Just as a well-crafted thriller kicks up a gear when apparently unrelated threads converge, the collapse of UK music and media retailer HMV seems to have greater significance than ‘just’ the failure of another high-street shop in an economic crisis.
It feels designed. As if an unseen hand has pushed Nipper – presciently posed on His Masters’ Coffin – into the front line against the sinister forces behind the music download. And that a big reveal is just around the corner.
Let’s turn back a few pages...
With the Virgin Megastore having retreated from the UK, Ireland, Spain, US, Canada, Australia and Japan, HMV culled a number of its stores in 2011 in response to failing profits. It proved a holding action only, and the administrators were finally called in on 15 January 2013. The national news media pounced. This was more than a big business going bust, more than another saddening round of redundancies, more than the withdrawal of a familiar high street name...
Vox pop TV interviews highlighted the cultural significance once enjoyed by youth music, records and record shops. TV shows explored how they defined identities and built communities. Celebrities recalled their formative years and definitive purchases. Analysts discussed economics, demographics and technology. Emotive images of seemingly endless racks of records and CDs, and black-and-white pictures of the first generation of teenagers in peg-board listening booths were pulled from the media's archives.
Conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, snowbound airports and talent show gossip struggled to compete for newsworthiness.
A minor (but willing) character in the plot, I found myself cueing up recent BBC TV programmes on the music charts and the history of the vinyl single on iPlayer – technical developments, cultural revolutions, more archive footage, memories and memorabilia. Compulsive viewing...
Slade’s Noddy Holder reckons that everybody of his generation remembers their first single as passionately as their first kiss. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson calls his ‘mechanical but magical’. For my part, I’m remembering the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ (1963, B/W ‘This Boy’) and John Frost’s on Sutton Parade. In counterpoint, music journalist and former Frankie Svengali Paul Morley described vinyl collecting as ‘part of a deep nostalgic sickness’ for collecting material goods.
Nipper to Napster...
News coverage of HMV’s troubles, meanwhile, took us back to the opening of its first store in London’s Oxford Street in 1921 by Sir Edward Elgar, no less. And then on to its reputation for holding any piece of vinyl you might possibly want. Then back further to Francis Barraud’s 1899 painting of Nipper – ‘Dog Looking At and Listening to a Phonograph’ – and the filing of a copyright application in readiness for offering it first to Edison Bell, and then The Gramophone Company (HMV) where it became familiar to successive generations of music buyers.
BBC’s wonderful Radio 6 Music gave broadcaster Mark Radcliffe the platform to discuss the conflict between major record retailers like HMV and the small independent outlets that had suffered at their hands. Could HMV’s exit open the door to a new generation of indies? If so, it is too late for the likes of Brighton’s cherished Rounder Records, which had closed just six months earlier, after 46 years of faithful service and reciprocal love.
As I write this, Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony have given their approval to the bid from Hilco (which bought HMV Canada in 2011) to acquire and revive the HMV chain. If nothing else, it would afford them a stab at the download culture that has caused them so many troubled nights.
While rescuing HMV cannot turn the clock back on the technical and social changes that have enabled music downloads to eclipse vinyl and CD music releases, the prospect of its failure has returned them to the headlines. Certainly, the HMV chapter in the story of music casts indie stores in a very good light – far better PR than any of the record industry’s recent actions or antics. But would a revived HMV actually survive on the high street?
For the record, I still have my first single and a good weight of subsequent vinyl. I have countless CDs but can’t buy into the poor quality of the ephemeral download. I rather like having record shops to hand. How about you?