Donning my rose tinted spectacles, I'm going to attempt to explain why I think the downward spiral HMV are currently suffering is a bad thing – because as we all know it is likely to ultimately lead to the shop's demise.
I have a love / hate relationship with the main HMV store at Oxford Circus – 'love' because I find it musically inspiring, and 'hate' because until the last couple of years it has parted me from cash far too often!
Oxford Street was a lot different when I first went in there in 1994 though. It may sound sad but I was pretty awestruck by the sheer amount of stuff there was on the shelves, and an hour later I had spent £150 of my student loan on tapes. Yes, tapes. I can remember some of them – it was the week of release of Massive Attack's Protection, and I also bought Blur's Leisure, Peter Gabriel's Secret World live album and The Prodigy's Music For A Jilted Generation. Quite a start, and that's before I even discovered the classical section!
Classical was once a haven in HMV, though typically it existed in a separate room all to itself, away from all that nasty pop music. There were great long swathes of shelves though, and when I moved to London in the mid-1990s my first weekend found me stocking up on Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Shostakovich. Moving with the times (!) I had now graduated to CD.
I have HMV to thank for so many musical discoveries. On the classical front that usually meant seeing recordings I never knew existed, and parting with my cash for Bartók String Quartets, Fauré piano music, and, once I'd graduated to opera, both versions of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov - though I remember being under the influence of alcohol when I brought that! Perhaps I'd turned in to what has been described as £50 man, the person who'd spend about that per week on CDs.
The in store gigs were a perk, too, and of those I can recall I've seen Junior Senior, Teenage Fanclub, Kings of Leon (when I still liked them!) and Dodgy, where it was so crowded we practised the old trick of going up and down the escalators to get a better view!
Now, things are a lot different, and the decline has been coming for a good few years now. The classical department still throws up the odd surprise, but for a long time the full price CDs have been weighing in at up to £17 – an expenditure I simply can't justify. The problem is thrown into greater relief when shops such as the second hand Gramex, near Waterloo, might have the same release in decent condition for just over £5. I used to spend ages going through the house and techno compilations, but that's a pointless exercise now – again, due to price.
I do still think though that it would be a huge shame if HMV goes to the wall. Having read posts on Twitter it would deprive a lot of town and city centres of the opportunity to buy music in the high street, but then that has perhaps only been an option for browsing, anyway, since most people buy their music online. I’m afraid I hold the supermarkets responsible for a lot of HMV's decline, with their deliberate undercutting of prices on a consistent basis, but then perhaps the music industry itself should also take some responsibility with its tendency to overprice, in the days when a new album release cost as much as £15 in CD form.
I guess this blog is a rambled attempt at dragging up some nostalgia, but it also gives me the chance to say that I really hope HMV survives in some way, even if – selfishly – that just means the Oxford Street store. It is something of a national institution, and its music should not be allowed to die out completely.
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