Anyone ever visit any of the HMV stores in NYC...specifically the one on 72nd and Broadway? That was my old store, I ran the Jazz department for a few years. I miss it.
If I hit an HMV, it was most likely one around Times Square or Penn Station. Can't remember now. But I focused most of my CD buying power in the village. Some of my earliest forays into jazz were at Tower... was it on 4th? Can't remember now... Dur... it was right by Other Music which means 4th.
HMV are now our only national chain selling music, DVDs etc, other than supermarkets, who carry a very limited range. There a few independents left in very large cities. The rumour in newspapers last weekend was that HMV is struggling at the moment. If they do go under it will mean the only way to buy physical CDs will be on-line from Amazon unless you want to buy chart CDs from supermarkets. If that happens it will be impossible to go into shops to browse jazz, folk, classical, rock etc other than in a handful of cities with independent stores, or specialist shops in London. All the local retailers in the fairly large university town that I work in have all gone now.
That's sad. Growing up going to school in a relatively small market town in Lincolnshire I had access to one of those old shops (I still see them in Germany) that made a living by selling musical instruments, stereo equipment, records, and T-shirts. And W.H.Smith used to carry a pretty good range for their size as well. Lunch break at school involved walking into town and to the record store and then to W.H.Smith and loitering around the bins. Found quite a few direction-setting things that way. At the same time I have to tamper the nostalgia with the realization that I am finding a lot of things now that would never have made it to Lincolnshire in the bricks and mortar only era.
Where abouts in Lincolnshire, germanprof? As a teenager I used to live in March in the middle of the Fens, not far from Lincolnshire. We had three independent record stores then in a town of about 13000 and between them you could get a range of genre and Wisbech a few miles awy had a really good store. WHSmith have very few CDs now and only in bigger stores - they just stock DVDs in that section now. In Northampton which we just have HMV, and they have as many DVDs and games as CDs. Otherwise there is nothing else other than Tesco etc who have chart muisc. Whenever I go to France I am just amazed at the range of local stores in some towns, including selling CDs. It is better in London and Birmingham, but not in places like Peterborough, Milton Keyenes and Leicester which are all big retail centres. Dpending on how long ago you were last over here you'd hardly recognise many high streets from what they used to be - technically they are known as clone towns in geography literature, as they all have the same national range shops and you could be anywhere almost in the country
Not far away at all. I lived (from age 5-18) in Long Sutton, which is not far from the Norfolk border; went to school in Spalding. Used to go to Wisbech shopping every now and then as well, or King's Lynn, or rarely Peterborough (too many bus routes away). Didn't really know the record stores there as well though. I was last over a couple of years ago (still visit family as regularly as budget allows), and spent e.g. a woebegone-feeling day in Bicester town center, which appeared to consist 90% of charity shops, hairdressers, and clothes shops. Some of the charity shops were functioning almost as ersatz used record stores, but obviously with a very random selection (though random pricing can actually be quite fun).
Yes the problem with Bicester is that it has an oulet shopping centre and a big Tesco on its outskirts - I know the outlet centre quite well but not the town centre at all, which is probably true of many people. I know what you mean about charity shops and CDs - I bought a Stan Getz CD a few months ago, still in its original wrapping. A small world though. When I was in my early teens we were going to move to Holbeach or Boston as my father was being moved to Boston from March in his job. We had nearly bought a house in Holbeach - I'd even been to look around Spalding Grammar School with my parents, when my father got a promotion so he could stay at the office he was at... We used to go to Long Sutton to walk along the Nene to the lighthouse fairly regularly at one stage. I have memories of queues of traffic at the swing bridge too. I went back to the area after college training to be a teacher - I taught in Peterborough until 1993 when I got my current job, moving away in 1994. My family still live a bit further south in the Fens near Ramsey now.
@thom. the wife and I made weekly trips to the city so we could peruse Other Music and the used shops in and around the Village. From 97-01, it all ended when we discovered eMusic.* :-/
*Interesting correlation, when we stopped walking NYC for 16 hours every weekend I started packing on weight like a bear in the fall.
Spalding grammar school is where I went from 11-18 - school bus went through Holbeach every morning. Wow, we could have been at the same school. And we still walk out to the lighthouse when I visit my mum, and yes, I remember the swing bridge queues - especially the day one summer when the weather was so hot that the bridge expanded while open and would not close, and we were stuck the wrong side of it for hours while they cooled it with fire hoses. I moved away to go to college and then became a teacher in the Nottingham/Derby area for several years before graduate study.
Wisbech, King's Lynn -- my mother-in-law's maternal grandparents and great-grandparents were from Wisbech and King's Lynn. She (MIL) was born in the US after her parents came here from England. Never thought I would run across those names here.
@mommio - wow. Growing up in Long Sutton the predominant sense was that it was a little backwater isolated from the rest of the world. Somewhere to move away from when you grow up if you wanted to be somewhere where much was going on. A month or two back when various of us started discovering Audio Gourmet releases here and I noticed the label is in Peterborough and one of the albums was by some folk from Bourne it gave me this weird but nice feeling of unreasonable surprise that people in that part of the world are actually doing cool stuff. Now I discover that having joined a fairly international and yet compact board, multiple people have connections to Wisbech (which could in no way claim to be a great metropolis). Small world indeed. (I guess that now makes everyone in this conversation less than six steps removed from Wisbech).
I have had to LOL! What a small world!! When I learned to drive it was in Wisbech. For about 10 to 15 years they had a driving test centre there. So flat that you had to do a hill start going over one of the bridges over the Nene. I haven't done that walk for years now - I really must go over there again soon. We used to think that March where I lived was almost the end of the world in my teen days - we knew that the end of the world was the small neighbouring town of Chatteris. But that whole area of the Fens was certainly a backwater then - still is in many ways. My stepson's girlfriend comes from just outside Boston. Needless to say she lives in London now...
@elwoodicious - I stopped those regular CD walks once I hit the unemployment line back in... 2002? Geez, that seems so long ago. Probably because it is. I miss Other Music, Sounds, Revolution... Etherea was one of my favorites. 9th and 2nd I think. But that closed back in like '98 or '99. They were a rather small shop, but had some of the best electronic selections I ever found. That's how I got into Autechre among others.
eMusic came in after I had grown used to not buying music with my previous fervor. That's why there was a lull in my collecting in 2003 and 2004. My wife has also come to the realization that she exercised a lot more living in Hoboken and working in the city simply by walking a lot.
@greg, lol - I remember the hill start thing. Took my early driving lessons around Holbeach, which wasn't able to offer anything more than an 'imperceptible incline start'..
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*Interesting correlation, when we stopped walking NYC for 16 hours every weekend I started packing on weight like a bear in the fall.
eMusic came in after I had grown used to not buying music with my previous fervor. That's why there was a lull in my collecting in 2003 and 2004. My wife has also come to the realization that she exercised a lot more living in Hoboken and working in the city simply by walking a lot.