physical threshold have been, respectively, for a private, rule-of-six-compliant gathering (when it was legal to do so), the other for a proper splurge, during last September’s Record Store Day ‘drop’, at the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham. On that occasion, it was a blessed reminder of the pleasure of rummaging through the racks of a well-curated music shop. 

Nothing wrong with Amazon, of course (and without mail order, life would have been extremely dull over the last 15 months), but there is, really, nothing to beat the admittedly fetishistic tactility of bringing home fresh vinyl. Traditionally it’s been depicted as the preserve of punters of a certain gender and, indeed, age group: when I lived in Paris I regularly spent Saturday afternoons in Gibert Joseph on Boulevard Saint-Michel, gorging on new vinyl releases amid a predominantly male, middle-aged clientele. But according to figures released this week, ahead of the first of two Record Store Day drops this summer, record buyers - and I mean of the mostly black, 12-inch variety - are getting significantly younger. 

A Record Store Day survey of more than 140 participating independent record shops recently revealed a “considerable rise” in the number of younger people buying vinyl. This doesn’t come as a great surprise: for the last two Christmases, both my step-daughters - 20 and 16 respectively - have asked for vinyl - a right old mix including The Vaccines, The Smiths, Rex Orange County, The 1975, Royal Blood, Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey. Their age is one thing, their gender is another - 60% of record store owners reported in the survey a growing number of women coming in to buy vinyl. 

“Record shops have had a history of being fairly male dominated spaces,” said Ashlie Green from David’s Music in Letchworth. “But the High Fidelity-esque days are definitely over as more and more women are enjoying vinyl. Not only are there more women behind the counter but the spaces themselves are much more welcoming to all people of all ages.” Green sees Record Store Day is a great way to open up shops to a more diverse clientele. “That list of releases is so eclectic and brings in music lovers from every background for what is normally a big party!”.

Jack LeFeuvre of Dundee’s Le Freak Records has also noted the trend towards younger vinyl buyers. “Nearly every artist will release a special vinyl edition as part of their album campaign and that is something that many music fans don’t want to miss out on.” LeFeuvre even thinks that younger consumers are driving a digital backlash: “If you love an artist there’s nothing more exciting than being able to hold the artwork, read the liner notes and enjoy the experience of listening to an album from start to finish. When we first opened we were always asked if it was a fad but it’s popularity has only continued to rise and proved the naysayers wrong”.

There’s no escaping the fact that streaming and digital music formats are here to stay, but the figures show that vinyl continues to grow, year on year. When then first Record Store Day took place in 2007, the UK was selling only 75,000 vinyl albums. Last year that number stood at more than five million, representing over £110 million in value. It’s something this year’s Record Store Day ‘ambassador’ Noel Gallager wants to see continue, and not just for his own sales (well, a bit): “I think if we can keep record shops open for as long as possible, we owe it to the young people of this country,” he says, plugging a compilation (Back The Way We Came: Vol 1) of his solo career so far, which is amongst today’s releases. “I’ll be getting involved,” Gallager says. “I’ve got something unique coming out. Hopefully the fans will like it and they’ll keep the flame burning for your local record shop.”

Record Store Day may be a momentary occasion - even if spread over the first drop today and a second on 17 July - but there’s no doubt that they stimulate interest in shopping for music in a traditional record shop (and, in these COVID-impacted times, locally, too). The challenge will be, as last year, getting the footfall amid continuing social distancing requirements. In pre-pandemic times, Record Store Day would be marked by packed shops and queues snaking around the block from dawn. 

Picture: Twitter/Banquet Records

This year’s drops will require shops to be somewhat limited, despite ‘general’ retailing being allowed to open up, but not everyone will be able to even do that. My local shop, Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, has reluctantly reverted to last year’s online model due to our borough having a surge of coronavirus infections (and, indeed, the highest infection rate in London). It’s not ideal, and last year’s online experience was fraught by technical issues caused by high demand for releases - great for business, but like trying to book an Ocado slot during the first weeks of lockdown last year. 

Once inside a shop - whether physically or virtually - this year’s drops offer something for everyone, with 340 special editions in the first one, including releases from Fontaines D.C., the Beastie Boys, Lady Gaga and Wolf Alice, and a further 200 in July, including the likes of Small Faces, The Clash and St. Vincent. The full list of releases for both drops can be found here. As for me, I’ve got my eye on a green vinyl 12-inch single of Ian Dury & The Blockheads’ Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Steven Wilson’s 40th anniversary remix of Ultravox’s Vienna, new coloured pressings of Marc Bolan & T. Rex’s Star King and Mark Lanegan’s Here Comes That Weird Chill, and a couple of live albums by The Police. 

If, however, push comes to shove, and I can have only one album from this first round, it’ll be The Truth by Prince. Originally only available as part of the Crystal Ball CD box-set, Record Store Day sees the first ever vinyl release of what has generally been described as one of the Purple One’s lost gems. Much of his work has been defined by relentless funk with a rock and pop edge, but on this recording Prince applied his bluesier instincts, with a more organic, acoustic sound that many felt, when it originally appeared in 1998, provided a fascinating insight into the late genius’s songwriting skills. 

