A 1990s teenage soundtrack… on vinyl
Vinyl sales and production tanked in the 1990s as CD’s came down in price. But this wasn’t the whole story
School finished at 3:30pm. I filed out of class and queued up for the bus that would take me to the town centre. It wasn’t my usual bus because I wasn’t going straight home: I had a mission to complete.
It was early 1994 and I was 15. Still in my school uniform I walked into the Stockport branch of OurPrice and over to the incredibly high counter. I peered upwards, trying to catch the eye of one of the staff.
Eventually someone noticed me, and I was able to deliver the most implausible line ever said by a 15 year old in school uniform in a record shop: “May I speak to your manager please?”
Let’s backtrack a bit.
A week or two earlier I’d dragged a reluctant school friend around the large assortment of record shops in Stockport town centre, armed only with printed questionnaires about the drop off in record shops selling vinyl records, and a sense of earnest determination. All the shops had complied with my request to fill out the questionnaire, though a few had seemed a bit puzzled. OurPrice had told me I had to come back and speak to their manager about it.
The manager appeared, listened politely to my survey request, and completed my questionnaire. “You’ll be asking the same kind of questions about tapes in a year or two” he predicted as he returned the piece of paper to me.
The survey was for my fanzine, Aggamengmong Moggie, and represented my first attempt at a piece of investigative journalism. While I probably didn’t represent the findings of my survey that well, the response I got from shops did encourage me to take investigations up a notch.
I decided the next thing to do would be to survey record labels about my concerns around the decrease in vinyl production. This also yielded a larger response rate than I would have expected. Possibly because the questionnaires almost always ended up on the desk of junior office staff, but also because I enclosed an SSAE* with each questionnaire I mailed out.
Some responses were a real surprise: The CEO of Food, a subsidiary of EMI who were doing quite well from Blur’s Parklife album at the time, replied in person and gave long, detailed responses. Equally as long and detailed as many of the UK DIY labels I surveyed at the same time, for whom vinyl production was arguably more of an issue.
In 1994 I didn’t have a CD player and, as such, I purchased all of my music on vinyl or on cassette. While my vinyl collection has been edited a lot since 1994, I do still have quite a few records. Especially 7” singles.
Of the 100 7” singles I own, released between 1961 and 2018, 50 of the 100 were released in the 1990s. The 1990s were an era when both vinyl production and vinyl sales were in steep decline so what was going on?
Those 50 7”’s represent a sort of aural teenage diary for me. Each 7” is a different entry. I don’t actually need to listen to them very often because I know every line, every chord, every crackle and pop of every single one. They are seared into me, ingrained. A part of me.
More than that, they also represent a disconnect between the popular cultural myths of the 1990s (Blur, Oasis, Britpop, The Spice Girls) and the reality of what’s actually in my record collection (Voodoo Queens, Pussycat Trash, Riot Grrrl, Kenickie)
If I look at a 10 year period of my 7”’s, from 1992 to 2002, it begins fairly conventionally with En Vogue’s R’N’B/Rock crossover ‘Free Your Mind’, an assertive classic, and ends, rather more obscurely, with Saloon’s ‘Girls Are The New Boys’.
Inbetween there’s, initially, a fair bit of US twee pop released on tiny US labels, purchased mail order on import, lots of UK riot grrrl records from bands such as Mambo Taxi, the Voodoo Queens and Pussycat Trash, some Japanese twee pop courtesy of B-Flower, the Glasgow scene as represented by the Yummy Fur, Lungleg and the Space Kittens, a Belle and Sebastian classic, a Spanish Cinerama import, Canadian alt country, Richard X’s illegal mash ups, a Welsh/Dutch indie collaboration, and various strains of punk and indie, with a bit of dance and electro. Oh, and a helluva lot of Kenickie.
What I still find fascinating, even now, is the sheer geography of the labels my 50 nineties records were released on, as well as the various UK distributors and record shops I bought from. Some of them, such as the first two Voodoo Queens records, were purchased from a record shop in London that advertised it’s mail order wing in the back pages of NME, but much of the really obscure twee pop and riot grrrl stuff came via distributions such as Piao! in London, Slampt in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and (later) Imbroglio in Sheffield.
