The Girl From HMV

hmv, The Quadrant shopping centre, 9am, Monday morning: the optimal time for record-buying. All the new releases, all in a row, on the right shelves, in the right boxes, in plastic bags with my name on them behind the till. Limited editions in limited supplies, virgin vinyl waiting to be played, polythene begging to be unwrapped: teenage dreams and middle-aged regret aching to be caressed, absorbed, purchased, and heard. CD1 slips into digipak2 and there’s a coloured seven-inch and a 12-inch with entirely different b-sides. There’s always a re-mastered classic or a re-release with extra tracks or some back-catalogue gem that I absolutely need to buy. This is the most important part of my week.

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Flick-Flick-Inspect/Discard-Flick-Flick-BUY! I’ve got the art down beautifully, I know my timing, I know precisely how long I need to assess the sleeve of a record before I can look at the next one. It’s like Panini football stickers when I was a kid, got-got-got-NEED, whether it’s a Babes in Toyland LP or a head-and-shoulder shot of a mulletted centre-half. Heaven forbid it should be my Holy Grail: One Man Clapping on CD or ‘Suicide Alley’ on 7” or one of the shiny foil stickers with the Man United badge on it. It’s past collecting now, past an avid or keen interest. It’s an obsession, an addiction, a need to own. If I go to hmv and don’t buy anything, or at the very least place a special order to be collected in 2-4 weeks, then that’s inconceivable. That’s the opposite of commerce, of purchase power, laissez-faire economics, the opposite of me. That would be a failure.

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Luckily it’s impossible. There’s always a picture disc 7” or a new release CD single going for 99p. It’s like a slot-machine gambler pumping coins into the change machine. You win every time.

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This one time I take my girlfriend to town, so she can get her train back to where she lives. We’ve done nothing all weekend apart from watch some telly and argue. I’m claiming poverty, because I’m skint, and she’s nouveau riche. We get off the unibus, into hmv (it’s on the way to the station, and it’s Monday morning) and I just want to look and see if they’ve got the new Kenickie album, and no, I’m not going to buy it, because yes, I really do have no money, but I just want to see the price and the track-listing and your train isn’t for another half-an-hour... So I drag her in, new releases Kenickie At The Club and I pick up a copy and I want it so bad. And she doesn’t buy it for me, despite her new-found wealth and her previous dependence on my bank account for the previous year of gig-going and night-clubbing and record-buying that masqueraded as a relationship. I put it back on the shelf, and I put her on her train and I go back to hmv and buy it with the last £13.99 of my overdraft and I get the bus home and I’m happy. We break up soon after.

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Falling for the girl behind the till at hmv is a bad thing. She was always so happy to see me. She spoke to me. She didn’t judge my purchases. Cultivating this fantasy is worse. What started off as a cute naive crush on a record shop girl became a relationship of convenience. Imagine, not only would I be going out with a cute girl, but I’d be taking advantage of her staff discount. She must get at least 25%. It was meant to be.

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My bank manager was always asking to see me, writing me letters, phoning me up. He’d always ask about my finances and my overdraft. I’d tell him I get £25 a week for DJing. I don’t tell him I spend £150 a week on records. He might take my visa electron card away.

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Like a power-ballad or a Euro-dance-craze smash, I find myself constantly milling around the upper echelons of the singles chart. Not that I really care about the Spice Girls single (I’ve already got it), but the top 10 is right by the till. I can time my purchases so that she serves me, rather than any other member of staff. If this fails, there’s always a handy box of 7” singles on the checkout desk to serve as a time-killer.

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I read: NME, Melody Maker, Smash Hits!, Q, Vox, Select, Time Out, Big Issue Cymru, Record Collector. I write about music for the Swansea student newspaper. I get free records. But they are all promos and do not have exclusive b-sides or sleeve notes or sometimes sleeves.

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I write her a song, called ‘The Girl From hmv’. The assistant manager of hmv Swansea really likes it. It goes to number 1 on the indie download chart thing, although this is before anyone really had the internet, myself included. I don’t know if she’s heard it. I don’t know if she knows it’s about her. And I don’t care, because it’s not really about her anymore. It’s about the soulless neon industrial vapid product-shifting enterprise that hmv probably always was, but now certainly is. Where they’ll happily sell you anything and everything, just as long as you buy something. There’s no condescending looks from older staff members when you buy the latest flash-in-the-pan nonsense. No knowledgeable chats about Northern Soul or lost punk vinyl or lo-fi synth-pop. Just DVDs and computer games, hipster books-of-youthful-rebellion-of-the-movie-of-the-novel-of-the-week, oh, and some CDs. That’s what happens when you move to a bigger outlet in the mall. Change. DVDs and computer games and change.

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I buy my records online now. Real records, not MP3s or iTunes. You can’t put an MP3 on a bespoke shelving unit, you can’t store a WMA in a cupboard, you can’t touch and smell an AAC file. Roughtrade.com and amazon and eBay, direct from the band or straight from the label. No girls behind tills to impress, no buying for the sake of buying (except occasionally to save on postage), no back catalogue impulse buys, no buying for the strange band name or the pretty artwork. No buying because the guy who works there just knows that you’ll love it and really thinks that you should buy it.

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My friend, Keith TOTP, tells me that there are no record shops in Camden, where he lives. Camden Town, home of Britpop and MTV and nightlife and gigs, has no record shops. There may as well be none in Swansea too. This makes me sad. Richer, but sadder.