A great Cure for boosting music and merchandise sales - Kevin Buckle
It was no great surprise, but The Cure playing in Edinburgh with Avalanche favourites Slowdive and Mogwai meant we had a bumper long weekend in the shop.
With the gig on Sunday, people started arriving early on Friday and were still in Edinburgh in large numbers on the Monday, which in fact turned out to be the busiest day we had.
We were well stocked up on T-shirts and the harder to find vinyl and compact discs by The Cure and while we can’t get any official merchandise for Slowdive and Mogwai ,we did have all their available music releases.
As happened, when AC/DC were in town fans of The Cure can never have enough T-shirts and of course we have a great selection of Cure-related Butcher Billy shirts, so most fans were finding shirts they had never seen before.
Several fans did turn up in the shop the day after the gig wearing the Butcher Billy shirts they had bought a couple of days earlier and we had even more people in who had seen others wearing the shirts at the gig and had asked where they had got them and had come along to buy one for themselves.
One couple asked to see the Butcher Billy Cure hoodies we had and after trying on several put them on the counter saying they would take them all. Another couple came to the counter with records, T-shirts and CDs and pointing to the display we have behind the counter asked for the most expensive Cure item we had which was a rare 12- inch single of A Forest in a picture sleeve priced at £100.
Unsurprisingly most Slowdive and Mogwai fans had all the music from these bands but we did get a few people filling in holes in their collection with some of the titles that they hadn’t seen before.
The start of the week saw gigs from Florence and the Machine and Lorde and we did sell quite a few Lorde albums, but the next big gig for us was on the following Thursday when the Deftones were playing.
We were well stocked up on T-shirts as the band’s Around The Fur shirt is the biggest selling band shirt we have ever had. Shirt sales didn’t disappoint and we sold a decent number of albums too.
Bon Jovi fans in for Friday’s gig mostly bought their most popular albums despite me having made an attempt to get a few more unusual titles.
Today is The Prodigy, so we have stocked up on their two big albums, which even now are regular sellers.
The final gig in this run of high profile gigs is Sigur Ros at the Edinburgh Playhouse on Monday. Strangely there are hardly any CDs available but we have all their classic albums in stock on vinyl, which I expect to do well.
We then have a couple of weeks to recover before the Edinburgh University students return and it is always interesting to see what the new intake are buying. I just hope they aren’t overly influenced by short clips on TikTok, which is a worrying trend these days.
Hopefully though, just like the Cure fans, the new student intake will find the shop Just Like Heaven!