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Berwick Street |
What’s the story with Berwick Street?
Once an oasis for record collectors, an iconic music street could be lost. Definitely? Maybe...
WHEN Oasis made Berwick Street the backdrop for the cover of their multi-million selling album What’s The Story Morning Glory, the street became a rock’n’roll tourist spot overnight.
The row of independent record shops in Soho had always been a favourite spot for “sifters” – record-collecting romantics happy to trawl through unsorted crates of vinyl and CDs in the hope of finding a hidden gem.
But with the Oasis cover – a shot of two men, their faces blurred as they pass each other one early morning – Berwick Street was put at the centre of the Britpop explosion of 1995 and trade was booming.
Fans of the band still recreate the sleeve. It might not quite be the Abbey Road zebra crossing, but it’s on the scale.
Yet the whole reason Oasis apparently chose Berwick Street for the setting for the album – the road’s central place in the heart of the “sifters” – is suddenly under threat.
Four record shops in the street have either closed or announced plans to shut up shop in the past six months. The lifeblood that made Berwick Street famous is at risk.
David Killington is to close Mister CD, a popular stopping off point for bargain hunters over the past 15 years, on Christmas Eve.
He said: “The demise of Mister CD and others in the street can probably be traced back to 9/11 and 7/7, when people started to fear travelling into the West End to shop. This, coupled with the congestion charge, gave people the excuse for shopping more locally to their homes, especially in shopping centres. The congestion charge made many small offices relocate their premises outside the zone. I relied a lot on their daily custom, which made lunchtime trade very busy.”
Mr Killington said his golden time was when office workers in Soho would go browsing for records in their lunch hours. The same workers, he said, now just order their tunes on internet sites without leaving their desks.
“Next came the invention of the iPod, which at first I thought might be just a fad, as messing about with mp3 seemed a bit cumbersome for most people,” he added.
“But this, equated with free file-sharing, made people force themselves to learn how to work with the format. This made it possible to burn your own CDs and distribute them to friends, making the need to buy the real thing almost obsolete.
“As the convenience of the iPod became more popular, especially amongst the young and students on a budget, the need to find cheap CDs lessened to a point that to have a customer under the age of 25 became a rarity. With the over 25s slowly catching up.”
The record shops still running on the street are determined to keep the magic of the street alive.
Jamie Anderson at Sister Ray said: “Lots of record shops have come and gone since 1995. There used to be a lot more shops but it hasn’t been so good for record shops in recent years because of internet downloading. But it’s not as bad as people make out. Sister Ray is doing well. Many shops here are independent so stand out – they have music that you wouldn’t find in HMV. Berwick Street is known around the world to serious record collectors and shops have a good quality of old and new records.”
Yet, even Sister Ray – the kind of vinyl den that wouldn’t be out of place in a Nick Hornby novel – has moved into a shop where once stood Selectadisc, a record shop that has retreated to a separate store in Nottingham.
Meanwhile, Reckless Records was a well-known franchise with branches in Islington and Camden Town and two stores in Berwick Street until going into liquidation in January. Steve’s Sounds and CD City in the Berwick Street family have found themselves in a similar predicament.
It all seems along time since What’s The Story.
Nobody from Oasis was available for comment but BBC radio DJ Sean Rowley, a self-confessed vinyl junkie who was the man strolling down the street on the front of the record, said he would always have a soft spot for Berwick Street.
He said: “Berwick Street has a great tradition, it is like a golden strip. It has been since the late 1980s but it’s fair to say that it may have seen its glory days. If I have an hour to kill in town, then I’ll happily kill it there – and I have spent many hours in the street.
“You get to know the people in the shops and you never know what you might find. Nobody would know it was me on the album cover unless they looked at the small print of the credits. I was s****ing myself just before it came out – I was going to be the man on the front of an Oasis album but then I was bit gutted when I was blurred. If you could have recognised me then forever I would have had people coming up to me and asking me about the sleeve and I would be just known as the guy who was on the front of the Oasis cover. It didn’t end up like that.”
He added: “If you look at the cover, it’s of its time. Look at what I’m wearing. Maybe it’s the same with Berwick Street.
“I don’t know what the cover means. I had an idea that it was about Oasis coming to London after the success of their first album. I was walking from the south and the other man is walking from the north of the street, and its like Oasis, a band from Manchester, coming to the south. If I put that theory to Noel (Gallagher, Oasis singer and guitarist), he’d tell me to f*** off.”
But Mr Rowley, who has found success with his Guilty Pleasures club night, a different kind of club night where DJs play a jumble of old records which people are nervous about admitting they actually like, refuses to get caught up in the nostalgia as the record shops close.
He said: “I am nostalgic about it but I won’t be too nostalgic about it because if I was nostalgic about everything I’d still be upset over the Batman TV series coming to an end in 1967.
“Something new always comes along and you can’t hold everything back for one or two dusty record shops.
“The thing for me is that nothing sounds better than vinyl and anything else is substandard.” |
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