shopping by category. In the fullness of time each of these sub-divisions would demand a store of its own but for the moment it was just about possible to hold the fragile consensus together. By the mid ‘70s it was evident that there was a market for just about anything and so just about anything could be released. In the end the only retailers who could afford to invest in this increasing catalogue, even if that meant stocking one copy of everything released by the major record companies, were thenew breed of megastores. These might be modelled on HMV’s flagship shop on Oxford Street, which had whole departments devoted to new formats like cassette (the leading sound carrier by the early ‘80s) and sub-genres like comedy, international, disco, reggae, soundtracks or classical. I worked in HMV for a while in the ‘70s and we sent back more product than most record shops could even dream of stocking.
records did so as a statement and they wished to buy them from people who shared their worldview. The era’s counter-culture marketing demanded its own sales environment. When the first Virgin shop opened on the first floor above a shoe shop in Oxford Street in 1971 it was like moving into our own place after years having to do your parents’ bidding. Here you were encouraged to hang around, to recline on huge scatter cushions and listen to the latest from the Flying Burrito Brothers on headphones as bulky as a helicopter pilot’s. Arrayed around the place were the other accoutrements of the hippy society: stars-and-stripes rolling papers, bottles of patchouli oil, photographs of half-naked girls dressed as nuns, copies of IT, “Keep on truckin” posters, obscure novels like Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America and even, amazingly when you thing about it, bootlegs. Dotted elsewhere in Soho were fearsomely hip outlets like Musicland, One Stop and Harlequin, which specialised in imports. If you were
there on Friday afternoon when the importers came hotfoot from Heathrow and dispensed their cargo of fat, shrink-wrapped Al Green, Isaac Hayes and Little Feat new releases straight from the back of the van, you felt as if you were buying your milk straight from the cow. It wasn’t long before every high street in the nation seemed to have its own funky little record shop, generally named after a much loved record or band: Harum, Spanish Moon, Bonzo, Moondance, Happy Trails or Mr Fantasy, Most of these were far from robust enterprises, run more for love than for profit. You would begin to put interesting legends on the divider cards in the racks, marking the beginning of creeping categorisation. The world of music could no longer be encompassed by “Pop A-Z”. We now had country, blues, heavy metal, reggae, soul, West Coast, funk and the rest. As the number of releases grew it was taken for granted that some people would begin
A shop like this, with its massive buying power, could afford to be committed to both breadth and depth. Of course we’d have Dark Side Of The Moon piled high and sold at list price but we’d also sell you a stereo rest record (“I am now standing in the right channel”), a cassette of train noises, and import copy of You Don’t Have To Be Jewish, the Japanese three-record set of Lotus by Santana, a quadraphonic copy of Tubular Bells and the much applauded, difficult to source and bloody impossible to sell album Lost At Sea by Glenn Phillips out of the Hampton Grease Band. The prevailing economics of the record business at the time meant that ‘classics’ were often being deleted and devotees had no alternative means of tracking obscure releases down. Thus if you had a source of import copies of Michael Nesmith’s Tantamount To Treason or you knew how to get your hands on Pete Atkin’s Driving Through Mythical America you could have customers almost weeping with gratitude. Smaller retailers began to specialise. The people who had been capitalising on the revived interest in singles during punk started shops like Rough Trade, where they would sell you anything as long as it wasn’t popular. These were the shops you weren’t supposed to tread in unless you were qualified. These were the real-life outlets that spawned the mythical Championship Vinyl in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Then the dance music shops emerged, dispensing expensive, inscrutablypackaged 12-inch singles from a counter built artificially high to keep customers in the preferred position of subservience. Record retailing has always been beset by the problem that the kind of staff knowledgeable enough to be able to help the public are generally the very people least inclined to do any such thing. The people I worked with didn’t need catalogues or microfiches. Their entire professional pride was invested in their ability to tell a customer that the track they were vainly trying to describe was Rock Candy by Montrose and you could get it on a Two Originals double cheaply but it was a German pressing and not as good as the original album which we stocked on import – “just down there on your left in Groups, M” – without actually making eye contact with them. MARKETING WASN’T INVENTED in the ‘80s. It only seemed that way. The new unit of consumption, the CD, no longer seemed to require trained handlers. You didn’t have to hold a CD like a cocktail waiter’s tray, taking care not to smudge the playing surface. Its square corners, relatively robust materials and more stackable dimensions made it ideally suited to the same techniques that applied to the selling of soup. The fact that it did not have the same materiality, the fetish value, the appeal to the soul that a record could have, seemed to make it more suited to the new forms of exploitation. Nobody ever fell in love with a CD, let alone a cassette, which suited the new forms of dispensation.
Top: Today at Rough Trade East in London. Above: HMV’s famed listening booths in the 1960’s. Top Right: A slide of the Dobells shop.