I have a strong memory of scratching a Velvet Underground itch in the late Eighties by walking into the HMV on Oxford Street in London, looking for a new copy of Nico’s Chelsea Girl on vinyl and finding it there for £5.99. This seemed like a very normal, everyday thing at the time. A decade later I remember looking back on that day in much the way that soldiers in the trenches looked back on the golden age of the 1890s. Did it really happen? Could it be that it was all so simple then?
Since the late Eighties, cassettes — both albums and “cassingles” — have boomed and died. The CD single likewise became a desirable object in the Nineties before becoming unsellable, and is now making a gentle second-hand comeback among Nineties and Noughties pop fans. Then there was the MiniDisc (which still has its diehard adherents, like me) and the thoroughly obscure DCC, or digital compact cassette, which barely made it to the shops in 1992 before being discontinued. Old-timey vinyl, ridiculed in the Eighties by CD enthusiasts, kept its head down and bided its time — it has outlived all the competition.
The news that HMV is to open ten new branches to celebrate its centenary has much to do with the vinyl revival, or at least the desire for a physical manifestation of music — with artwork and possibly posters and sleevenotes — in the age of streaming.
In 2020 vinyl outsold CDs in America for the first time in 34 years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The trend has picked up in 2021; in America 19.2 million vinyl albums were sold in the first six months of this year, a 108 per cent rise compared with the same period in 2020. Taylor Swift’s Evermore sold more than 100,000 copies in a single week. As long as pressing plants can keep up, the vinyl revival is clearly here to stay.
Some five or six years ago I walked into the same branch of HMV on Oxford Street where I’d bought Chelsea Girl. The first thing I saw was teddy bears in Union Jack T-shirts piled high; behind them were DVDs and calendars. To be honest, I’d only gone there to buy the Kylie calendar as a Christmas present; I wouldn’t have bothered going there to buy music, on CD let alone vinyl, as the choice was poor and the shop clearly wasn’t prioritising music. This seemed a strange and unsustainable business model.
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It wasn’t as if HMV had needed vinyl to make it a retail destination. Like many other people, I would arrange to meet friends there at the start of a night out. After the vinyl racks disappeared I would meet them in the basement where they stocked niche magazines such as Elvis: The Man and His Music and reissues of Fifties and Sixties obscurities on CD; there was even a jazz department with the atmosphere of a library, the air thick with reverence. It felt as if everyone in the shop was a true music fan. I loved it.
HMV has always been to record shops what Heinz is to tomato soup, or the BBC is to television. I worked for Our Price Records after leaving school, which was more like Channel 5, before moving to Virgin Records — the ITV of record shops — where my pitiful wages of £59 a week would eventually help to enable Richard Branson to fly into space. HMV had the history — it had Nipper the dog. It also had its own record label, which was of great significance in pop history because it had released the first 7in singles in Britain. The livery may have been an unpleasant mix of black and hot pink by the Nineties, but HMV was still the king of record shops.
The nationwide reach of HMV had begun in 1966, when the Beatles sent record sales figures through the roof and the only real retail competition was regional. For most of the Seventies, WHSmith, Woolworths and Boots were the only other shops with nationwide outlets. It seems slightly surreal from a 21st-century perspective, but it was by no means unusual for chemists and newsagents to have a carousel of records in one corner — Rotherhithe could even claim a knitting shop that also sold the latest albums by Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder.
By the beginning of the Eighties, the upstart chains of Virgin and Our Price were giving HMV stiff competition and effectively shutting down mom-and-pop outlets; HMV’s reach peaked in the Nineties with 320 stores, but when LimeWire and the like made illegal filesharing possible around 2000, the writing was on the wall for high street record shops — the vast amount of money lost to retail and the music industry can be measured by the RIAA’s claim that LimeWire alone owed an improbable $75 trillion in damages.
The news since then has been mixed and unexpected. In the past decade boutique record shops have opened up in towns across the country, helped by innovations such as Record Store Day, often with separate drinks-based functions to keep them viable.