The Truth also whets the appetite for the release, at the end of July, of Welcome 2 America, an apparently “lost” studio album recorded in 2010 and then shelved. Five years after Prince’s death, it will be a point of curiosity, especially amongst fans, but also from sceptics who feel that such posthumous releases were held back to begin with for a good reason. We shall see. Certainly won’t stop me buying it, however. Because that’s how we record buyers roll.

Tales from the other end of the planet: Steve Kilbey's Eleven Women

Music will do strange things to a fellow. In normal times, it’s what turfed me out of bed at Rude O'Clock to queue for a must-have “exclusive” on Record Store Day that would, quite probably, be freely available later in the year. And at a more sensible price, too. It’s the same mild insanity that once sent me on a 12-hour road trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album (for context, I was on holiday in Mammoth Lakes, California, and the nearest Tower Records was in Fresno. To me, a 750-mile round trip seemed a logical use of free time). 

By similar token, I once went to Montreux for the day just to see Prince. The lengthy return train journey, plus two days off work, was totally worth being crammed into the Jazz Festival's Stravinsky Auditorium, wedged against the stage edge with a heaving crowd of 4,000 behind me, just to see Prince deliver three sweaty, cramp-inducing hours of funk, with hardly any hits. It will always be one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.

My last marathon music trip was again in California: in May 2019 I found myself in Los Angeles for work and discovered that legendary Aussie wooze merchants The Church were playing up the road. The fact that "up the road” was Santa Cruz, a six-hour, 380-mile yomp up Interstate 5, was somewhat immaterial. What was important was that The Church were playing, in its entirety, Starfish, the record that introduced me to them. With the luscious Under The Milky Way and Reptile, it was an album of the moment, produced as so many were in that period with an emphasis on mood and jangly guitars. It was the band's deserved breakthrough, placing them in the pantheon of global Antipodean rock exports in the 1980s, like INXS, Crowded House and Midnight Oil. Until 2015 I’d somewhat lost touch with The Church, until I was alerted to them playing the poky New Morning club in Paris, where I was living at the time, and in promotion of a new album, Further Deeper. It was, however, something of a disappointment, largely down to frontman Steve Kilbey appearing somewhat worse for wear. Thankfully, the Santa Cruz experience four years later was a wholesale improvement, making the drive up from LA, the overnight stay and the glorious trip back down California's more scenic Highway 101 all worth it. You can read my recollections of that gig here.

Kilbey has, however, been a fascinating character to follow, from afar. An enigmatic frontman, his dabblings in music, poetry, painting and even acting, are not the symptoms of a dilettante character but, simply, manifestations of one of those people who just have an abundance of creativity about them. Thus, his latest solo album, Eleven Women, is the product of a prolific output over the last 30-odd years, being his 12th solo release (in 2014 it was reported that British-born Kilbey had 750 original songs registered with Australia’s copyright agency, the APRA). In fact, Eleven Woman was the fourth new record Kilbey had been involved in last year, like so many others in his profession, applying himself creatively during the lockdown at home in Sydney. Kilbey, however, hadn’t even planned to make a solo album, having expected to spend 2020 touring and recording with The Church.

Picture © Naomi Dryden-Smith

The result is an album that is at turns heartwarming and enjoyably baffling. Loosely, it’s a series of 11 sketches about women, similar in premise, I suppose, to Eleanor Rigby, but with a lens distinctly similar to that which Kilbey applies in his painting. You could - at risk of a convoluted metaphor - look at Eleven Women as pencil sketches with dabs of paint on some, full colour washes on others, and more intricate brushwork elsewhere. There is psychedelia, such as opener Poppy Byron, with its mesh of guitars - some jangly, some Balearic - and 60s-vibe congas. Or Where Gloria Meets Rachel, which purrs along with a beautiful 12-string and mandolin shimmer. Kilbey’s post-punk sensibilities show through on Woman Number 9, which has echoes of Bowie’s Berlin period, although the vocal owes more to Syd Barrett’s whimsy as much as anything else. 

Over the 11 tracks there is a driving curiosity to Eleven Women, as it takes subtle left and right turns, the music and Kilbey’s at-times obscure lyrics combining to maintain constant interest from start to finish.  Some, like Shiba Chiba and Queen Of Spades veer into pure pop, while the moody Lillian In Cerulean Blue takes Kilbey’s bassy vocal into Ian McCulloch territory, a clear contemporary of The Church's breakthrough early alt-rock era. Kilbey’s vocals are, it has to be said, never the surest, but then there are plenty out there (or were out there) who were never exactly pure, either, from Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Mark E. Smith and even Morrissey. It depends on what you’re looking for, I suppose. On a track like Josephine (no, not a cover of Chris Rea’s AOR staple), a rustic, folky ballad, Kilbey’s singing weaknesses are highlighted, but on the quirky Birdeen, it reaches a similar tone to Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett (yeah, yeah - lazy Australian trope, I know), which fits the song with perfection.

It was only after listening to Eleven Women that I discovered it was a classic lockdown production, recorded in just three days. That might suggest an artist in a hurry, but my reading was that Kilbey wanted to create immediacy. Albums can, if the people behind them are so inclined, take an inordinate amount of time to produce: just look at the decades between Peter Gabriel’s output, or the 18 months Bruce Springsteen laboured for to create Born To Run. Eleven Women doesn’t suffer from rapidity at all, even if Kilbey only recorded a couple of takes for each song. Rather than produce something slapdash, he’s created something warm, quirky, at times humorous, always genuine and quite unique.

