A double album of memories: looking back at our love affair with record shops

The shuttering of the other 27, including Fopp Byres Road, and the HMVs in Ayr and at Braehead, meant the loss of 455 jobs, to be followed by 122 warehouse jobs in the weeks ahead.

After the hashtag SaveFoppByresRoad flourished on Twitter, and customers and musicians protested, the shop reopened yesterday to much relief.

"It lives on!" author Adam McNellis wrote.

"I am 38 later this year - I am probably from the last generation to "get" why browsing/ touching/ holding/ sharing your albums and films really means something... lets hope that it is open for business for many more years."

“An absolute institution and a cultural and musical oasis in the west end of the city, enriching, edifying and bringing sheer joy to so many people’s lives at affordable prices.” wrote actor Gavin Mitchell.

Broadcaster Janice Forsyth had urged Putman to reconsider the closure of Byres Road: “More than a shop, a much-loved Glasgow institution – a busy hub with brilliant staff, fab books and music – frequented by music fans of all ages, bands, musicians...”

Film composer Paul Leonard-Morgan described the shop as "an institution" and said: “#fopp is where we all started out in Glasgow, buying all our vinyl and CDs from their suck-it-and-see for a fiver collection."

Despite a recent revival in the popularity of vinyl – a format that many older music fans once thought had been killed off by CDs – most music these days is streamed, via such services as Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music, or downloaded from, for example, iTunes, and this has posed daunting challenges for music stores.

Figures from the Entertainment Retailers’ Association suggest that spending on physical music, video and computer games slumped from £5.7 billion to £1.8bn in 10 years; spending on digital music, video and computer games soared in the opposite direction in that decade, up from £660m to £5.3bn.

Rose Norton and Dougie Anderson were until recently co-owners of Edinburgh shop Coda Music, which had Scotland’s largest selection of folk and Scottish CDs, in addition to jazz, blues, world and country and new vinyl. Both spent the last 45 years behind shop counters but are now starting to make the most of their retirement.

“It was difficult,” Rose said this week, “as Coda was still a busy shop, but we didn’t want to keep going on into our 70s. Naturally we will miss having our shop and all our great staff and regular customers.”

Like many in the business, she is convinced that HMV ought to have moved with the times faster than it did. “They could have wiped out their dated DVD and CD displays and filled them instead with vinyl. I think they’d be in a much better position now if they had done that, and taken advantage of the beneficial terms they have with the record companies, and re-branded to attract the vinyl customers.”

A wider issue also comes to mind. “The way in which digital/streaming music payments are currently set up,” she adds, “it could eventually kill recorded music. How can the majority of musicians survive?

“Digital as an ‘idea’ is brilliant. It is user-friendly, and portable, even environmentally friendly. But it falls down 100% in terms of compensation to the artists. That urgently needs to be resolved.

“We hope that people keep buying physical product, not digital. When it comes down to it, it’s really about supporting the artists and making sure they get paid. Record shops are just the guys in the middle.”

Many former Coda customers have spoken of the role the shop played in their lives. “There is now a huge hole in the fabric of Edinburgh. Thanks for all the sounds you brought to my attention, and for your knowledge and passion,” one customer said on Facebook.

“I’m devastated by the news,” wrote another. “Thank you so much for being there & for all the times you tracked down obscure CDs for me. No one will ever be able to take your place but it would be nice if there was anywhere else left that still sold music these days!”

Older music fans have found it difficult this week not to yield to nostalgia and think of the great indie record-shops that are no more.

In Glasgow, they included 23rd Precinct, Listen, Gloria’s Record Bar, and the behemoth that was Tower Records, where Bon Jovi played a brief acoustic set in the summer of 1995. In Edinburgh, shops included Gutter Music and Bruce’s.

Tom Russell is one of Scotland’s best-known rock DJs. Years ago, he even ran a number of record shops.

Does he think people have an emotional attachment to record shops? “Very much so,” he said. “Before I opened my own shops, I lived in Kirkintilloch and used to go to a record shop called Sound Developments, in Cowgate. When I went into Glasgow, there were some shops that I frequented – Listen Records, which was great, but my favourite was 23rd Precinct.

“I had my own shops – first in Bishopbriggs, then Shettleston, Duke Street and Mount Florida. It was enjoyable, though it was probably at the tail end of the heyday of record shops.

“I was really sad when I heard about the closures, but I must admit that the last time I was in HMV, there was something missing. There wasn’t much for me – it was all video games.

“It’s good to see vinyl back again and selling reasonably well, even though it doesn’t sell in the quantities it used to. When vinyl was dying out a few years ago, I used to get into conversations with bands about it. We’d always say there was something about a LP – whether it was a gatefold sleeve, or maybe in coloured vinyl, or it had all the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve – that was fantastic. We lost something when CDs took over.

“You can understand why a 17-year-old lad streams all his music, but when everybody does it, and doesn’t pay for it, then it’s obvious that something has to give.”

I remember buying my first vinyl from Bruce’s, in Falkirk, while I was still at school. Most if not all of the records I bought then I still have today. Nothing could induce me to throw them away.

I can still remember the lay-out of the shop and even the faces of a couple of people who worked behind the counter. Studying the LPs now – Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Allman Brothers, an obscure Japanese act by the name of the Sadistic Mika Band – brings a sugar-rush of indelible memories of that long-vanished period. Next to Zuma is a copy of an album by Beck, Bogert & Appice, bought in 1973 from the music section of a local hardware store.

The music writer Jon Wilde once tried to clear out his vast collection of music. The CDs were easy; the LPs, less so.

“As I thumbed through the shelves and cupboards, each and every 12-inch sleeve brought some long-buried memory bursting back to vivid life,” he wrote in The Guardian in 2007. “The Sundays’ Reading Writing and Arithmetic that I bought on the way home from hospital after seeing my son William being born. Slade Alive!, my first-ever album, bought for £1.75 from Rediffusion on the day I got my first kiss from Angela Denby, a plump girl with a lazy eye...

“In a way that CDs never could, my vinyl purchases marked decisive and calamitous moments in my life, just as the songs themselves provided my life’s vital soundtrack.”

He is right, of course, and record shops are part of those memories.

Tom Russell is glad there are such shops as Love Music, in Glasgow, that still serve music fans, and he frequently urges his own listeners to consider buying new records on vinyl or CD from their nearest shop. “What I always say is, ‘If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.”