Three years ago Ian Rosenblatt went into his local music shop in Muswell Hill, north London. He came out having bought a couple of CDs and, to his own surprise, the shop. Rosenblatt, a city lawyer and classical music lover, had been chatting with the owner and learned he was planning to close it down.
Today, Les Aldrich Music, which has had premises on that spot since May 1945, the optimistic month the war ended, is one of the last surviving music shops in north London, an Aladdin’s cave where you can buy vinyl, CDs, sheet music and instruments. In the 1960s it sold the Davies brothers Ray and Dave – of the Kinks – who lived nearby, their first guitars. Today it employs Enrico Savoncelli, a luthier, repairer of stringed instruments. And, if you play or just listen to music it is a place to visit and cherish, an unlikely hold-over from a vanishing era when notes were held in physical places: wood, strings, paper, grooved black plastic or a shiny silver disc.
Across Britain, the high street has become a series of identikit thoroughfares. You could be in York or St Albans and you’ll find the same predictable outlets selling the same goods, all of which you could buy online anyway. Retail’s tactile skills – of “feel the quality” and expert advice – seem to be dying out. It’s been years since there was a bricks and mortar store in my neighbourhood that sells CDs, perhaps because I’m part of a dwindling number of people who still prefer to retain a hard copy of the music I purchase, having been burnt too often by iTunes, which summarily deletes my music library with each software upgrade.
A few years ago my local bookshop closed down. In its heyday I could read a review of the Collected Stories of Isaac Babel in the Guardian, walk in to ask if they had a copy, and the manager’s assistant would say: “Mary ordered two copies. She said Linda Grant would buy one and someone else would buy the other.” And reaching to the reserve shelves, he would produce a copy of a book which I had not heard of until half an hour earlier.
A combination of high commercial rents and Amazon murdered that shop. Up for sale for months, no one was interested in taking it over, and so it became an ice-cream parlour and cafe. After it shut I heard that people would come in to browse, take a note of the ISBN, then go home and order online at a deep discount that a tiny place could not afford, unable to sell at sufficient volume. Its location opposite a supermarket was excellent, but that in turn contributed to its failure: the freeholder could always find a new enterprise to absorb the costs of running a retail outlet in a popular shopping district. An interiors shop a block away (started, ironically, by a couple who had been made redundant from their jobs in publishing) told me that customers would come in brandishing a printout of the lowest online price for a Philippe Starck Ghost chair and ask them to match or even beat it.
Independents of all kinds are being driven from the high street. Can small shops like these, run by individual enthusiasts in a seven-day-a-week trading environment, survive in the internet age?
Rosenblatt had already rescued a series of opera recitals in 1999 when its original sponsor had pulled out, and founded a summer music festival at Branscombe in Devon. He was determined not to allow Les Aldrich, where he had shopped for 25 years, to go out of business, and nor was it enough for him to buy the shop and install a manager and assess the balance sheets. Every Saturday morning he comes to work behind the counter. CDs sales continue to decline, he says, but sheet music and instruments are thriving.
This month as part of a campaign to persuade people to get off the internet and into the shops, Rosenblatt is hosting a series of instore Christmas shows. When I turned up last Saturday, composer Thomas Hewitt Jones and pianist Charles Owen had dropped in to give short recitals from their new CDs among the free mince pies and Quality Street chocolates. Serving behind the counter was surely one of Britain’s most knowledgeable classical music shop assistants, Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny, whose last stint in sales was as a teenager in Cornwall, knocking out coffees and croissants. The customers ranged from the elderly types one sees at Sunday morning Wigmore Hall concerts, young players both amateur and professional, and schoolchildren learning their first instruments, with their mothers.
What will it take for classical music to survive as an art form in the digital era? Hewitt Jones admitted, with great embarrassment, that he no longer bought CDs. Clearly there aren’t enough entrepreneurs to go round to save the dying high street trade in recorded music even if the customers were there, but the business of sheet music and instrument sales, hire and repairs – which require the advice and assistance of skilled and knowledgeable salespeople – can’t exist exclusively on the internet. For the next two Saturdays, Les Aldrich will be hosting more musical open days. Put the internet away and come down, or go seek out your local music store and visit it while you still can.
- Linda Grant’s new novel The Dark Circle is published by Virago.
