Read High Fidelity for Free Online Page A

know that I should work with it, enjoy it while it lasts.
    This is how I commemorate my return to the Kingdom of the Single: I sit down in my chair, the one that will stay here with me, and pick bits of the stuffing out of the arm; I light a cigarette, even though it is still early and I don’t really feel like one, simply because I am now free to smoke in the flat whenever I want, without rows; I wonder whether I have already met the next person I will sleep with, or whether it will be someone currently unknown to me; I wonder what she looks like, and whether we’ll do it here, or at her place, and what that place will be like; I decide to have a Chess Records logo painted on the sitting room wall. (There was a shop in Camden that had them all—Chess, Stax, Motown, Trojan—stenciled onto the brickwork beside the entrance, and it looked brilliant. Maybe I could get hold of the guy who did that and ask him to do smaller versions here.) I feel OK. I feel good. I go to work.
    Â 
    My shop is called Championship Vinyl. I sell punk, blues, soul, and R&B, a bit of ska, some indie stuff, some sixties pop—everything for the serious record collector, as the ironically old-fashioned writing in the window says. We’re in a quiet street in Holloway, carefully placed to attract the bare minimum of window-shoppers; there’s no reason to come here at all, unless you live here, and the people that live here don’t seem terribly interested in my Stiff Little Fingers white label (twenty-five quid to you—I paid seventeen for it in 1986) or my mono copy of Blonde on Blonde.
    I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here Saturdays—young men, always young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags—and because of the mail order: I advertise in the back of the glossy rock magazines, and get letters from young men, always young men, in Manchester and Glasgow and Ottowa, young men who seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and “ORIGINAL NOT RERELEASED” underlined Frank Zappa albums. They’re as close to being mad as makes no difference.
    I’m late to work, and when I get there Dick is already leaning against the door reading a book. He’s thirty-one years old, with long, greasy black hair; he’s wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt, a black leather jacket that is trying manfully to suggest that it has seen better days, even though he only bought it a year ago, and a Walkman with a pair of ludicrously large headphones which obscure not only his ears but half his face. The book is a paperback biography of Lou Reed. The carrier bag by his feet—which really has seen better days—advertises a violently fashionable American independent record label; he went to a great deal of trouble to get hold of it, and he gets very nervous when we go anywhere near it. He uses it to carry tapes around; he has heard most of the music in the shop, and would rather bring new stuff to work—tapes from friends, bootlegs he has ordered through the post—than waste his time listening to anything for a second time. (“Want to come to the pub for lunch, Dick?” Barry or I ask him a couple of times a week. He looks mournfully at his little stack of cassettes and sighs. “I’d love to, but I’ve got all these to get through.”)
    â€œGood morning, Richard.”
    He fumbles nervously with the giant headphones, gets one side stuck around his ear, and the other side falls over one eye.
    â€œOh, hi. Hi, Rob.”
    â€œSorry I’m late.”
    â€œNo, no problem.”
    â€œGood weekend?”
    I unlock the shop as he scrabbles around for his stuff.
    â€œAll right, yeah, OK. I found the first Liquorice Comfits album in Camden. The one on Testament of Youth. It was never released here. Japanese import only.”
    â€œGreat.” I don’t know