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Bradford has the Record Café, record shop by day and bar by night, with DJs and pop quizzes as well as an unusual line in charcuterie. Like most independents, it’s vinyl only. Five minutes away is Bradford’s branch of HMV in the less aesthetically pleasing Broadway shopping centre. I popped in last week with my five-year-old son, expecting he would get bored quite easily. On the “new this week” racks were albums by Anne-Marie and Inhaler, on CD and vinyl, while just underneath were copies of the never-ending Now That’s What I Call Music series, now up to edition Now 109. There were biographies of Stormzy and Queen, alongside less likely ones about James Acaster and Dennis Nilsen. My lad was taken by a whole row of anime and manga merch, as well as Hot Wheels and Batman goodies. He didn’t seem bored at all.
Another aisle was labelled “HMV’s Century”, featuring vinyl editions of monsters such as Prince’s Sign o’ the Times, Bruce Springsteen’s The River and David Bowie’s Young Americans. But there were pleasant surprises too — I found swamp rocker Tony Joe White’s posthumous Smoke from the Chimney on vinyl, while my lad spotted a double album of the Monkees’ debut (although it was £54.99). There was also a clear vinyl edition of Jethro Tull’s prog classic Aqualung, with its sleeve image of unkempt singer Ian Anderson in a filthy raincoat — which, oddly, the boy wasn’t drawn towards.
This reissue of Aqualung is part of a series of limited-edition vinyl records produced for HMV’s Exclusives Day. These range from Louis Tomlinson and Sleaford Mods to Kate Bush, the Prodigy and such unlikely names as Seventies hard rockers Uriah Heep. This certainly bodes well — the market for limited reissues on coloured vinyl seems inexhaustible, and HMV is well positioned to capitalise on Sainsbury’s partial withdrawal from the market. Rather surprisingly, the supermarket giant recently announced that it is no longer stocking any CDs or DVDs, and vinyl will be regarded as “gifting” rather than on permanent offer. Given that just a few years back it was pressing exclusive coloured vinyl editions of albums by anyone from Kylie and Madonna to the Zombies, this is both good news for HMV and a warning of how precarious the physical music model still is.
It is less than three years since HMV fell into administration for the second time in a decade; in December 2018 it was acquired by a Canadian company called Sunrise Records, whose chief executive, Doug Putman, talked positively about new branches — there were closures, including its flagship Oxford Street store, but within a year Putman’s HMV had also opened the Vault in Birmingham, the size of a supermarket, which stocks 80,000 CDs and 25,000 vinyl albums.
Now comes news of further expansion, with an eye on vinyl, although the locations of the ten new stores are yet to be announced. In no way is HMV out of the woods; in early 2020 branches in Nuneaton and Bury St Edmunds closed, and the spectre of Covid hangs over the high street. But HMV says a growing audience for vinyl has led to an increased footfall since unlocking. If models of Batman and high-end Monkees records can get under-tens through the door, as well as teenage vinyl nuts and old-time record store holdouts like myself, then you’ve got to think there’s hope for the high street record shop.
10 of the best independent record shops in the UK
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The record stores that are thriving thanks to being far more than just shops. By Jade Cuttle
The Record Deck UK, various locations
The UK’s only travelling record shop on a narrowboat has been gliding its stash of predominantly second-hand records — spanning classic rock, pop, blues, jazz, soul and folk — through English canals for seven years. Open every weekend (weather permitting) the boat and its musical cargo is a regular guest at canalside festivals such as Linslade, Foxton Locks, Stratford River Festival and Cropredy. At present the boat is on tour from Newbury on the Kennet and Avon canal, with plans to veer west, stopping at towns and pubs in west Berkshire and Wiltshire, before winding up in Somerset this September. It plans to revive its on-store (rather than in-store) performances from Easter next year.
facebook.com/therecorddeckuk
Spillers Records, Cardiff
Who knew that the world’s oldest record shop is located in Cardiff? Spillers predates records “going flat” and sold wax cylinders when it opened in 1894. It boldly stuck with vinyl records even when stocks were so unpopular the business came out at a loss. Located in the Morgan Arcade since 2010, this record store has expanded its collection to also include CDs across jazz, hip-hop, rock and indie.
spillersrecords.uk
Resident, Brighton
Hailed by Nick Cave as the “best f***ing record shop in Britain”, this Brighton store, founded in 2004, not only sells music from all genres and eras, but also hosts it live in-store. Its varied line-up of in-store and out-store performances and in-person signings — which has included the XX, Beth Hart, Wolf Alice and Kae Tempest — will soon add Declan McKenna (Aug 13), Villagers (Aug 21) and Yungblud (Aug 23), before Tom Jones, Celeste, Tom Odell and Idles drop by in September. Now shipping out their records worldwide.
