I BOUGHT A record of tunes Bryan Ferry wrote for the movie of The Great Gatsby today in the closing-down sale at the big HMV near Oxford Circus. It’s the saddest I’ve ever felt in a record shop. They were literally taking the place apart as I was shopping.
In the basement the Classical department is long gone, absorbed into the Jazz department, which in itself doesn’t seem as big as it used to be. The shrinking of even these specialist departments means this is structural; if it’s happening with Classical and Jazz you can’t blame the decline of the CD business on The X Factor.
I passed the rack of Spoken Word recordings and thought, I bet that lot doesn’t resurface in the new store down by Bond Street. I’ve been there, and it seems to be aimed at selling records to tourists, which no doubt makes sense.
When I worked at HMV, which is forty years ago, it made most of its money selling the hits of the day, just as it does today, but it also prided itself on its curatorial role, on the fact that it stocked the records other record shops had never heard of.
Here there was an International department long before anyone had come up with the term ‘world music’. Elsewhere you could get LPs of train noises, stereo test records, EPs of nursery rhymes, Hoffnung at the Oxford Union, BBC sound effects, Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari pressed on extra-heavy vinyl, military band music from Stalinist dictatorships, Songs Of The Humpback Whale, records for self-hypnosis, and even some that went round at sixteen revolutions per minute.
When there was a record business there was always something interesting going on in the margins of the record business. Records that were made because there was a tiny market, records which catered for some special interest group, and records which did OK by selling in tiny quantities, worldwide, for ever. Records which came out because somebody somewhere wanted to put out a record with their name on, something they could hold up and say, ‘There, there it is, this is what I did.’
The Ferry record is a classic example of that. There is nothing quite so self-indulgent as Bryan Ferry putting his name on a record of Roxy Music tunes done in the idiom of 1920s jazz. I scoffed as much as anyone when The Jazz Age came out and didn’t take any notice of the odd review that said, actually, this is quite good. It’s taken a few years to find a way into my heart.
Nobody’s going to get behind a record like this. No DJ’s going to shout about it from the rooftops. It won’t produce a hit single. Like so much good music it was thrown a lifeline by Hollywood, when Baz Luhrmann heard it and asked Ferry to provide some music for his soundtrack of The Great Gatsby. The ‘Jazz Age’ hasn’t happened yet and it may not but, even a few years ago, it was just conceivable that a record like that could move out of the margins and temporarily lend its spice to the mainstream.
It happened before for records like Buena Vista Social Club, Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares and Missa Luba. When I was at HMV people would approach the counter with a piece of paper and a ‘you won’t have heard of this’ look on their face. If you told them they were the fifth person to ask for it that day you’d be spoiling their fun. They needed to feel they were free spirits.
In the end it happened for these records and quite a few others because they were records, briefly precious objects as well as means of delivery, tangible monuments to the self-esteem of the people who made them and bought them. The music on them was made because somebody wanted to make a record, not a recording. Nobody’s going to go to that trouble to get something on Spotify. Watching them take down the old HMV today I was more than ever convinced that it will take a lot of the record business with it, and maybe the area at the margins is the bit it will take. If there’s nowhere to sell records like that, why would you bother making records like that?