Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it…
Right, it’s about time we had another reader participation event. This one is a good one too, and hopefully should be a lot of fun to take part in. The assignment? As follows:
I would like you to introduce us to your local record shop. Go in, take a couple of pictures, have a chat with the staff or the manager if you can be bothered, and write it up. Email me a post to put on the site, along with a couple of mp3s from albums you have bought there. It doesn’t have to be a great big clever post, just a little bit about a record shop which you think embodies the spirit of independent music that we’re trying to encourage here. And email it, don’t just write it in the comments, because that’s pointless.
Edinburgh folks will have to take first dibs in the comments section, because there aren’t that many record shops around here, so good luck to yez. I may pick somewhere in Austria because I doubt anyone else will pick that and I actually spent a lot of money on vinyl during my Vienna years.
Anyway, get writing, and get them emailed to me by the end of next weekend (the 7th I think) and I’ll post them all over the course of the week. And to commemorate the idea of great record shops, I hated the film and I think Nick Hornby is a risibly bad writer, but High Fidelity is one of the most sincere homages (it rhymes with cabbages so pronounce the fucking ‘h’ you barbarians) to the small record shop going, so here are a couple of songs from the soundtrack.
Smog – Cold Blooded Old Times
The Velvet Underground – Oh! Sweet Nuthin’
Bob Dylan – Most of the Time
Well, ok. But the only really independent local store around here is Spillers – & that’s had enough publicity for anyone recently. I’ll see what else I can dig up of interest. Most are 2nd hand places.
There are NO little music stores here, not a one, BUT I’ve already started (in my head) something about my teenage music store haunt, if that’s allowed.
So you pronounce c.a.b.b.a.g.e like “cobauhgz”? You Scots are so odd. And I don’t care what you say, I’m writing up Reckless Records just like it was in High Fidelity (even though it turns out that it wasn’t the same store at all, pffft). Great idea Matthew! xoxoxo
Cabbidge. Hommidge. It’s English, deal with it.
Adam old chap you can write about anything you please – I’d be so pleased.
DC – I think the best ones here are 2nd hand too – Elvis Shakespeare springs to mind. Avalanche might be the only other one.
DC, man, you have to do Spillers.
It’s either that or that second hand record shop up on Mackintosh Place.
Ok – we need a Cat from Portland to do Jackpot (and its apparently superior precedent).
Any volunteers? Toad spent a happy hour in there but a local would be better….
I would like to chart the demise of the biggies. Dammit it used to be cool to hang out at Virgin on the Champs Elysees when I was a young un! now its called Zest or zoom or some shit. Megastore used to MEAN something.
Opps comment above is actually me but its Friday night, I’ve beeen away five days, am on US time and am drinking like a fish. Fuck up pardonable.
Can I bagsy elvis shakespeare?
Is that how you spell ‘bagsy’?
I’ve never written it down before.
Er, seeing as no-one else has done Avalanche in Edinburgh, yet can I do that?
Coming back to Mrs. Toad’s point about the demise of megastores.. I remember being blown away at the age of about fifteen by the imports section in the Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road.
It was all so exotic..
mine closed down recently and is now a hairdressers. boo.
Hello hannah – delighted to have you back. That seems to be an all-too-familiar story.
groucho’s in dundee. now there’s a music shop with stories to tell.
Well what are you waiting for, man!
I’ve got a really cool idea for this – but I don’t know if I can actually make it work.
Watch this space…
(And if after an appropriate period of space-watching; nothing appears, just move along quietly and go about your business as normal.)
i used to work in a local indie record shop in the north east of England, called…B-Bop….closed now.
I can’t provide photos (unless I steal them from elsewhere on t’internet), but I’ll say a few words about Rotate This in Toronto.
Oh and you’re wrong about Hornby (although I’ll admit that some of his books are annoying) and way off the mark about the movie. It was funny and enjoyable 1st time round, and still is on the 5th or 6th viewing….
Brilliant, old chap, that would be superb.
Did you read How To Be Good? I wanted to track him down and punch him after that. I may as well have been written by a slightly awkward twelve-year-old.
‘How to be good’ was excruciatingly. But High Fidelity, book and film, have a certian charm. So, I take it I can do Avalanche, then?!
The book of High Fidelity was a pleasant enough holiday read.
The record shop scenes in the movie were obviously far better than the bits where he was schlepping about pursuing the love story, but I still love the film.
But then I suspect John Cusack would make redecorating his spare bedroom entertaining to watch.
Alright, I’ll admit that High Fidelity had its merits. It was occasionally amusing and the portrait of an obsessive music fan really should touch all of us a little.
But a constant onslaught of ‘Waah waah what’s wrong with me why don’t women like me whinge moan my constant self-indulgent navel-gazing drives off women so I’m going to go and overpower them all with self-indulgent navel gazing until they tell me what’s wrong and why they don’t like me waaah waah waaah’ got a bit much. People don’t like you, John (or whatever his character was called), because you never stop whining and you never stop talking about yourself. Maybe if you grew the fuck up and got on with life you wouldn’t repulse people quite so violently.
And I don’t really like the ‘well you’re not much good, but I am beginning to despair of finding anyone any better so you’ll do’ approach to the reconcilliation at the end of all of Hornby’s books. No wonder the spineless nonce is so fucking miserable, if that’s the kind of capitulation with which he selected his life partner.
My three-word Nick Hornby review: stop fucking moaning.
So perhaps, while I can see where you’re coming from, I may still have issues with his work which I need to address.
As to Avalanche; looks like it, mate. No other takers.
Cool, will get it over to you soon.
Ed
Gah!!
I only just read this post now.
If I can knock something together tomorrow (the 8th) would the deadline be enforced??
Must try and keep up in future…..
Aye, of course Winston. I’ll be posting them over the course of next weekend, while I’m away at the End of the Road Festival.