In the wake of the Trumpification of this time we are living through I’ve been avoiding the news of late. Only four years to go, I tell myself before rushing off to find something where I’m pretty certain the President elect's voice - that conjunction of ignorance and malice - won’t invade my airspace. Basically that means football commentaries and music shows.
I ended last Sunday night listening to Elvis Costello talking to Tim Burgess on Absolute Radio in the latest episode of Tim’s Listening Party.
Costello, who turned 70 this year, came on to talk about his 1986 album King of America. Never my favourite Elvis album, though others rate it highly.
Over a leisurely two hours Costello and Burgess talked lyrics, Glasgow’s ban on punk and his fellow band members on the album.
Costello managed to work with some of America’s most storied musicians on King of America, including Earl Palmer who played drums on Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti.
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“If he had just done that, that would be it,” Costello suggested.
And in and around the shop talk you got a few glimpses of the man himself. We were introduced to Costello's photographic memory: “I remember everything. I can remember gigs I did 40 years ago, what songs I sang, the colour of the wallpaper. It’s almost a curse.”
And then there were his drinking habits. “Most people couldn’t tell when I was drunk,” Costello suggested. “That’s why I had to stop. Some people are happy drunks. I wasn’t sullen. I was just silent. The only time I didn’t talk was when I was loaded.”
Gin, he said, was his weapon of choice.
“Coleridge, he smoked opium to write those poems. So, I guess I didn’t do too bad.”
Not to be outdone, Burgess added: “I did a whole album on absinthe once.”
The things people do to kickstart creativity.
I’m wondering now if I bought my copy of King of America in the Stirling branch of Our Price in 1986? The record chain was the subject of this week’s business show Toast on Radio 4 on Thursday.
Founded in 1971 as The Tape Revolution, Our Price became a familiar name on Britain’s high streets through the 1980s and into the 1990s, driven by its founders Gary Nesbitt and Mike Isaacs.
“Michael was a good retailer,” Phil Cokell, former marketing director of Chrysalis Records, recalled. “I do remember him telling me he had been to every high street in the country. You could ask him, ‘Where would you want to be in Dundee?’ And he’d tell you which end of the high street he wanted to be because he stood there with a clicker counting how many people were walking past.”
It helped that Our Price slashed record prices too. At its peak there were more than 300 Our Price stores around the UK. But it began to falter when it was bought over by WH Smith who then also cosied up to Virgin.
The latter’s megastores were seen as the way forward in the 1990s, which was a problem for the smaller Our Price stores which were tied into 25-year leases.
And as vinyl gave way to CDs and the home entertainment boom Our Price got left behind. By 2004 the brand had disappeared from our high streets.
This was a very meat and potatoes approach to telling the Our Price story and none the worse for that. Unlike television - which seems obliged to dress up business programmes in pantomime costume; most egregiously the appalling The Apprentice - radio is quite able to tell business stories simply and directly. The result is very listenable. And in this case, unusually for a programme devoted to analysing why businesses become “toast”, there may even be a happy ending.
The Our Price brand has been revived online as a result of the resurgence of vinyl, selling largely to the people who used to visit the shop.
Could it work in the high street again? Its current owner Paul Harris is not sure.
“These days I think they have to be more than just record stores. They have to be destinations: live music, great coffee, soft furnishing, personal appearances.”
In short, it’s not enough for a shop to be just a shop these days. Selling a lifestyle is insufficient. You have to be a lifestyle.
Finally a quick nod to the latest series of 6 Music’s Artist in Residence which saw The Pet Shop Boys play their favourite records, which was predictably, a treat. Monday night’s theme was “Queer”. So Neil and Chris kicked things off with the Modern Rocketry track entitled Homosexuality. No messing around there.
Listen Out For:
The Essay: Scotland Rocks, Radio 3, Monday to Friday, 9.45pm Poet Kenneth Steven turns his attention to Scotland’s geology next week. On Tuesday he goes searching for agates in Angus and Fife. Later in the week he travels to Arran and Iona.
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