... or exchange?
Derek Walmsley
I got a nostalgic rush when a promo CD of the
new Streets album came into the office – not a reaction to the CD
inside, but the slipcase, which is from (presumably purchased, but
who knows?) Music And Video Exchange, the dusty and sprawling
Notting Hill second hand record emporium where I used to work for
quite a few years. The red sticker in the corner, where they reduce
the prices month by month, is the giveaway. As it happens, I'm not
the only Wire writer who has passed through its, er, hallowed
doors.
I was in the the other day, selling old CDs into the shops to
exchange for other stuff. My plan to invest in valuable classical
vinyl, in the hope that it will hold its value when the economy
goes into total meltdown, was thwarted, though. Their classical
shop due is to close any day, and the racks were empty. I wonder,
though, with an upcoming recession, if second hand emporiums will
soon be booming again, packed with fresh stock from cash-strapped
punters.
The beauty of MVE was that you came at music culture
backwards. You're surrounded not by usual music that is pushed
at you, but the stuff that gathers together at the margins.
Outdated music was often more poignant than music which still held
its popular currency. In most MVE shops, records never went below
50p – even at that price, the assumption was that someone would
have a use for it, even if the root of that use was as kitsch,
sample fodder or curiosity value. This was where you found new uses
for music. The process is rather like musical compost, biodegrading
in its own filth, but providing all sorts of vital micro nutrients
to other growths. I used to greedily suck up cheap old jungle
compilations, packed with fat hits but with zero cool quotient;
hit-it-and-quit-it dancehall 7"s which had been cheapily pressed up
in the thousands and were now sitting around gathering dust; random
white labels, noone knowing what the hell they are except for a
catalogue number; quasi bootleg jazz compilations which nonetheless
provided strange trawls through the oeuvres of the likes of Billie
Holliday and Charlie Parker.
Recycling all these vast swathes of music culture, you get that
sense of the street finding its own use for things, as the saying
goes; what The Streets has to do with it, I'm not so sure.
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