It was a love affair of diminishing returns: consummated with frequent expeditions to Oxford Street throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, ending with cursory circuits around my rather sad looking local branch in recent years. The separation from HMV, and high street record shopping in general, though inevitable, is tinged with sadness, if only for the memories conjured up upon the announcement of its going into administration.
HMV Oxford Circus, along with Tower Records Piccadilly and Virgin at the other end of the street, were magical destinations, the locus around which all my teenage journeys to the capital were hinged. Hours, hours were spent flipping through the racks of vinyl, marvelling at obscure film soundtracks, perusing glossy fanzines (who knew you could actually buy magazines devoted to a single artist?), inspecting the spines of obscure biographies that would have taken weeks to arrive by order in the suburbs. The shops were buzzing with life and the smell of ‘new’. You didn’t quite know what you might happen upon next.
Later, with the internet encroaching, my product-hunting outings diminished, but there was still the odd in-store to enjoy (it might not be legible to anyone looking at it, and the man himself may or may not have been totally aware of his surroundings at the time, but yes, that really is Brian Wilson’s scribble on ‘Gettin' In Over My Head’…). The megastores in particular still had their pull.
If the shutters do come down on 150 Oxford Street, it’s perhaps fitting that my final fling involved a bunch of men in costume and a brief encounter with their producer, a long-time hero. (And very nice he was too.) A child of the ‘70s, but just that bit too young to remember it, gets to step into 1974, if only for a day...
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