clivemurray.com

Hold on a sec… I have to catch my breath… I’ve just had a shock.

[interlude]

OK, that’s better.

So, I was just in HMV on Oxford Street in my lunchbreak, checking out the CDs, and I found Alice In Chains’ excellent debut “Facelift” on the shelf for £7.99. That’s a pretty good price - even the usual suspects can’t match that. So I picked it up and carried on browsing, which was where I ran into difficulty.

“Ah!” I thought, “I wonder if they have “Too Fast For Love” here… that’s over 20 years old, they can’t be charging too much for it… Or maybe I’ll pick up “Powerslave“, I’ve not heard that in years…”

Want to know how much they were charging for these two albums? I suggest you sit down…

£16.99 and £19.99 respectively.

Errrr… WHAT?

What the FUCK?

(It was at this point that I shoved “Facelift” back onto the shelf and marched out of the building at the hurry-up.)

How the dribbly crap can they imagine that they can charge that much? TWENTY [expletive deleted] QUID for an album released in 1984? And seventeen of my hard-earned shiny shiny pounds for a 23 year old album which only had 9 songs on it originally and isn’t likely to be much improved by shoehorning on 4 “previously unreleased tracks”? (Those tracks were probably unreleased for a reason…) It’s not like either of them is a collector’s item or anything. Amazon have both of them for �10.99, so this can only be one thing - an attempt to further cash in on the recent rock resurgence by upping the prices of old rock CDs.

AGAIN.

AS IF THEY WEREN’T OVERPRICED TO BEGIN WITH.

What, do you imagine that anyone old enough or addled enough to want old Cr�e and Maiden CDs isn’t going to NOTICE that you’ve arbitrarily added between six and ten quid to the price? Is that what you think, HMV? Really? Tell you what then, how about you fuck off? Try that.

My HMV boycott starts today and lasts until their CD prices descend into the realms of the merely exorbitant. (Hah! Yeah, like that’ll happen.)

Fuck’em. In the ear.