Years before I was allowed to travel into Manchester city centre (ie; when rival gangs had stopped shooting each other), I was buying from independent shops in Stockport, pestering HMV to order stuff in, or making my mum write cheques to various improbably named distro’s to buy tapes or 7”’s by bands she’d never heard of.
When I was finally allowed to travel into Manchester, I’d go to Piccadilly Records. Later forays to Leeds led to the discovery of the similarly independent Jumbo Records.
While a lot of the 7”’s I bought in the nineties were released on small UK or US independent labels, I know that there were similar cottage industries all across Europe. My collection isn’t as diverse in that respect as I’d expected, but I am pleased to report two Dutch releases, a Spanish import, and — from 2001 admittedly — a French electro import. There’s also an Australian 7” and a Canadian one.
Within the UK, 13 of the records were released on London labels, five were from Newcastle, three were from Glasgow. Other UK locations included Derby, Port Sunlight, Atherstone, Sheffield and Leeds. That said, as the nineties progressed, it got harder and harder to establish where a label was geographically based because, by then, less and less records were including postal addresses on their sleeves and more of them were including websites instead. Today, it’s usually social media handles.
The survey I conducted in 1994 wasn’t done for fun. I was really worried about the increased difficulties of purchasing the music I wanted to hear on the format I wanted to hear it on. As the decade progressed, the situation became even worse.
While I could, as a rule, get what I wanted on vinyl, I was increasingly coming up against the barrier of CD only releases. Two particular examples of this trend come to mind: The 1997 release of the long anticipated Coping Saw album Outside, Now on a tiny Edinburgh label, and the re-issued Creatures Bestiary of.
The rise of the CD only release may be explained by the decline in production costs of CD’s throughout the 1990s. Part of the reason the CD had been so expensive to buy in the 1980s and early 1990’s was that it genuinely cost more to produce than vinyl.
But by the time a friend and I launched our decidedly unsuccessful record label, Cheshire Cat Records, in 1997, we were reliably informed by the studio that cut our record that vinyl was still the cheaper format to produce, but only just. The studio expected a switchover of fortunes, format wise, to happen anytime.
The Creatures reissue was the last straw: In 1998, I gave in and purchased a CD player. But, as my collection will testify, I didn’t stop buying vinyl.
Sometime in the 2000’s I defaulted to a system of CD preference for albums and 7” preference for singles. Then, as interest in vinyl thoroughly torpedoed and it became harder and harder to get a good record player for a reasonable price, I went over almost entirely to CD.
I have watched the vinyl revival from the late zeroes onwards with a combination of bemusement and affection: It felt too late for me, and it felt a bit too much like a fad. The cassette revival (the man in OurPrice was right: Cassettes were next to be phased out in the nineties) felt more bizarre, if only because pre recorded cassettes (the blank cassette, the home taper and bootleggers friend, is a totally different matter) always felt like such as crap format. Anyone who’s ever had to untangle a chewed and unspooled tape from a cassette machine will surely know what I mean.
I suppose it is Record Store Day that has provided the boost vinyl needed, not only to record stores themselves, but to vinyl sales. The tide seems to be turning in recent years though, with reports of stores dropping out, no longer participating, not finding it worth it. Certainly the reasons people buy vinyl has changed: Collecting seems to be a bigger deal than it once was, driving a lot of the vinyl reissue market, but that’s not to say people don’t buy new records to listen to. They do. It just costs a lot more than it used to.
HMV in Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre marked the release of the new Florence + The Machine album, High As Hope, earlier this year with a promotion that would see fans who bought the album on LP getting a CD copy for £5 as a bonus. While I bought the album on CD, I did pay £18.99 for the Record Store Day 2018 7” of the bands single ‘Sky Full of Song’.
That 7” represents not only my most recent vinyl purchase but is also the most expensive 7” I have ever bought. The hipsters have certainly taken over the market and the prices have risen accordingly (also representing a rise in production costs) but I’m glad that the vinyl revival has happened. I now have a decent record player at last and I’m glad that I kept my memories, and my records.
- — Stamped Self Addressed Envelope
Photo one by Alex Iby on Unsplash. Image shows a woman sitting on the floor by shelves of LP’s
Photo two is my box of 100 7" singles
Photo three shows four of my 7" singles from the 1991–1993 period
Photo four shows the Record Store Day 2018 release of Florence + The Machine’s ‘Sky Full Of Song’ on 7"
