Grrrrrrraaaaggggh!! HMV at 100
"The 1980s will remain the halcyon days. Many will remember the pink and blue neon adorning the entrances; impressive window displays; Haçienda-like darkened interiors punctuated by bright blocks of colour; Bros, Duran Duran, the latest Now! compilation or Madonna blaring out at an obscene volume ..."
Er, yes, many will. And many will want ... to forget. This passage, in a big HMV at 100 write-up in the Guardian, did indeed bring back troubling memories. As previously mentioned on this blog (though not too often), I myself wasted a biggish chunk of my 80s-era youth working in one of HMV's shops. Wasted youth ... Or was it wasted? Actually, possibly not. For one thing, it taught me to strongly dislike these middle-market, supermarket-like record shops with their racks and racks of Billy Idol or Terence Trent D'Arby or Bruce Sprinsgteen. And their managers who knew a fair bit about music (true), but mostly knew about selling stuff. Anyway, that Guardian passage is interesting. Haçienda-like? Er, no. Not at all. My memory of HMV from that era was that it felt over-crowded and over-decorated. The completely overdone grey-and-white spotty (animal print?) design was the very opposite of Ben Kelly's relatively restrained light-industrial chic at the Haçienda. Everyone now focuses on the Haç's yellow/black hazard striping, but I think of big empty, unadorned walls with a few jerky videos projected onto them. Impressive HMV window displays? Only when I did them! No, they were nothing special - just a few dummy album covers stapled together, with a big life-size cut-out of Lionel Richie or whoever. Now that's what I (don't) call art ...
One thing the Guardian blurb gets right is the blaring music. The shop sound system was often up really loud. A couple of notches higher on a Saturday or in the lead-up to Christmas. And the key big-sellers would be played in truly relentless shop rotation: Go West or Tears For Fears played ad nauseam. Over and over. Brain-deadeningly. In the singles area something like Paul Hardcastle's 19 was played about n-n-n-19,000 times a day. It seemed to affect the punters' brains too. They'd come in for one thing and end up asking about the record that was playing/replaying/re-replaying, and ... buying it. In the end, HMV was about merchandise not music. Yes, I heard Bob Dylan being played in the shop (one quiet weekday afternoon) and ended up getting into Subterranean Homesick Blues-era Dylan. And yes I remember being vaguely excited ahead of a visit to the famous Oxford Street shop in London in the early eighties - and buying there, several years after its release, a copy of Wire's Pink Flag. But this is mostly incidental, unrelated to the core mission. HMV's main purpose was to move units. Hundreds and hundreds, thousands even. How many copies of Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? or Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power Of Love did we sell at the shop during my time? I can tell you exactly. We sold a lot. It's obviously all very easy (and arguably lazy) for a self-appointed music aficionado/head/snob/show-off like myself to mock HMV. And I realise that it probably served (still serves?) a useful purpose. Music for the masses, or whatever. It was/is leagues ahead of the stuff you see in (gulp) supermarkets, even if in some ways it emulated those places. And it was, I suppose, an "inclusive" record shop experience - meaning older people trying to get a Christmas novelty song they'd heard on Radio 2 could (more or less) happily queue up next to a flat-top-hairdo student buying a just-released, John Peel-endorsed Microdisney album. But, but ... there's still something soul-destroying about HMV. So yes of course Ed Sheeran is playing a big show at the new HMV-branded Empire venue in Coventry soon. And yes of course HMV recently opened a mega-shop in Birmingham ("almost the size of 12 tennis courts", according to the BBC's mirthless puff piece). When all's said and done, HMV seems like some kind of grossly inflated 80s dinosaur - still trying to fight its doomed battles, with its high-profile artists, its bigger premises, its bigger this and bigger that. Gigantism. Yep, Nipper has metamorphosed into a kind of Godzilla monster battling it out with attack helicopters in among the Japanese high-rise buildings. It's desperately trying to take down the symbols of modernity (the internet, streaming, small specialist shops). An epic battle! I freely admit to knowing less than nothing about running a major high street business like HMV, but I still think the Godzilla of the music industry is doomed to lose. It just doesn't know it yet. Grrrrrrraaaaggggh!!
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