It's the vinyl countdown - Record Store Day is with us again

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

To some of us, buying records - and I mean the round, mainly black objects with a hole in the middle - is more than the fetish those who remain indifferent to physical music ownership might think it is. Each to their own. For everyone who maintains that Spain can't be beaten for a holiday (remember them?) another will insist on Greece. For Nike see Adidas. You get my point.

Music's digitisation, first with the CD and, latterly, streaming services, has undoubtedly set free consumption, and facilitated it into our busy, mobile, portable lives. However, it also abandoned the pleasures of opening a brand new record, removing it from the sleeve while still studying the artwork and liner notes, and then sitting down to listen. Well, at least, that's my justification. It's also why I'm one of those happy to be ensnared by Record Store Day, the normally annual vinyl-buying splurge designed to help out independent music dealers as they compete with the few remaining record chains, the Amazons of this world, the supermarket checkout impulse-buy points-of-sale, and streaming.

COVID-19 has forced RSD to this year postpone the regular April fixture into three smaller 'drops' - the first in August, a second today and the third next month. August's drop met with no shortage of custom, with record shops reporting brisk in-store business and the now-familiar queues forming at sunrise by punters keen to bag special releases and the odd rarity. It is, at the end of the day, a purely indulgent, self-serving frenzy, but the punters get something unique and the shops do a decent bit of business. Those that get it right, of course.

One emporium local to me, which didn't open physically on the day (unlike plenty who did), decided to do its RSD trading entirely online, with a clunky system by which you registered interest in a release in advance and then waited on the day for an e-mail at 6pm to say you could then go online and buy it. When this didn't work at the time when everything was supposed to be up and running everyone went to the shop's website and promptly crashed it, rendering Record Store Day a frustrating Saturday evening hitting 'refresh' a lot. For  RSD read RSI. Now, I appreciate that the shop in question may have stayed shut out of consideration for its staff, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't do well for customer loyalty. And makes me wish I'd been queuing up at the crack of dawn to spend my money somewhere that managed to get it right.

Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Stupid or not, we got what we wanted from retailers who had got their e-commerce acts together: releases as disparate as The The's latest RSD-only single (a regular occurrence, but you wish Matt Johnson would do a new album, rather than these one-offs...) and a compilation of Memphis soul obscurities, the obligatory release from The Dame (BowieNowChanges) and a vinyl reissue of Peter Bruntnell's sublime Normal For Bridgwater. Happy days. Today's drop will be a little more modest (just 89 releases as opposed to August’s 345), but that may not be the point: whether you’re interested in a Two-Tone 40th anniversary compilation, Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, The Yardbirds classic Roger The Engineer or even Britney Spears’ Oops! …I Did It Again, it's sometimes worth taking a punt on RSD, buying something you've either never heard before, or haven't owned since you had it as a crudely taped copy back in the day. That’s half the fun of record curation in middle age.

“The real thing, the real joy, is in the tactile relationship, between you and the artist,” says Simon Tyler, who runs the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham, Kent. He points to the physical object itself: “This square piece of cardboard with a 12-inch round record slipped inside," he says, “It's a magical object.” Not surprisingly, Simon says that the magic begins with the record shop itself, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The imposition of lockdown on in-store retailing severely curtailed the pleasure of browsing and discovering something you didn't even know you wanted. Or in the case of shops like Simon’s, a natter with a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor. 

“Firstly,” he says, “you hear the shop as you walk along the street. The strain of music drifting out of the double doors turns your head. ‘What’s that? Is it? Oh God, yes! I haven’t heard THAT for years!’.” Once inside, the tactile experience draws you in further. “You see row upon row of albums calling to you like a siren,” Simon says, describing his own shop’s experience, in a calming corner of Kent's oldest and quaintest market town. “You walk across the threshold and let your fingers browse across the top of the records. You see familiar pictures and faces, and new images that offer a strange fascination. They tease you; they reveal and yet conceal the secrets within.”

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Simon’s view is obviously biased, owing to running a generously stocked shop full of vinyl records, but he’s spot on. Some people can enter a fashion boutique and feel tempted to buy the place up; record shops, for me, hold the same appeal, such is my interest in buying something new or something worth hearing anew.

There is, as Simon says, a magical experience to opening up a freshly-bought record, but to me it is more about the listening experience. That, I recognise, sounds like I've swallowed the music industry's Kool-Aid and gone back for seconds. Records are, though, magical objects, which may go to explain figures from the BPI, the UK's recording industry body, earlier this year which revealed that many people who buy LPs never actually get round to playing them (and not just those like me who acquire too many and then struggle to find time to listening to them). 

Moreover, the BPI found that as many as a fifth doesn't even have anything to play their vinyl on. This reflects strangely in light of vinyl enjoying sales growth for 12 consecutive years in the UK, now accounting for one in every eight albums bought as a physical format. 

Over 4.3 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK last year, a 4% increase on 2018. In the United States, vinyl sales have just surpassed sales of CDs for the first time since the 1980s, accounting for $232 million of music sales in the first six months of this year, as opposed to just under $130 million for CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That, the RIAA has revealed, is a 4% increase for LPs and a 48% decrease for the shiny silver discs. This might also reflect the times we’re in, but despite my love of vinyl I’ve still continued to buy CDs that I might want to play in the car. However, seeing as lockdown and all of that has meant I’ve hardly used my car since March, my listening has been largely done at home over the last six months. 

