the only place to get music is online and it’ll probably not be long ’til decent priced discs are outlawed in Rip Off Britain.
Fopp was really the only “record” shop I went into these days to buy any CDs, been a long while since I was a frequent visitor to the second hand record shops in town, where you were pretty much guaranteed to find me if I wasn’t in the pub or snooker hall during my student days. It was a good and bad situation.
The good – finally there was somewhere to get reasonably priced non-chart discs, especially those a few years old.
Which lead to the bad – so many times I’d come out of Fopp with my wallet or debit card feeling like they’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. After years of wandering round the other shops before exiting empty handed my wallet was taking the strain of Fopp, a force that could even overcome my Tyke birth and upbringing.
There was no way I was going to pay the prices HMV/Virgin charged for an album older than I was, £15 to replace my vinyl and tapes, not bloody likely, I’ll stick with my records and vast amount of Thomsun Originals – 7 Dirhams each or five for 30, I do you best deal. ANd I ain’t a supermarket shopper.
But the £3 and £5 specials at Fopp were my kind of price range and I did buy quite a few from there over the years. The other decent thing was in the beginning they had a better range of blues albums than the other mainstream outlets, with quite a number of albums on special price, though the this section shrank considerably over time to a very small rack which contained the same discs every time I went in, which was disappointing.
It was also good to go in one day to find most of the Calexico albums at a fiver, another to find all the Ramones reissues at that price, offers that just couldn’t be ignored.
But now it’s no more.
Overstretched themselves buying a chain that was failing? Well when I walked past HMV or Virgin there would be people in there but never seemed many buying but head for the tills at Fopp with a handful of discs and your wallet sweating and you’d nearly always either be joining a queue or starting one.
Saying all that I’ve actually bought very few albums this year and MediaMonkey says of them only 4 were released 2007 and one of them was a freebie.