The Record Shop ritual

From The Smiths to WH Smiths, that was the ritual. Almost every Saturday, more often in the holidays. Shuffling from shop to shop, flicking through the racks. What’s new and exciting? What’s old but influential? What did I read about this one?

The gentle click of CD cases turning over in the rack. The throbbing bass and hissing hi-hats of whatever was playing while you browse in-store. Somehow, even when you hated the song (because you were a smalltown boy and the record shop was an Our Price and the playlist was comprised of soap stars with dreams outstripping their talent) that click ate with the beat as you scanned the selection. Then, the showstopper. The big solo. The moment when you spotted what you were looking for (or sometimes what you never knew you’d been seeking) and lifted it out to explore in all its glory.

It was almost a religious experience. Uncovering the holy relic. As prophesized in a well-thumbed NME or Melody Maker, it had come down from the sacred heights of the record company and fallen into the hands of you, the fanatic, the believer, the keeper of the flame (except in late October when you became the Keeper of the Seven Keys).

But writing (and, by implication reading) about music is like dancing about architecture, right? I knew that some other oracle had listened to this with ears already steeped in decades’ worth of the canon: he (and it was almost always he) had embraced each passing trend, only to cast out these false idols when they attained the rare state of popular grace bestowed by Top of the Pops and a slot on the Our Price playlist. He took the obscure and made it familiar with reference: the Pistols, the Stooges, the Mary Chain, the Ramones. Always, apparently, the Ramones. An influence on literally everyone, so influential they were no longer actually an influence, in the same way that oxygen isn’t really a big thing in my life because it’s a big thing for everyone.

I’d read about the big new release. Appetite whetted, I’d collect my pay packet from my paper and scamper into town to look for it. Being too cool for school (if not too cool to deliver newspapers on the way), I disdained the doorway displays of music for the masses. It took a deeper, slower dive to get my hands on the goodies. This was the courtship dance, stepping deep inside the indie and alt.rock section, exploring a Dominion where few girls wandered, even by mistake, until I held the album of the week in my hands.

Now the formalities: I freely handed over my inky dowry to liberate my shining bride-to-be from her corporate clutches. On the bus home, with trembling fingers, she began to undress. Shrink-wrap plastic, that eco-disaster in waiting, slithered into my lap. Gently, reverentially, she was opened up. Carefully sliding out the sleeve notes, a tease and a tantalizing glimpse of the Unknown Pleasures to come. Fifteen minutes with you, on a double-decker bus. Left to our own devices. Time simultaneously passing in a flash and dragging into eternity.

Then, at last, home. The consummation. The climax. Onto the player. Push in the drawer, a practiced gesture, a decisive move delivered with reverence, anticipating some great reward. Fingering the ‘play’ button, eyes closed, awaiting initiation. The transition from Virgin to Rough Trade, perhaps, as the noises I’d imagined for days finally took form and flesh, became a reality instead of a description. The Saturday shopping trip was over.

This Kirsty MacColl track, apart from being brilliant, neatly captures some of the joy of hearing a new album for the first time and dancing around in one’s socks. One of the very singles I owned was Kirsty’s ‘A New England’, so it feels like an appropriate reference.

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Not for the first time, I’m indebted to Mike Singleton, whose Benefits of the Availability of Digital Music sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place!

Astute readers might hazard a guess at my age from this, or just have fun picking out the references (intentional or otherwise) to bits of my CD collection. My generation was perhaps the last to experience the record shop ritual at an age when I was passing from Hornby trains to Hornby novels. And while yes, a lot of my music came from High Street chains (little else was on offer except on the days we caught the train), there was a special thrill to be had in a good second-hand shop staffed by people who knew what they were selling and why. There was no internet, so news of upcoming releases would be carefully policed by the music press: inkies for authenticity, glossies for corporate insincerity and somewhere, out of reach of shy schoolboys like me, ‘zines for self-defining (self-limiting?) exclusivity.

Having a yen for songs they never play on the radio, broadcast media wasn’t much help. One or two DJs helped to unpeel the façade of disposable pop and expose the strange fruit beneath, but it was a rare day when I bought a CD and knew what I’d hear before I brought it home. The purchase was an investment: roughly a week’s worth of delivered newspapers, no room for buyer’s remorse. If I didn’t like it at first, I kept listening until I did, or at least until next week when the process started over.

It’s all over now. The High Street is comin’ like a ghost town; record shops don’t trade no more. The next generation vapes in the places where I used to play. The internet, coupled with the trend for luxuriously pressed and luxuriously priced vinyl, has transformed the way we consume music. An online age has its pros and cons. But I doubt I’m alone in mourning the passing of an old ritual, even if I get to experience a far wider range of music now than I could ever access then.