However, while all this love for vinyl is admirable, it can’t be ignored that physical sales continue to drop, and the pandemic isn’t helping. Industry figures have shown that overall physical music sales continue to drop exponentially as streaming has grown, both for ‘free’, ad-supported services as well as premium subscriptions. That, at the end of the day, is not good news for the artists themselves, who get a lesser cut of the action than they do with physical sales. For the so-called ‘heritage acts’, like Fleetwood Mac, who’ve re-released back catalogue material on vinyl to relatively healthy receipts, physical sales might offset lower income from streaming. For those in middling industry positions, now also denied the opportunity to play live - which, these days, is what makes them money, the virus has hit them hard.

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Record Store Day, at least, will provide a momentary fillip for the artists who take part - even if their releases aren’t even taken out of the shrink wrap, a phenomenon identified by the BPI in its All About The Music yearbook. “A proportion of people are buying vinyl because they’re a superfan,” said Rob Crutchley, the book’s author, when it came out in April. “Even if they don’t actually have a turntable they’re still keen to support the artist and have the artefact itself."

"There is still a strong core of fans who also value the opportunity to acquire, own or gift recorded music on physical format,” Cruchley added, pointing to the custom of artists using Record Store Day to give fans something unique. “Sometimes it can be because they’re catalogue titles that are being re-pressed in a new edition - maybe a run on a different coloured vinyl - other times it might be a new title that has a limited press on a certain format.” 

This, then, points to the irrationality of consumerism overall. I’ll be the first to ’fess up - mainly to my partner - at buying albums that already exist in my collection. In some cases, it’s for new sonic experiences - remastered, refreshed editions on 180g vinyl that have improved upon recordings made many years ago and now benefit from modern studio and reproduction techniques. Or they’re albums bought on CD early in the day, often when the new digital discs were effectively crude transfers from analogue recordings. In some cases, they’re albums I’ve only ever heard on cassette tape, furtively 'borrowed' from my brother and recorded while my dad was out at work. 

“The joy of records is in the experience,” says Simon Tyler. “That joy is deeply personal, and long may it continue.”  Record buying is, then, one of the cycles of life. There is little real justification for buying an album again “because it sounds better”, but the same applies to replacing that VHS copy of The Godfather, with the DVD, then the Blu-ray Disc and ultimately the 4K Blu-ray version to play on your super-duper new flatscreen TV. And I know you wouldn’t buy a new copy of a classic book because it’s been given a new cover, but there’s a difference. There really is.

Is it any wonder?

And so the anniversary of David Bowie's death comes around again. A properly balanced individual would simply get over it, as they would the deaths of any figure they'd held in high regard but never knew personally. Bowie is, though, one of only two artists I’ve properly mourned for, the other being John Martyn. And when I say “mourn”, I don’t mean the lowering of flags and wearing a black veil for a month, but a profound reflection on - as irrational as this sounds - the loss. In the case of Bowie, it was the loss of a creative soul who’s music, and all the different phases of that music - the winsome folk, the glam, the soul, the post-punk, the pop, the grunge...the endless reinvention, basically - captured my interest almost inadvertently. 

But in the wake of Bowie dying, on this day four years ago and just 48 hours after releasing his final album, Blackstar, I discovered another Bowie, one that I have also come to miss as much as a personal and now absent friend. In the flood of archive video clips that started surfacing on social media, documenting both live performances as well as the few on-camera interviews he did, I encountered a Bowie brimming with warmth and a distinct south London charm. Unencumbered by the addictions and foibles of the 1970s, the 1990s Bowie was funny and relaxed. Indeed, backstage footage of The Dame on what would be his final tour saw not a rock deity but a bloke you would willingly want to spent time with, down the pub, in a restaurant, out on the town. 

Somehow this not only completed my picture of Bowie, but also my appreciation of him, as if the incredible body of music and the bold artistic adventure hadn’t been enough. The cap of it all was a train journey back to Paris from the Montreux Jazz Festival when I watched the entire concert film of Bowie’s Reality Tour. Recorded in Dublin in 2003, and running to almost two-and-a-half hours, over 30 songs it not only captured Bowie at his best and captured Bowie’s best, but faithfully portrayed the relaxed, funny, easy-going Bowie that bandmates like Gail Ann Dorsey and Earl Slick would later tell a BBC documentary was what typified him on that tour. 

Sad, then, that health issues ended his live career in 2004, and until the bombshell of 2013, when the single Where Are We Now and, later, The Next Day album, appeared out of the blue, his public appearances were limited to a few guest slots, such as performing Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb with David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006, and his hilarious cameo in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (“Chubby little loser!”).

Since his death there has been no shortage of posthumous releases of archive material and rarities, all of which this fan has been more than willing to Hoover up. Yes, I’m the record company’s dream punter, buying super deluxe editions without question, but just as I will defend most live albums (if recorded well enough and capture a genuinely great performance), the Bowie box sets have provided new opportunity to appreciate the music, the charisma and the artist anew.

