northern comfort

So, an end of an era really. For me, anyhow. You may remember that Fat City records in Manchester shut its physical, upstairs shop to run from the cellar as web-only, with visits on Fridays/Saturdays. Well now even that’s gone, as the brand/stock/etc has been sold (to Jazzman, apparently) in that there London. The website I believe will continue, but that’s it.

I first started to going to FC when it was in Affleck’s with Chubby Grooves on the counter. First time I walked in I just bought the record that he was playing at the time (which was a Dave the Ruf LP I believe). Since then I’ve spent many, many hours in there, from 2 hour brew and butty sessions with Treva Whateva and Martin Brew, to more recent general abuse (in a friendly way) from Darren Laws, mixed in with endless great recommendations from Jon K, Ryan Hunn and Dave, amongst many others, it’s been a vital part of my record buying for some time.

It’s another sign of the sad decline of the record shops. So hard to make money nowadays from new releases – buying them at £3 to sell them at £5 makes any physical store an expense too far, and when customers can buy online from any number of places (some like Juno with greater buying power) or even just download why would they bother to come to the actual shop? So people don’t, yet they’ll happily bemoan the closure of shops like this. And when these shops close what do you lose? You lose the people who work there, and the knowledge that they’ve gathered over many, many years playing, collecting and selling records. You can’t go online and ask for some recommendations, based on the website’s knowledge of you over the past 5 years. You can’t ask a website to pull out something that ’sounds a bit like XX’ that you may have missed. You can’t ask them to put something to one side for you, or talk through a label/artist, or have a chat about the state of music in Manchester, or, or, or. All these things – yes, physical shops are more expensive than some alternatives – but this is what you’re paying for. Real People. The extra that having a Real Person in a shop can provide. Not a ‘people who bought this also bought that’ auto-generated script, or a ‘things you may have missed’ article put up by someone to shift stock. A Real Person.

Yes, I appreciate that this is just another piece written by a mid-30s music collector bemoaning the changing of something he loves, and by extension, bemoaning his own gentle descent into middle-age and irrelevance. I’m sure that to any 16 year old music lover the thought of going into a record shop is a quaint concept, a relic from times past, and perhaps especially so for shops selling new records where anyone can compete online – why bother? But I also genuinely believe that in losing real, local shops you’re losing the Real People who work in them, and you lose their knowledge and personal attention. And even from a purely selfish point of view, I think that sucks. Soon there will just be online music shops, ebay, and the occasional second hand shop surviving. So next time you’re thinking about buying online, why not pop into the local record shop instead? Talk to the people who work there, get their recommendations, use them – because you don’t know how long they’ll be there for.