• Screen/Play #2: Record Shop Retail in Empire Records and High Fidelity

    For someone like me who has only ever had a passing interest in music-buying and hit puberty around Napster’s ascendance, the record shop as a location resided almost exclusively in the general cultural imagination as opposed to my regular routine. Inevitably my idea of what record shops and the people who work there were like came to align with the enthusiastic but elitist list-making devotion immortalised by Stephen Fears’ High Fidelity (2000), based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, and brought to life by John Cusack’s world-weary shop owner Rob Gordon and his pair of ‘musical idiots’, played perfectly by Jack…