Ricblog

Get yourself a time machine and head for Manchester in the early 1990’s. You’ll find a rather geeky teenager wandering around the city centre in pursuit of a copy of David Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’ on vinyl for under 3 quid. That geeky teenager was me, and on that day I didn’t manage to find a copy that was cheap enough (I ended up going home with a rather battered copy of ‘The Slider’ by T. Rex). Going into Manchester every saturday afternoon was always an adventure. I never knew if I was going to find the album that I wanted, and 50 percent of the time I didn’t. Marching from record shop to record shop was a day out, a job, my life. I didn’t have a cd player, so it always had to be vinyl, I spat on cassettes I thought they were rubbish. In those days Manchester was bursting with record shops on nearly every street. In the Corn Exchange alone there were at least five little shops flogging cheap vinyl. I could only afford to buy one album a week, so it was always a special moment. A magical journey into another world…..the 1970’s!. It really was a fanatastic experience and I’ll never forget leaping out of bed on a Saturday morning, having my breakfast, then running down to Heaton Chapel railway station with a scruffy handwritten note of 60’s and 70’s albums I had to find, if I could. Proper record shops like HMV were too dear and I always thought Our Price was cheap and tacky. If I did buy something from HMV, it was always with birthday money and the choice of records was always quite mind boggling. It was a cold clinical experience and I was snobby enough to tut in disgust at this corporate cash cow. But one could not deny their range of albums stretching for yards and yards. When the big HMV first opened in 1990 (i think), it was half records and half cds. The full conversion to cds hadn’t taken place quite yet and it would be another couple of years before this would happen, sucking me in, along with everyone else. This  was the beginning of the end…………fast forward 16 years.

October 2007, and you’ll find a rather geeky confused man in his 30’s looking for record shops that no longer exist. I must say what a trite and hollow experience it was shopping in Manchester last Saturday, and I doubt i’ll ever do it again. Firstly HMV seem to be in a state of utter panic, caused by downloads, file sharing, copying etc. As I walked in I nearly fell over the stacks of bargain DVD’s of films and TV programmes i’ve never heard of. Each one carried a garish sticker proclaiming ‘ was £70 now £35 ‘ for example. I don’t give a shit about DVDs and waded my way through to the cds, to find the most bizarre pricing system i’ve ever seen in my life. You could buy a James Blunt album for as little as £4, four pounds seriously wasted, in my opinion. But if you wanted some classic rock, Rubber Soul by The Beatles for example, you had to part with……….wait for it………wait a little longer………..£20!!!!!!!! 20 quid for an album that’s 42 years old and hasn’t even been remastered, what!!!. Not only that, HMV’s range is virtually non existant, catering only for impulse purchases. A word of advice to HMV; yes, you will get people buying DVD’s and cds at stupid low prices  when they’re in the sale, but if you think that people are gonna forget that everything else in the shop in massively overpriced, you’re wrong. The place was nearly empty aswell. For a Saturday afternoon, this spells real trouble. Disgusted with what HMV had turned into, I promptly left, never to return. The only second hand record shop left in the city centre is The Vinyl Exchange. I had fond memories of getting most of my stuff from there, when I was a teenager and in my early 20’s. Imagine my shock to discover that the shop was devoid of stock. There are more records and cd’s in my bedroom than in the Vinyl Exchange. Clearly struggling to make money, just about all of their second hand cds were the same price as a new cd purchased on the internet. I remember that the basement used to be chaos, with people falling over each other to have a look at racks of vinyl. I ventured downstairs expecting a familiar buzz of excitement……………..it was dead, empty, almost spooky. The racks once bursting with records were only half full. Picking up a selection to look through, it beacame painfully obvious that all of them were once again over priced. No chance of picking up a bargain in this shop anymore. I left knowing i’d never go back, not just because of the stock, deep down I knew the place was doomed, just like so many others over the years. The Corn Exchange was bombed in 1996 and took all the record shops with it. I still find it hard to walk past the place (now called The Triangle) knowing it’s full of upmarket clothes shops, people that probably don’t even own a record now flock to one of my favourite teenage haunts. How very sad. Which neatly brings me to i pods and the internet. I’ve nothing against modern technology at all, I find the internet most useful, in fact i’m using it right now, so that’s clearly demonstrated. However, the internet and music is a marriage I wont be attending, the whole idea of clicking a button on a mouse to listen to music still strikes me as a really cold, soulless, and downright lazy method of getting into music. Yes, it’s all there at your fingertips, but to me that’s it’s downfall. The joy for me was (and to a lesser extent still is) the unknown journey into dusty record shops, never knowing what you’ll find. Clicking a button an a computer, without even having to leave your chair isn’t really the same, is it? And the idea that someone out there is downloading my entire record collection (that took 20 years of hard work) onto a plastic box the size of a fag packet fills me with horror. So tonight i’m going to dig out that battered copy of ‘The Slider’ I bought on that wonderful saturday afternoon so many years ago, put it on my turntable and remind myself what music is still all about to me. Yep, the record will probably crackle and the inner sleeve will be falling to bits, but I really wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s the experience that counts.