Sweet Sorrow(54)

‘What do your mum and dad do?’

‘Hm?’

‘You don’t talk about them much.’

‘Well, Mum works at the golf club. She used to be a nurse, then she helped Dad, now she organises weddings and events and all that stuff. But I don’t live with her.’

‘You live with your dad?’

‘Uh-huh. Mum moved out in April with my sister.’

‘You didn’t say that.’

‘No.’

‘Christ, I’m such a cow.’

‘Why?’

‘Banging on about, I don’t know, my top three fruits, and you’ve not told me that.’

‘You asked before, I just changed the subject.’

‘Yes, why did you?’

‘Change the subject? I don’t know, living with my dad – bit weird, isn’t it?’

‘Well, it needn’t be.’

‘No, but it is. It feels the wrong way round.’

‘And what does he do?’

‘He’s unemployed at the moment.’

‘He got made redundant?’

‘Bankrupt. Lost everything. House, savings.’

‘But he used to …’

‘Run the music shop on the high street.’

She grabbed my arm. ‘Vinyl Visions! I loved that shop! I used to get everything there.’

‘Thank you. It didn’t work out though.’

‘I know, I saw that, just after Christmas. It’s a real shame. Wait a minute, I know your dad – nice man, sort of tall, sort of … crumpled.’

‘That’s him.’

‘Always playing really far-out jazz in the shop, really wild stuff. When I was younger, he’d be playing this mad, brilliant afro-funk or old blues, nodding along with his eyes closed and I’d go up to the counter with something by Boyzone or whatever, and he’d take it out of my hand and just sort of … smile really sadly. “Oh, my child …”’

‘Yep. That’s my dad.’

She peered at my face. ‘That’s where I knew you from!’

‘Well, I take after Mum, mainly.’

‘What happened?’

‘Competition. Discounts in the big shops. I think he overestimated the local jazz scene.’

‘So what’s he doing now?’

‘This time of day?’ I looked at my watch. ‘He’s either asleep or watching Countdown,’ I said and then felt a shiver of self-disgust at that gesture, examining my watch like that, a shabby piece of theatrical business. In truth, I’d not seen his face for days now. For reasons I couldn’t say out loud, I did not want to go home. But neither did I want to stay, not now that the conversation had been tainted with pity and mawkishness.

‘Well. It’s a shame,’ she said eventually. ‘I loved Vinyl Visions. Business is brutal, isn’t it? Everything great gets stamped on in the end.’ She took my arm. ‘We could walk a little further. If you want to talk some more?’





The Jazz Section


It had been something great, our family enterprise, while it lasted.

My father’s own musical ambitions had stalled. His only regular jazz gig was with Rule of Three, a trio that played the more open-minded local pubs, the kind of accomplished and committed outfit that is always being asked if they can play more quietly. For cash, he played the circuit in a famously slick wedding band, but he had grown to hate the kitschy eighties sax-playing that this work demanded, the screwed-up eyes, the head thrown backwards, as posturing and silly as using two fingers to represent a gun. He had wanted to be part of a British jazz revival, not honk glumly though ‘House of Fun’ at some anniversary, a surly ‘Careless Whisper’ at the Rotary Club’s Christmas do.

But neither did he want to inherit the family business. Vinyl Visions was a mini-chain, three branches on the high streets of small suburban towns, and my grandparents wanted rid of them. The term ‘independent record shop’ suggests dedication and expertise, the kind of place that might be curated, but my grandparents’ feeling for music was like an ironmonger’s feeling for buckets. Music was a commodity and each branch of Vinyl Visions was equally fusty, selling middle-of-the-road music to locals who couldn’t face the ‘big shops’. Before their mystifying left turn, my grandparents were stationers and remained stationers at heart, still stocking random items from that noble trade – lewd and abusive birthday cards, a totem pole of crêpe paper, random items that caught my grandfather’s eye at the wholesalers and that he felt belonged amongst the racks of popular classics, novelty records and easy listening on the Music for Pleasure label. Through disco and punk, metal and mod, post-punk and electro-pop and the early days of house, the shop’s most consistent sellers remained Richard Clayderman and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. If your heart demanded bagpipe music on cassette and some ancient tinsel, then Vinyl Visions was the only game in town, a music shop for people who didn’t much care for the stuff.

The suburban high street was once the natural habitat of shops like this, ill conceived and inefficient, irrational and scrappy with dusty, fading window displays, closed half-days on Wednesday. But in this new decade, the retail environment was less hospitable, and music retail in particular was changing at a dizzying rate. Should they drop cassettes and commit to CDs? Abandon singles? It was all too much, and so my grandparents called on Dad. It was, they said, irresponsible and immature to live with two kids in rented rooms. Bad enough that he’d dropped out of accountancy, but there must be, what, five, ten people in the country making a living from playing the saxophone, all of them trained at academies and conservatoires, all with better contacts. Dad was an amateur. Silly to think he could be one of them. Besides, music retail was a stable business. People would always need music. In return for help with a mortgage on a proper house, why not come back and take over?