And, there seems, plenty more to come. On what would have been Bowie’s 73rd birthday two days ago, Parlophone announced the next set of baubles to prise open the fan’s wallet. Over the next six weeks an EP, David Bowie: Is It Any Wonder?, will be released online in six increments, starting with - and available now - a previously unreleased version of The Man Who Sold The World. The EP’s following five tracks will be released on a weekly basis from 17 January onwards. Then, on this year’s Record Store Day, 18 April, Parlophone will release ChangesNowBowie, effectively a recording of studio rehearsals for Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden on 8 January, 1997. Track listings have not yet been released, but the concert featured classics like Space Oddity, The Jean Genie, Queen Bitch, Scary Monsters (And Supercreeps) and other more obscure gems and a cover - with Lou Reed - of The Velvet Underground’s I'm Waiting for the Man. And, of course, I’ll be in the queue at 6am to buy it.

Put the needle on the record...

(Picture: Naomi Davison)

In a week that began with the ever-youthful Gary Crowley talking about his 40 years listening to, playing and talking about music, one which continued with the premiere of a documentary about singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe's idiosyncratic approach to making music tangible, Saturday arrives with a celebration of the album itself. For today is the second annual National Album Day, a combined UK initiative of the BPI, the Entertainment Retailers Association and the Association of Independent Music, designed to embrace all that is good, still, about the album as a complete body of musical work.

It comes at a time of continuing mixed emotions about how we consume our music. Just last week I reviewed Sheryl Crow’s album Threads which, she says, is likely to be her last due to the changing consumption model of consumers effectively sequencing their own listening via the pic’n’mix of streaming services. And, yet, at the same time, the 50th anniversary re-release of The Beatles’ Abbey Road went straight into the album chart at No.1 when it was released two weeks ago, something of a reaffirmation of the album format from the very band which, according to music journalist David Hepworth, invented the LP with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 52 years ago.

According to National Album Day's organisers, the album as a packaged piece of music remains a robust proposition. 143 million albums, they say, were either streamed, downloaded or purchased in the UK in 2018, a 6% increase on 2017 and worth approximately £1.3 billion. A healthy state of affairs, it must be said, and made shinier by the 4.2 million vinyl LPs sold last year, although this must be still seen as just under 3% of the overall number of albums shifted, even if representing a 25-year high for the format.

Where all these sales are coming from is, actually, hard to identify: friends of mine who used to be dyed-in-the-wool record buyers are now just as likely to be listening to new albums via Spotify, unfussed by either the lack of tactile interaction or the reduced fidelity created by streaming compression. And, yet, the notion that young consumers are eschewing albums-whole for the selectivity of YouTube on mobile-friendly platforms could equally be a misnomer, if the experience of accompanying my 14-year-old step-daughter into Kingston’s Banquet Records recently was anything to go by. What may, though, be preventing today’s teenagers from replicating how I began my record collection at the same age may simply be economics. Paying more than £20 for a vinyl record is certainly beyond most pocket money budgets if serious collation is going to take place.

Visiting the HMV at Bluewater yesterday it was notable how much vinyl had crept back into a shop space that would, as recently as a couple of years ago been occupied by CDs. However, here lies the peculiarity of HMV’s continued survival strategy: the Bluewater shop's most prominent racks contained a strange mixture of new and old - Elbow’s brand new album Giants Of All Sizes sat next to ‘staff picks’ like Steely Dan’s Aja. Nothing wrong with either of those records (and stay tuned for my own review of the Elbow release), but there was an incongruity in what was prominent and what wasn’t. Elsewhere yesterday HMV - the chain that less than a year ago called in administrators for the second time in a decade, resulting in dozens of branch closures - opened its biggest ever retail space, ‘The Vault’ in Birmingham. Covering 25,000 square feet, it promises to be a “nirvana for music and film fans”, with dedicated spaces for vinyl, CDs, Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, as well as a stage for in-store performances. It is a brave move by the chain: even when musicians themselves are seeing their own incomes challenged by the relatively meagre returns from online music services (most make more money these days from touring than they do from releasing records), music retailing via so-called ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets is under threat from the twin terrors of high rents and the likes of Amazon.

In this mix lies the emotional act of buying a record. If you can buy an album for £1 less on Amazon and without the hassle of going out to buy it or the add-on costs of bus fares or car parking, plus that latte in Costa you weren’t planning but had anyway, record shops are heading for an even darker future. That places like Kingston’s Banquet and my favourite, Casbah Records in Greenwich, still appear to be thriving - if challenged by prevailing ‘market conditions’ - is a welcome throwback. HMV’s owner Doug Putnam still believes the need for a physical, tangible music consumption experience is driving their belief in opening a store like The Vault. “We know that people want to stream music when they're out, but also want to physically go in store and purchase something special, something they love, to add it to their collection at home,” he told the BBC.

"We all want human interaction but do we want to pay for it?", countered retail analyst Richard Hyman. "I think [The Vault] is a very courageous venture but it'll need more than courage to make the economics stack up." There is a view that I share that record shops are being kept open by two factors: firstly, old heads like me, clinging on to physical music ownership much as their hairlines recede and their waistlines expand, and secondly, younger consumers being drawn to the niche experience of buying ‘a vinyl’. Certainly a visit, the other Saturday, to Soho’s Sister Ray Records supported the first of these views, judging by the exclusively male, middle-aged clientele.

