It was International Record Shop Day yesterday, so I hope you all went out and supported your local store, if indeed you still have one. Now record shops are essentially a thing of the past, I often wonder where this generation's music geeks are going to spend their time . Maybe there aren't music geeks anymore. As for myself, I mooched around Slowboat for a bit, then trooped up to Real Groovy and felt like a vulture picking over a carcass. Good pickings, though.
The story behind this song – should you want to know – goes like this. I'd moved on from working at Going For A Song (not a record shop that had the patina of cool of your Rough Trades or Sister Rays, but a job's a job)but was still in touch with my old workmate from there, Graeme. Graeme was a great laugh, but intense and very highly strung. We met for a beer one night at the Blue Posts. It's one of three Blue Posts in central London, I think. This was the really, really shitty one in an alley round the back of the Oxford Street Virgin Megastore. A couple of pints of warm flat lager into the evening, and talk turned to Nick Hornby's “High Fidelity”, which had just come out. I asked Graeme his opinion.
“Alright, I suppose”
Given that he specialised in “this is the best/worst thing ever “ type opinions, I pressed him on it. Yes, the characters were well drawn, Hornby had nailed the geekiness and pointless obsessiveness of us and ours, and yes it was pretty funny too. He obviously liked it, but he was holding something back. What's wrong with the book, Graeme?
“Well, you know that Solomon Burke track he talks about all the way through the book?”
“Yes?”
“It's crap. I can't believe he chose that one.”
And if there's a more High Fidelity-esque reason for not liking “High Fidelity”, I'd love to hear it.
So here it is in all its 'crap' glory...
No comments:
Post a Comment