His Master's Voice

Derek Walmsley writes about the beleaguered HMV in his editorial for the February issue of The Wire, and it's jogged a memory of a wonderful two-week break spent in Malta in June 2015. The connection here is the instantly recognizable HMV sign spotted looming over heads of shoppers and tourists on Valletta's St. John Street. The sign belongs to D'Amato's, Malta's oldest record store and one of the very few brick and mortar store music store left on the island. It's astonishing to think that this store has been in business since 1885, the famous HMV sign a leftover from a bygone era when the original proprietor Anthony D'Amato, was the sole dealer of the Gramophone Company's record label His Master's Voice. Meanwhile across the street, the vertical Cinema sign beckons patrons to the small, intimate City Lights cinema which specializes in cult, exploitation and adult cinema - if you were in Valletta this week, you might have caught The Last Walz, and perhaps skipped across the street afterwards to purchase the soundtrack.

I'm feeling terribly nostalgic about HMV this week. Closer to home, my nearest HMV opened in Cork city in 1990, moving into the Pavilion Cinema building which closed its doors in August 1989, after 68 years of film exhibition. The first film shown at the Pavillion was D.W Griffith's 1919 6-reeler The Greatest Question, while the very last picture show was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Pav, as it was known to Corkonians was the last of the city's palatial picture houses and I have very fond memories of the auditorium's beautiful ornate wooden panel ceiling, and the grand staircase which was decorated with the posters of the day. Happily, when the building became a music emporium, the film connection was maintained as HMV became my first port of call for my burgeoning VHS collection. In fact it was less his His Master's Voice than His Master's Video, in the early years of the shop, whatever cash I had was sent upstairs to the first floor, to the VHS section where I bought my first copies of some of the most pivotal films of my life -  Blue Velvet, the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Devils, Suspiria, 2001 and the first widescreen VHS edition of Apocalypse Now in 1992, to name but a few. At the same time I was scouring the videoshops of their old dusty pre-certs, but what set HMV further apart from the other VHS hunting grounds, was the availability of foreign and independent Cinema, the shop stocked a fine selection of esoteric titles from some of the more outre labels of the day - Artificial Eye (Andrei Rublev, Blue, Farewell My Concubine) Tartan (Man Bites Dog, Hard Boiled and the original b/w Night of the Living Dead), Connoisseur/BFI (The Falls, Solaris, Stalker) and Electric Pictures (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Mean Streets, Pierrot Le Fou). I still have a few of those HMV-bought tapes to this day.

I shouldn't over egg the nostalgia too much. As a music store I had little use for HMV in those early years. Back in the early 90's, even a modest size town like Cork could support 5 or 6 record stores at any one time, and most of my cash was spent at the small but legendary Comet Records, which kept me supplied with Death Metal on vinyl. I don't recall HMV stocking the likes of Obituary and Bolt Thrower, and vinyl at the time was dying a death before its spectacular resuscitation a decade later. I seem to remember getting excited one Saturday afternoon to find Ministry's 1986 album Twitch sitting on the rack, an album that had no earthly business in HMV, but such discoveries were few and far between. And unlike Comet, no one hung out in HMV which to me is an essential characteristic of a great record store. HMV was expensive too, and it always seemed to be a choice between a video or a CD, and in most cases, the video won out. I remember well the hell of indecision of weighing up the cost of The White Album, which was grossly overpriced - £27 Irish pounds to be exact, expensive in old money, but a veritable box set in today's money. However a vicious young hoodlum I befriended, regularly shoplifted-on-demand from HMV and did eventually secure me a copy of the White Album for a fiver. I never did find out how he snuck the fat-boy case past the scanners on the double doors - an agent in the field should never be made reveal his methods, but I hear a tin-foiled lined pocket was enough to bypass the security.

And yet, I miss HMV when it was HMV. Since 2006 the building has been occupied by the home-grown Golden Discs, another record shop and a truly wretched one at that. Its film section has none of the reach that HMV once had, comparatively speaking, and prices are even more inflated - a fresh vinyl copy of the 1967 Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits will cost you 3 times the price of the humble CD edition. Incredibly Golden Discs has been operating for almost 6 decades now, and has seen a slew of Cork record stores rise and fall around it. At this point I think Golden Discs would survive a nuclear catastrophe which probably makes it more a cockroach than a record store. Meanwhile, the future of HMV hangs in the balance yet again, and it's my sincere hope that a solution will be reached that will save jobs at the 125 stores across the United Kingdom and allow the HMV name to live on.