Their interest, I’m sure, is much like mine - the discovery of albums as complete experiences. It’s why this year’s National Album Day - which is being championed by Elbow themselves, Lewis Capaldi and Mark Ronson - is focusing on the theme of ‘Don’t Skip’, to encourage the discovery and enjoyment of albums as total bodies of work, to be consumed from first to last track as a single, arcing narrative. It’s the consumption experience that David Hepworth drew from with his brilliant tome A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives, which traces the evolution of the LP through his own experience, his eyes being opened by 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, before seeing it disappear with the advent of the CD and its remote-controlled skipability. ‘Long playing records’ had existed way before The Beatles’ opus but, argued Hepworth, Pepper turned the LP into something other than a vestibule for songs, a package of listening and looking. It was probably the first concept album, launching a series of ‘themed’ records from ever more progressive artists, including The Beatles themselves, but also The Who with Pete Townshend’s rock operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia, Bowie and his recurring astronautical subplots, and of course the prog giants like King Crimson and Pink Floyd, each presenting music as theatrical suites.

Hepworth’s book got to the nub of the album buying experience. It may be considered a cliche to think of nerdish types in record shops pouring over the everlasting trope of gatefold sleeves and Storm Thorgerson cover art, but it was (and still is) part of the total act of ownership, right up to and including the moment the needle was placed on the intro groove, to flipping over to Side 2 and then watching the stylus go back and forth on the outro groove. Hepworth’s description of shared house ownership and the obsession of male housemates with speaker cables and hi-fi separates is certainly one I can appreciate. I’m still a hi-fi separates man to this day. Hepworth, however, saw the beginning of the end for this experience when he first encountered a Sony Walkman when interviewing Stewart Copeland in 1980. If he wasn’t all that enamoured by Sony’s miniaturised music experience, with its tinny headphones, the next few years, with CDs and the arrival of MTV, sounded the death knell for Hepworth for the album as that total, beginning-middle-end experience. Selective consumption had now arrived. Skip-play technology had done for the album. “You can fill your room with the very best loudspeakers,” Hepworth concluded in his book. “You can spend your money on a pristine new copy of your favourite album. It can be produced on the highest quality vinyl. It can feel reassuringly weighty in your hand,” he says of today’s ‘new’ vinyl experience. The really difficult bit, he says whimsically, “will be convincing yourself that for the next 40 minutes you have nothing better to do than listen to that record. Because that’s how it was back in the golden age of the LP. It seemed as though we had all the time in the world.”

Perhaps we have lost patience. Perhaps the instant reassurance some have from looking at their phones every ten seconds is a sign that we have become digitally restless. Strange, then, that the Netflix and Amazon model is largely catered towards those who can binge through hours of box sets in a single sitting. Why we can’t do that with albums, I can’t say, although I could very easily, given the opportunity. As I write this I’m currently on the second consecutive and complete listen to Elbow’s Giants Of All Sizes. Perhaps it’s a rare luxury to be able to do so on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s how I’ve always preferred to hear albums, even delaying getting out of the car to finish up the final track of a CD. From first to final, before repeating and listening all over again, that’s the correct way to do it.

“Some artists see the album as a collection of short stories,” Elbow themselves say in the official National Album Day press release. “We see the album as a novel. Songs are often included or omitted on account of the balance of the overall record rather than on their individual merits.” The band themselves see the television binge model as a parallel: “To suggest the album is under threat because of [streamed] playlists is to suggest that movies will disappear on account of television, they are two completely different things.” Geoff Taylor, the BPI chief executive, backs this view: “The album is where an artist gives the fullest expression to their creative vision at a given moment in time. It’s a musical novel, where multiple themes can intertwine to deliver a cultural experience deeper than a single song, the summit of a performer’s art.” Album ownership, like dogs being for more than Christmas, shouldn’t be about a single 24 hours, be it National Album Day, Record Store Day, or any other such industrial cause. But with some viewing this medium as continuing to hang by a thread, a little indulgence can’t do any harm.

Record store daze

Two weeks on from this year’s Record Store Day, Danny Baker may have finally calmed down. His Twitter rant, on the eve of RSD, about record company "vampires" exploiting poor saps like me with limited-edition, available-for-one-day-only pressings of records we probably already own, was particularly fruity. Over several tweets Baker (for almost half a century a voracious record collector himself) frothed with some justification about the Record Store Day "racket" and "this stupid treasure hunt" being "so much less about indy [record] stores than creepy eBay limited editions". And those were some of the milder remarks.

While some of Baker’s eruptions were a tad overblown, he made a good point in that local independent record shops - much like a Christmas present puppy - should be for life, not just one single day. This is an argument supported by Garth Cartwright, who has just written the deliciously insightful Going For A Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop.

"Record Store Day certainly increases turnover for shops and gets them some attention," says Garth, "but the whole RSD 'limited edition vinyl' thing is a scam. You need to be nice to record shops like you are nice to your mother - all year round, not only one day a year!".

Nevertheless, record shops this year reported another day of boffo business, with some doing as much turnover on that day's trading than in the usually moribund entire post-Christmas period. This year’s best sellers, such as David Bowie’s triple-live LP Welcome To The Blackout, helped generate a 16% increase in RSD album sales, with 60,000 LPs sold in the UK as part of the exercise. Rachel Lowe of Brighton’s Vinyl Revolution told the industry trade magazine Music Week that April 21 had been "the best day we've had since opening" and that "the revenue will help our young shop immensely but the publicity and goodwill will last much longer".

