Showbiz Kids (24/1/14)

At 6pm tomorrow, Saturday the 25th of January, it's all over bar the shouting. Well, bar the tidying up to be completely accurate.

Tomorrow night I'll close the shop doors to the public for the last time and (other than three days of gutting the place for the next occupants) draw a close to twenty seven years of my working life. And you know what? It feels fine. The future beckons, time to move on and all that.

I have a playlist. Obviously I have a playlist. There was a very fine tradition that we used to observe in the Church Street store; anybody who left the store, anybody who left the business was allowed to DJ (we had a DJ booth with a full on mixing desk and everything) for an hour. I have decided to resurrect this tradition and, in light of the fact that I'm in charge and can call seniority in every possible manner, I've resurrected it for myself. Accordingly I've spent the last hour setting up an hour long playlist on my iPod; the 21st century version of the mixtape. It is, of course, utterly splendid.

There had been some debate over the last few weeks concerning what the last song that we ever play should be. I settled the argument last week by telling anyone willing to listen that it should be The Super Furry Animals' rather brilliant 'The Man Don't Give a Fuck'. Obviously this was never going to happen. The title isn't a misnomer, the song is based around a sample of a Steely Dan lyric "Showbiz kids making movies of themselves, you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" and repeats the second half of the phrase for about six minutes; no way was that getting played.

So I settled it properly at lunchtime today. George Harrison. All Things Must Pass.

Except I may actually have something else in mind.

And in terms of tradition and my own anal retentive tendencies I have a last purchase to make. I'm fairly sure that I made the first purchase from the store (Spider-Man and Fellowship of the Ring on that new fangled DVD thing) so I'm making the last purchase. Circular again, as always.

And, as always, very specific choices with very specific reasons;

Elvis Costello and The Roots 'Wise Up Ghost' for the fact that the first really interesting release of my time with Revolver was Elvis's frantic, apocalyptic 'Tokyo Storm Warning'

and

Johnny Marr's solo album from last year which I somehow never quite got round to buying. I've said this before but I'll reiterate; the last album that I bought before starting my HMV life was The Smiths' 'The Queen is Dead'. The end should echo the beginning, everything should connect, that's the order that the world should have; reasons and patterns in everything.

So tomorrow I'll drive to work (I'm really not going to miss Speke Boulevard, hideous road) with 'The Queen is Dead' playing at deafening volume in a car that I would never have considered owning when I bought the original album and I'll get ready for the end to give way to a new start.

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