Fopp Dies
Prompted by this excellent, fascinating article at Rolling Stone there are threads discussing The Record Industry's decline at ilm and Dissensus.
Just yesterday walking from the Seven Dials to Soho I was flabbergasted to see that the gigantic FOPP on the corner of Shaftsbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road had closed. I believe this has something to do with its sister company (which had been selling Imported CDs at reduced prices, thereby undermining the arrangements of the domestic market) finally being shut down by litigation. However the view from the street is simpler, another retail outlet gets nailed.
People probably don't know FOPP's background as a Glaswegian record store. I first visited the store in 1990 when they had a branch in Glasgow's city centre on (was it?) Renfield Street. I remember buying a Charlie Parker record from them which I still have somewhere. When I ended up at University in the city I would obsessively visit their Byres Road branch, often 2 to 3 times a day, as it was sandwiched between my flat and lectures. I remember wishing I would catch staff on different shifts. In those days they had big posters in the window which were collages of amazing, fabulous and exotic record sleeves. It was an immaculately conceived 'all-points-of-the-compass' buyers guide, perhaps a little like my WOEBOT 100, but one which you had to figure out yourself. For example, the cropped-out black dude with the Chinese hat playing an African flute in a cliff-top overlooking the sea turned out to be Pharaoh Sanders on the cover of "Thembi".
In the beginning the emphasis was never on bargains, though in time as the store began to expand that was how it came to be. To be honest, in a curmudgeonly way, I slightly disapproved of their stacks of classics-on-the-cheap. But, quite like the posters had done, nosing around the store was often illuminating as to what might be worth checking out. I'm sorry for the directors of the business who must be soberly surveying their shattered dream, one which had grown so far and which had shown so much promise.
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Postscript: It turns out there was quite a lot more to this than I was aware. Two WOEBOT readers who've contacted me worked for FOPP on the shop-floor (one in Scotland and one in England) and they haven't pulled any punches in describing how they believe the company ran itself into the ground. Tsk.