Picture: Surrey Comet

Jon Tolley of Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames said that RSD was "hands down our busiest day of the year" and a "great shot in the arm" for the business. He told Kingston’s local newspaper, the Surrey Comet, that Banquet had seen more than 1,000 people queuing up, some since 6.30am the previous morning. "Our business year revolves around Record Store Day, which really lasts at least a fortnight," he said. "It’s a great time to not only celebrate physical music but also the weird and wonderful independent shops who sell it."

Such "weird and wonderful" shops provide a strong component of Garth Cartwright’s book, for which the New Zealand-born author travelled the UK, talking to shop owners, record collectors and even musicians to map both the national history of record shops as well as the state of play today. Going For A Song builds a fascinating picture of record buying culture that transcends the traditional tropes of musty shops staffed by cocky cynics like Jack Black's High Fidelity character, as well as some of the characters who made record shops cathedrals of their worlds - famous patrons such as Bowie and Elton John, and former employees like Dead Or Alive's Pete Burns, Dusty Springfield and, of course, the aforementioned Baker. Some shops, such as Dobells in London's Charing Cross Road, played an integral part in the evolution of Britain's post-war musical habits as a mecca for jazz, blues and folk records, while Liverpool's NEMS department store - whose record section was managed by Brian Epstein - became key to The Beatles' own story, and was, by the 1960s, the most successful record shop outside of London.

Garth Cartwright

Incredibly, though Ground Zero for the British Record Shop was neither in London or in the rock and pop era: it was Cardiff. "Cardiff is home to Spiller’s, the world’s oldest record shop," reveals Garth. "It was founded in 1894 to sell wax cylinders (amongst other electrical goods) and developed its focus on only selling records in the 1920s - and continues doing so today. Why is sleepy Cardiff home to such a historic shop? Because in the late 19th Century it was a booming port and much of the coal trade came through here - a boom town - which meant there were people with lots of money around. And people with money tend to buy new technology. Wax cylinders and wax cylinder players weren’t cheap when they came on the market."

It's long been believed that, as word reached these shores in the 1950s of rock'n'roll, Elvis and the blues, cities with strong maritime links became gateways for imported American music. Garth says there's a little bit of myth to this theory: "Liverpool, another booming port city, and Manchester, a massive industrial city, became home to important record shops," he says, "but I actually don’t think the transatlantic liners provided so many records. What I’ve learnt is that the UK has long been obsessed with American music - minstrels were popular here in the 19th Century and there was a banjo craze at the start of the 20th. Then jazz exploded across the UK, post-World War One, and record labels - both majors and indies - were releasing some jazz, blues and country '78s from then on."

Garth notes that the record industry in the 1960s was (and still is) profoundly London-centric. From a record shop point of view, however, London is only a bit-part player in the story. "Brian Epstein could not get The Beatles a record deal as the London-centric labels were absolutely contemptuous of music from outside 'the Smoke'. That he did came through him being such a good client of HMV, with NEMS selling large amounts of [their] records."

Regional shops became intertwined with their local music culture. "There were regional music scenes, like Merseybeat, across the UK and all reliant on their local record shops," Garth says. "There was no Radio 1 until 1967, so the record shop was where you went to hear new music. The Beatles used to colonise NEMS’ listening booths! The Diskery in Birmingham - still trading today! - was a big place for the early Northern Soul DJs. Selectadisc in Nottingham too. Not that these shops were specialist soul shops - they sold everything but ensure they got R&B 45s for the local mod scene."

Specialist music shops, however, continue to be resilient in the UK music scene, albeit in proportionally smaller numbers than mainstream outlets. "There remain a handful of 'ethnic' record shops that continue to sell music related to their communities," says Garth. "Southall - which once was home to great Indian record shops - now has the Afghan Music Centre. At the bottom of Brick Lane there’s Sangeeta Ltd which still stocks CDs and cassettes from Muslim artists in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Melodi Muzik in Green Lanes is a Turkish shop that focuses on Turkish music and musical instruments and football paraphernalia. Supertone in Acre Lane, Brixton, is an old school reggae shop that also stocks what the owner calls 'big people music', i.e. old R&B, Elvis and Jim Reeves LPs that older West Indians love. In Brighton there’s The Record Album, a vinyl-only shop established in 1948 and run since 1960 by George Ginn - he specialises in soundtracks and showtune albums. George is a lovely man and has a very eclectic stock in the sense of stocking some really weird albums - John Wayne’s one spoken word album! Fabulous!".

The depth and scale of Garth's research for the book is impressive, as is his clear enthusiasm for the characters and stories he encountered along the way. But the book does also reflect the clearly changing landscape: "I landed [in the UK] in 1991 and record shops then were everywhere - from megastores run by Virgin, HMV and Tower Records, to junk chains on the high street like Our Price and basement dance shops selling techno 12"s and beyond. Today very little of that remains: I miss places like Mole Jazz and Beano’s - Europe’s largest second-hand record shop in Croydon. The Tower Records in Piccadilly had really deep stock."

