​Pulp Hogmanay concert can bring back ‘the old days’ - Kevin Buckle

​Genuinely exciting news this week that Pulp will be headlining the Hogmanay Concert In The Gardens. While recent concerts from Harry Styles and Bruce Springsteen brought many fans into the shop there is nobody that better matches the old Avalanche demographic than Pulp.

Singer Jarvis Cocker of Pulp - In the mid-90s students were coming into Avalanche to buy “the first Pulp album” after the huge success of Different Class

​We have of course been selling Pulp albums since the early eighties but it wasn’t until the mid-nineties they crossed over into a more mainstream indie audience. I remember well students coming in to buy “the first Pulp album” after the huge success of Different Class when what they wanted was the previous album His ‘N’ Hers as they were blissfully unaware that there were three albums that preceded that.

This was of course “the old days” when singles mattered and affter scrapimg into the top 40 the previous year with Do You Remember The First Time, Pulp reached number two with Common People, kept off the number one spot by Robson and Jerome, who later that year also managed to keep Oasis and Wonderwall from the top spot.

Three more top ten hits from the number one album followed which of course meant the album was a big seller for quite some time. All of this now is completely lost. Customers both young and old have no idea what single is at number one and even old-timers have no more than a passing knowledge of how even their favourite artists have fared in the album charts.

It was therefore with some surprise that when Avalanche hosted the post Record Store Day meeting I heard record companies and labels still really concerned about the chart positions they achieved.

I was well used to artists and their labels highlighting chart positions, especially in the Scottish charts, which had been achieved with sales in the low hundreds and sometimes not even reaching three figures. However to hear how much the big record companies still cared about these things was a surprise.

There are shops now geared specially to selling a few hundred of a new release and online platforms including those of the artists often selling thousands directly to the fans, but what they gain in week one sales is lost overall in that albums now have no shelf life at all as the shop will move onto the next week’s release and the artist’s website will see few sales after the initial flurry.

Shops are now regularly offered just a month or two after release items that were only meant to be available from the artist because sales have slowed so drastically.

What is quite depressing now is that the most influential platform is Tik Tok with popularity based on no more than a short snippet of a song. There also appears to be lists of records you should have that are regularly consulted that lead to some unusual sales with it no longer being a surprise if somebody buys Aphex Twin, King Crimson, Elliott Smith and Slowdive.

One thing is for sure and that is with even more festivities planned for Waverley Bridge and Pulp just along from Avalanche in the Gardens it is sure to be a busy time and no doubt fans from all over the world will take the opportunity to see one of their favourite bands in a beautiful setting on such an occasion.