My Boy Lollipop

So where was I? Ah yes. Record shops. A subject that cropped up the other day. A surfeit there may be of fashion shops and shoe shops, but the record shop is pretty thin on the ground. Unless someone can tell me otherwise, I know of only one shop that sells records (or to be more accurate CDs and DVDs) in Alcúdia and Pollensa, and that is the German Müller store next to Alcúdia's Auditorium.

A few years back, there used to be at least one record shop in both Puerto Pollensa and Puerto Alcúdia. The former never seemed to be open and finally gave up the ghost, the latter struggled on until maybe five years ago. This was called Lollipop, and it was in the same street as The Highlander Bar; it is now, I think, a locutorio. Lollipop was run by a German woman. I used to give her challenging assignments as to CDs I wanted to buy (this was before downloading came into real vogue). One of them was by Catherine Denby, an artist no one else in the world seems to have heard of other than myself and a presenter on the national radio station, RNE3. The CD in question never did turn up, and when I went one day to enquire I found that it was unlikely to ever turn up as the shop had gone.

Since then, with the exception of Müller (and stalls at markets), the area has been devoid of record stores. Whatever one thinks of downloading, there is little to compare with the satisfaction of thumbing through racks of CDs, though even this is nought as compared with the ancient ritual of the record shop (when vinyl was all there was and there were listening boothes). That there are no record shops is no real surprise. Lollipop struggled for several reasons - the emergence of downloading (even if it was in relative infancy), lack of stock (itself a factor of lack of business success), physical theft of CDs, and pirated copies. At the time, this latter factor was probably the most significant, and it is of course still a factor.

The guys who sell the pirated goods around the bars and on the streets (so-called "lucky-lucky" or "looky-looky" men) have a limited range of products - sunglasses, watches, jewellery and CDs and DVDs. It should appal, but somehow it doesn't as the whole "business" of pirated goods is so widespread.

I was once in Singapore, and a taxi-driver asked if I wanted some good products at good prices. He took me to a shop that had its windows taped over. Inside were Gucci this, Lacoste that. The Singaporean authorities took a dim view, especially as theirs was a country aspiring to total legitimacy in the global economy. The next day, I picked up the local English paper. It was called "The Straits Times" I think. On the front cover was a story about a raid against a shop selling pirated goods. It was the one I had been taken to only a few hours before.

I say all this because, although the Spanish police do have periodic actions against pirated goods, the selling of them goes on unabated. Spain and Mallorca are not the only places in Europe where this happens, but unlike Singapore which made a concerted effort to stop the practice, here it just carries on.

The sale of pirated CDs is one of the main reasons for there being an almost total absence of record stores. The added ease of the Internet has been the real killer though for such stores. While they have ceased to be, there are still plenty of places where you can buy sunglasses, watches and jewellery, despite the fakes that are available.


QUIZ: Yesterday - Dionne Warwick, penned by Bacharach and David. Today's title - who sang this?

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