Greenwich's finest - Casbah Records on Record Store Day

© Simon Poulter 2018

Today, says Garth, there are still plenty of good independents on offer with, even, new players opening up: "After the crash of the CD and the megastores, and the high street Top 40 chains, people have retrenched and decided that they like buying vinyl and going to good independent stores. Eel Pie Records [in Twickenham] is a great example of a new shop that has a musical vision - Phil and Kevin love music and have worked in the industry for years so they’ve gone about opening a record shop that reflects their passion and knowledge. They’re not attempting to compete with the supermarkets. Instead, they’re championing fresh, independent music. This is the way forward."

"There’s lots of good shops," he adds, from the specialists I mentioned before through to longstanding outlets like Reckless Records, Sound Of The Universe, Honest Jon’s, Soul Brother and new places like If Music in Soho and Lorenzo’s Record Shack in Peckham." Garth, who lives in south-east London, regularly visits Camberwell's Rat Records as well as my own local emporium, the very brilliant Casbah Records in Greenwich (dangerously located just 600 yards from my front door...).

While the record shop landscape has changed, as chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and Our Price have vanished from high streets over the last couple of decades, the business is still relatively vibrant. Margins might be thin and rents might be high, and while we shouldn't get too carried away by the so-called vinyl "boom", shops like Casbah remain the knowledgeable, if slightly intimidating experiences they've always been. Garth is somewhat cautious: "I think the club-going, DJ-ing youth are into buying records on vinyl, but most people just want to listen to music on their phones." Times have changed, he says: "Back in the 1950s and '60s most people bought their records in Smiths and Currys, and Mantovani was the most popular album seller in the UK," but adds that there remains a resilient core of consumers - semi-obsessive middle-aged blokes like me as well as Millennials and hipsters - keeping the trade going. "So long as there is a developing community of record shoppers I believe there’s a future for good record shops," he concludes.

---

Garth Cartwright discusses Going For A Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop in the next Word In Your Ear podcast - details of which will be published here. The book is published by The Flood Gallery and can be ordered via their website.

Mood music

Picture: Philips

If there's one thing I know about music it's that it's there when I need it most: soothing on a Sunday morning, uplifting on a Saturday night, energising on my way to work and relaxing on my way home. Just yesterday I finally got around to playing my Record Store Day purchase of David Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), and hearing rich and previously unreleased arrangements of Heroes, TVC15, Ziggy Stardust and Alabama Song put me in an extraordinary soak of good humour.

Several years ago, when I was working at Philips, we collaborated with the Canadian neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in a PR exercise to tie together the findings of his book, This Is Your Brain on Music - a deep examination of how we humans relate to music - with our personal audio products, used by gym bunnies in their endorphin-generating, natural high-producing workouts.

Levitin's book outlined how elements of music - timbre, rhythm, pitch, harmonies and so on - influenced neural function, neurochemistry and even cognitive psychology. Music, Levitin revealed, has a profound effect on cognitive, emotional and even physical health, and from an early age, too: the auditory system of a human fetus is fully functional after just 20 weeks and year-old infants will respond to the music they’d been exposed to while still in the womb. At the other end of life, Levitin wrote, music had a beneficial part to play in the care of Alzheimer’s patients, helping them connect with the depths of their ravaged memories. Music therapy has indeed been a well known practice for almost 60 years, dating back to 1959 when American composer Paul Nordoff and special needs teacher Clive Robbins started the work that would later lead to the Nordoff-Robbins charity and the incredible work it does in helping children and adults (such as stroke victims) with cognitive skill development.

Picture: Bank of England

So, knowing that music has a profound effect on mood, what about its effect on the economy? In a speech published earlier this week by Andy Haldane (left), the very forward-thinking chief economist of the Bank of England, he outlined the role of so-called 'Big Data' in providing semantic insight into human behaviour and how, in good times and bad, that might influence the economy. "Capturing people’s true sentiments and preferences is devilishly difficult," Haldane revealed, saying that "non-traditional" methods of opening up the consumer's mood were under examination.

"To give one recent example, data on music downloads from Spotify has been used, in tandem with semantic search techniques applied to the words of songs, to provide an indicator of people's sentiment. Intriguingly, the resulting index of sentiment does at least as well in tracking consumer spending as the Michigan survey of consumer confidence," a reference to a study which interpreted key themes from lyrics in songs in the Billboard Top 100 in the US and how their popularity corresponded rises and falls on market indices like the Nasdaq, Dow Jones and the S&P 500. The study, called The Rhythm of Markets, found that even a 1% increase in the frequency of the word "anticipation" led to a 0.444% drop in the Nasdaq.

Haldane also suggested that music might not be alone: "People’s tastes in books, TV and radio may also offer a window on their soul," he said, adding that gaming , in particular, might also be useful, since some games providing virtual environments that made observing behaviour easier than in the real world. Multiplayer online games and the fantasy World of Warcraft already had "primitive" economies that economists were studying, Haldane said, adding that such games could facilitate the study of player reactions to policy intervention on monetary and regulatory issues.

Quite how all this will have a defining impact on fiscal policies remains to be seen. I'm sure Mr. Haldane's need to be tapped into every vital sign affecting economic mood gives credence to mining Spotify download statistics to see what its subscribers might be feeling, given the sometimes impulsive nature of plugging into the platform to satisfy a particular musical craving. But as someone who still prefers physical music formats (and the purchasing of it) to lift my mood, the only fiscal correlation I can draw from the mood created by musical habits is that my disposable income will be significantly less in the days and weeks immediately after Record Store Day, or when there's a decent-sized box set on the way.

Picture: Spotify