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R.I.P HMV (1921-2013) – Some thoughts on growing up and falling apart.

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Barraud's picture HMV nipper

Of course, part of HMV’s particular pull on you, the reason you greeted news of its demise with a certain self-protective numbness is that logo, how imprinted internally it is on all our memory banks, how you know that in India Nipper was sometimes replaced by a Cobra. Just how far the magic reached – across empires, how all my dad’s Indian records still had the insignia of that shift from cylinder to disc. In its way, Barraud’s picture reveals a lot. The arrogance of Edison in knocking it back (“Dogs do not listen to phonographs”), the opportunism and luck of Berliner picking it up. That moment at the dawn of recording when the purposes of recording technology were almost entirely non-musical. Edison’s original patent for the phonograph contains a myriad of uses of which musical reproduction is only one.

Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
The teaching of elocution.
Reproduction of music.
The “Family Record”–a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
Music-boxes and toys.
Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.

Music here as perhaps only one use of that magical mid 19th Century moment when photography and phonography suggested for the first time in human civilization that time could be stopped, that the previously evanescent could be captured and relived. The way that recording technology has progressed, the way it’s thieved from other technologies, turned the swords of electrical recording (WW1) and tape-recording (WW2) into the plough-shares of the microphone (intimacy) and multi-track (playfulness with source) is an odd one, a stop-start narrative of stasis and sudden progress that almost seems accidental. Deforest’s Prime Evil, the stereo of Blumlein, Jack Mullin’s tinkering with captured German magneto-phones  Goldmark’s microgrooves – these were not conceived of with thoughts of how what could be done with that technology could form some of the most important art of the century, they were tinkered into life with nothing but curiosity and playfulness. Even the MP3 was initially an academic research project into the impossible.

Of course, we’ve been tutored by the white-heat of all that technological change to be dispassionate about this, even if for at least 40 years after the change from 78 to 33 & 45 the format really didn’t change (and so we felt held in that post-war moment, as close to the Beatles & Stones & the comforts of the canon as we were to those ever-changing sounds pulling the ground out beneath us). Really, what we’re seeing is the return of music to an almost pre-industrial state, the state it was in before this strange 150 year frightmare that is the record-business took what was previously ethereal and momentary and captured it and barcoded it for commerce. But looking at these photos I can’t just blithely march into the future, no matter how much the fact musicians are back throwing their caps on the floor and hoping for the best might actually open up new ways of thinking about music making and listening, no matter how much the collapse of the record industry might loosen the systems of debt and dependence that have left so many in penury, and have so strictured and strangled the ambitions of western music.

Looking at these photos I’m reminded that no matter how much of a bloated graveyard of artistry the record industry could be, it still had an exclusive control of my hope for much of my growing life, a direct control over my vacillation between despair and determination. It touched me inappropriately  I will love it forever, despite everything. RIP HMV. You, more than school, more than home, more than anywhere else, were my LIFELINE. Don’t fret, I’m safer now. Safer. Not sure about happier.

HMV store, Coventry

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