Now, here’s some good news- National Record Store Day
After the recent string of deaths, retirements and general looking back, here’s something to look forward to: Next saturday, April the 17th is National Record Store day, which as I’m sure you know is a wonderful and noble idea.
I spent a lot of time in record shops as a teenager, leafing through seemingly endless stacks of music, searching out new sounds, bands I’d heard of, songs that friends of mine had mentioned to me at school, or that I’d read about. I had a favourite ship, Avid Records in Oxford, which I spent god knows how long looking through stacks and stacks of music. In researching this, I’ve just heard a rumour that it’s been closed down, and that makes me feel old and sad.
Going into that shop was a personal delight, the first steps in a journey into music that I’ve been taking ever since. It’s where I found music by long-gone bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, My Bloody Valentine, The Chameleons, Whipping Boy, and too many more to mention. Every now and then I’d see something that I’d never even heard of before, and buy something just to see what it was. Sometimes it’d be great, sometimes awful, but that was part of the fun.
This is what it looked like, when I wandered in through that door:
Avid Records- solipsistic muso paradise!
Of course, nowadays we have this thing called the internet. You don’t have to do leave your bed to find new music, not if you’ve got Wi-Fi and a laptop. It’s there for you in a thousand guises, all you’ve got to do is look.
In some ways that’s superior- there’s something wonderful about Last.fm and playlists and Spotify and all of that. But still, there’s something irreplacable about the act of going into a record shop. It’s the difference between Amazon and your public Library. They’re nice places to go into, and something about the atmosphere of being in a shop serves to connect you to people in ways that just reading about stuff online doesn’t. I might just be old-fashioned about this, but I think there’s still space for small stores in today’s music world. A good one creates a sort of musical landscape all of its own.
So remember, on Saturday the 17th, go buy some music from your local record shop. Call it an investment in future nostalgia.
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