Something I Wrote About HMV In 2018

I read the news today, oh boy! HMV in administration again. It’s another sad notch in the recent history of what was once a cultural totem, but also an unsurprising one. I haven’t been in an HMV for years.

Where I have been is on an awful lot of trains and Tubes, such is outer London life. Sharing them with teens and early twenty-somethings, on their way to schools, colleges, weekend jobs or those first bold steps into a career. As is the way of every generation since Nobutoshi Kihara brought the Walkman into the world, they have the volume up and the earphones leaking.

So I hear a lot of second-hand pop, hip-hop, various urban sounds I’m way too old and out of touch to identify, and this one 64th-note drum fill that like everything samples as if it’s some kind of latter-day Amen Brother. And one of the things I hear a lot is oldies. For a group whose members have no memory of living with a year that started with a “1”, Gen-Z listen to an awful lot of oldies.

It’s impossible not to start earwigging — you’re sitting on a train trundling your way to work and you’re getting a tinny serenade from the best of the ’60s and ’70s; wall to wall Beatles, Stones, Queen, Hendrix… sometimes you even hear the goofy album cuts and the B-sides and the moments where Paul got a bit too Paul being skipped where the youthful playlist commander knows there’s no point listening to When I’m Sixty Four if there’s more solid gold a click of the “Next” button away.

Thing is, I had that tape. Except mine was covered in AM fuzz and Mike Sweeney talking over the outros. And it wasn’t wall to wall gold. That may have been my intention staying up late with finger poised over the record button of the Sony cassette/radio, but you didn’t get wall to wall Beatles and Stones and Queen on the radio. So I’d end up recording stuff I wasn’t looking for; Manfred Mann, Del Shannon, Small Faces.

This may sound strange in a world where we have a near-permanent connection to everything from the biggest #1s to multiple versions of White Bird Come Down, but that’s also what going to HMV was about. You went to HMV (or Virgin Megastore, or Our Price, or Tower Records) to buy music you weren’t looking for.

Since the big Beatles, Led Zep and Floyd deals were signed, Spotify has democratised music history. If you take it upon yourself to marathon everything from Please Please Me to Let It Be, you don’t get a dialog box popping up asking you to pay an extra supplement or saying, “that’s enough of those now, would you mind switching to 100 ’60s Favourites Re-recorded by the K-Tel Studio?” Your subscription doesn’t give you a choice between 10 streams of Queen or 100 streams of Roger Taylor solo.

HMV did. When you went into the big store, you had tough financial choices to make. Music was stratified into layers of rarity and commodity. At the top was rock royalty: £16.99 for a Pink Floyd album or a Queen remaster. Then £12.99 for a current Pulp or Manics album or something in the “respected, not royal” tier of classic rock. Then down to the infamous seams of hard work and occasional gems: the “2 for £15” and “3 for £10” bins.

If you were going in with £6 a week from a paper round, it was obvious you weren’t going to be walking out with the entire Beatles discography under your arm. At least, not legally. These were reserved for birthday presents or post-Christmas voucher-fueled splurges, and were so rare you’d persevere with even the duffest of filler tracks to feel you were getting your money’s worth. Would you give Man On The Prowl more than a derisory snort of being a less-good Crazy Little Thing Called Love? You would if The Works is one of only two Queen albums you have on CD!

Outside of this, though, the action was always in those bins. This is something flipping through Spotify tracks will never give you: the feeling of having two great albums in your hand and needing one more to complete the elusive 3 for £10. You’d hold a Greatest Hits Of Squeeze compilation in your other hand, wondering whether to dig further or cash in now, the same as you’d sit listening to the radio wondering whether to record With A Girl Like You now or wait in the hope of the DJ playing something that didn’t sound like it was recorded in a shed using Reg Presley’s garden tools as instruments.

See, HMV and radio and even the early days of newsgroups and Napster were a kind of shared adversity that helped you discover and discuss music. It was about practical working knowledge: knowing that you were always safe rounding out your 3 for £10 with the Crash Test Dummies or early REM, or that the Queen album in the 2 for £15 bundle was Hot Space and you should flip past it in favour of Nashville Skyline. (Dylan always seemed immune to the normal logic of HMV pricing and you were as likely to find Highway 61 Revisited in the bargain bin as you were Self Portrait at the full wallet-flattening £16.99 Rock Royalty price point.) Being faced with particularly slim pickings, finding a Wes Montgomery compilation and wondering if now is perhaps the time to Get Into Jazz. Wondering whether to play it safe with a 5-year-old James album or take a risk on this band called Clearlake you’ve never heard of. Going to HMV, buying music you didn’t want, and enjoying it… about 70% of the time.

So I understand why it’s in trouble, and hasn’t really been out of it for most of the last decade. Getting your arse off the sofa and into town to spend money on records (or latterly, films) you weren’t looking for is as much an artefact of history as someone on Napster cutting off your 56K modem download of Mother’s Little Helper at 98%. What’s the point, when you can dial up whatever you fancy and play it via connected multi-room audio with little more effort than getting your phone out of your pocket?

But I miss that accidental curation, enforced discovery, and hours spent trying to “get into” albums in the hope they were merely challenging rather than a wasted purchase. Even though I’m not quite prepared to give up the convenience of 40 million songs at my fingertips for it.