Everything Everything (Photo: Live4ever Media)
Everything Everything have declared the decision by high street retailer HMV to call in the administrators as ‘another body blow to the physical product’.
The band were playing an in-store session at their local HMV in Manchester on Monday evening (January 14th) as the news was breaking, and later told Channel 4 News of their sadness at the continuing decline of more traditional album formats.
“I think it’s another body blow to the physical product – not recorded music generally – but the actual record you can hold in your hands has lost another platform, and all the things that go with it like the artwork and the things we spend time on,” Jeremy Pritchard said.
Drummer Michael Spearman added that the potential demise of high street shops such as HMV will take away the notion of buying an album on a whim, without any particular prior knowledge of it. “I’d go not really knowing what I wanted, maybe the artist, and I’d just go, ‘Oh, I like the look of that one’,” he recalled.
“There’s something quite nice about not knowing absolutely everything and seeing loads of reviews. You can just pick it up and go, ‘I have no idea if this is going to be any good.”
HMV’s 239 outlets in the UK and Ireland are remaining open for the time being, but around 4,350 jobs are under threat as its owners look to secure an unlikely long-term future.