‘CD ONLY’ SHOP IS A HIT IN LONDON
From the commotion outside the record shop at 84 Charing Cross Road last Saturday morning, you’d have thought some hot pop attraction was making a guest appearance.
Couples with cameras posed in front of the door, while other people waited impatiently to get inside. The people, mostly in their 30s, appeared too conservative to be waiting for Sigue Sigue Sputnick, the latest rock (out)rage here--but you could imagine them shrieking at the sight of, say, Sade.
In truth, the couples with cameras were tourists, attracted more by the building itself than its contents. The address for years was the home of Marks & Co., a secondhand book shop celebrated in a work by Helene Hanff, an American who has written several children’s books and contributed articles to such magazines as the New Yorker and Harper’s.
Her book, “84 Charing Cross Road,” is what led the tourists here. It’s a collection of letters between Hanff and the Marks staff--a correspondence that began in 1949 with Hanff’s inquiries about rare books but expanded over the course of two decades into a series of warm, even loving exchanges. It has been made into a play--now running at the Broadway Playhouse in San Gabriel, Calif.--and is scheduled to be turned into a film.
However, most of the non-tourists waiting to get into the store knew or cared little about the history of the building. In fact, they wondered why all these crazy tourists were taking pictures of it when Piccadilly Circus was within walking distance.
This crowd consisted of compact disc fans, and the store--Covent Garden Records--was tailor-made for them. Despite the revolution compact discs have triggered in the record business, record stores partition off CDs from regular albums, cassettes or videos. This usually means a limited selection and uninformed sales personnel.
At Covent Garden Records, however, CDs are literally everything. In addition to more than 5,000 pop and classical titles, the split-level shop offers CD players, used CDs and a listening area so you can sample any CD in the store. There are no traditional vinyl LPs or cassettes.
Simon Hosein, the store’s general manager, sees the “compact disc only” concept as an idea whose time has come. He predicts a rash of imitators in large cities in such major record markets as the United States, Germany and Japan.
The Charing Cross shop, he explained, is the offshoot of a classical record store in London’s Covent Garden area. As soon as CDs were introduced here in the spring of 1983, shop owner Howard Woo saw a revolution in the making and felt the need for a shop that specialized in the new discs.
To hedge his bet, Woo also stocked a few vinyl albums, but he soon did away with them.
“We found an immediate audience,” said Hosein. “And it was a more discriminating and demanding audience. The CD audience is definitely a breed apart, and we began to design special features to meet their needs.
“There seems to be a far greater degree of discrimination among the CD buyers than anything we experienced in the old record shop,” he continued. “They’ll say things like, ‘The orchestra is too far back (in the sound) or the placement of the mikes is wrong.’
“Because the cost of a CD is much greater than a regular album (about twice the price), they want to hear what they are getting. Instead of just picking up a Beethoven record, for instance, classical buyers will go through several performances of the selection and find the one that sounds best. They may listen to six versions.
“Pop fans (use the listening area) for different reasons. They may come in because of a hit single and they want to hear the rest of the album to see how the other tracks sound, which is something they would have done with records if they had the chance.
“The problem is, stores were reluctant to play the records for customers because it was so easy to damage them. With CDs, we don’t have to worry about the damage. The CDs are virtually indestructible.”
Because of the durability of CDs, one of the most popular sections of the Covent Garden shop is the “used” bins. With the discs discounted almost 40%, demand for the used CDs is so great that there is a line around the block when groups of them are put on sale.
Hosein, whose CD stock includes German, Japanese and U.S. imports, said word of the store has spread so fast through the compact disc fraternity that the shop now does large mail-order business.
So, the tradition of the building is still alive. Maybe, Hosein speculated good-naturedly, there’ll even be enough correspondence for a second, pop-oriented volume of “84 Charing Cross Road.”
LIVE IN L.A.: Tickets for The Concert That Counts--the drug awareness marathon rock concert on April 26 at the Los Angeles Coliseum--will go on sale Monday. . . . Tickets also go on sale Monday for the Bangles’ May 17 appearance at the Greek Theatre and for Judas Priest’s May 9 stop at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. . . . Tickets go on sale Sunday for Waylon Jennings’ May 3 return to the Universal Amphitheatre.