resident-music.com
The Record Album, Brighton
Brighton’s oldest surviving record shop (established in 1948) is roughly the size of a broom cupboard. Yet this interdisciplinary curiosity shop — which often resembles a teenage bedroom with its action figures, stuffed toys, books and tour memorabilia — is filled with obscure finds. The Record Album has always dealt in rare and deleted records — motion picture and TV soundtracks comprise roughly a third of its stock — and so bills itself as “Europe’s foremost soundtrack shop”. Each window display is curated around a weekly theme or concept, from the Olympics to Arnold Schwarzenegger. You’ll also find modern jazz, soul, pop, rock and alternative genres.
therecordalbum.com
Tangled Parrot, Carmarthen
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Tangled Parrot began life as two apple boxes full of records as a market stall in Carmarthen in 2000. Since 2011 the apple boxes have expanded to a chain across Carmarthen, Hay-on-Wye and most recently in Swansea. Music on vinyl, CD and cassette — new and second-hand in all formats — is handpicked from what the owners describe as “the fringes and sometimes the extremes of music”. There’s a big choice of contemporary Welsh language records.
tangledparrot.com
Wow and Flutter, Hastings
Once home to the suffragette HQ for Hastings, this quirky record shop by the sea has been selling an eclectic selection of mostly pre-owned records, comics, books and toys since 2014. One of the owners of this nerdy affair (the shop takes part of its name from the measurement of playback variations in rotary audio devices, and actively shuns online sales, preferring vintage-style rummaging) co-hosts a popular podcast called We Buy Records, where he delves into the often strange world of buying and selling records. The café has reopened, and in-store gigs and spoken word events, which have so far included David Toop, Robin Ince, Will Carruthers of Spacemen 3 and Eugene Chadbourne, are slated to return soon.
wowandflutterhastings.com
The Book and Record Bar, West Norwood, London
This vibrant record store set inside an old pub — The Gipsy Queen, also a book and coffee shop with live bands, DJ nights and open deck events — is one of a rare few to simultaneously run a digital radio station (wnbc.london), broadcasting live shows each week. Guests and DJs include Alex Paterson (the Orb) and DJ Food. As for the shop and its 10,000 or so records — most of which are second-hand — the selection spans all genres, with a fondness for electronica, 1960s psychedelia, jazz and soul. There are also several thousand books on sale, with generous shelving set aside for crime fiction and science fiction-lovers.
bookandrecordbar.co.uk
Nervous Records, Hinckley
An old-school approach — no website, social media or online sales — just a charming but thorough one-man labour of love, tucked away in an old terraced house in a side street in the Midlands. The owner has nearly half a century of record trading expertise, resulting in a varied stock of second-hand vinyl albums and 7in and 12in singles (several thousand in total). The vast majority is rock and pop from the late 1950s onwards, with jazz, blues, soul, folk, punk, new wave and indie too. Plenty of collectors’ items and sensibly priced.
Nervous Records, 16 The Lawns, Hinckley, LE10 1DY
Assai Records, Edinburgh and Dundee
Despite opening its doors only in 2015, Assai Records had already built a loyal following after operating as an online-only business for more than a decade. The Edinburgh and Dundee-based shops stock new vinyl and specialise in supporting Scottish artists via their Assai Recordings label, exclusive edition releases and in-store events with artists such as Lewis Capaldi and KT Tunstall. The author Ian Rankin is a regular, with Nicky Wire (Manic Street Preachers) and Sam Mendes also dropping in from time to time.
assai.co.uk
Crash Records, Leeds
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This northern hub offers a broad range of CDs and vinyl records (7in/12in singles and LPs) with a focus on indie, alternative, rock, punk and metal. The shop hosts high-profile meet-and-greets, signings and album launch gigs with local venues, with acts such as Snow Patrol, Foals, Elbow and Courteeners. The next Crash shows include Tom Jones at Brudenell Social Club (Aug 31) and Tom Odell in September.
crashrecords.co.uk
