Alright, it's not about a record shop as such but a Jonathan Richman song from the above album seems the most appropriate way of following the previous post. When the chorus, with its nonsense words, swells up for the first time (about 1.44 in) it seems stupid, old fashioned and odd - yet a joyous release, as though it does indeed embody the store, is the "ghost smell", the "old wooden smell" made audible, the shop magically - well, re-stored, I suppose you'd have to cry it.
I walked past the MADD shop, former home of Cheapo Cheapo Records, only a few days ago. Having already sampled its expensive wares I didn't feel the urge to go in, though the interior seemed to have been changed around a little, from what I could glimpse from outside. But I understood why people engage in all that blue plaque malarkey: the wish for some kind of marker. Other things happened in that place and they shouldn't be forgotten, even if they are only of interest to a limited number of people - as it might be, the plaque committee.
And I have been plagued by the thought of one thing I could have done which I didn't: I could have hoovered up Cheapo's nostalgia LPs on the World Records label when the opportunity was there (as described in this post).
Whether or not I intended to play them it would have felt like I was buying back a part of my past, a memory which was partly Cheapo itself and partly the local library with its pvc smell wherein I first became acquainted with World Records (no, not in the bad Andy Kershaw way: "bat's wing melodies," as Ken Tynan would have put it, issued by an offshoot of EMI).
But I do have - and I think I found it in Cheapo, though I'm not sure - a second copy of a cassette entitled The Golden Age of Hutch, and I cannot begin to convey what it brings back.
As the Sound It Out owner said, records are memories.
And memories don't leave like mango-based desserts do - or don't, at any rate, depart the system with the celerity of such lunchtime treats.
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