Taylor’s welcome to our delayed 40th anniversary - Kevin Buckle
Avalanche was officially 40 years old last Saturday, having opened at 33 West Nicolson Street on June 1 1984. I’m planning a year of celebrations but decided to delay the start slightly so we could first get over the visit of Taylor Swift to Edinburgh - something that if you had told me 40 years ago I would never have believed.
I’m basing my expectations on the two-day visit last year of Harry Styles which I hadn’t really given too much consideration to apart from making sure we were well stocked on old One Direction merchandise.
People started arriving the day before and were still milling about the day after the concerts, so it was four days of hats and feather boas which some described as looking like a well behaved hen party.
As I write this the day before the first of the three Taylor Swift concerts at Murrayfield the atmosphere has been slightly more subdued but it is clear from the bags that visitors to the shop have been carrying that her advance merchandise sales have been unsurprisingly a huge success.
Certainly Taylor’s visit appears to be more of a family affair with visitors from as far afield as the States and Australia in the shop saying the entire family would be going to the concerts.
When it became clear that Taylor was bigger than both the Superbowl and Record Store Day I decided our more humble celebrations could wait a little longer, though we do have some exciting things lined up.
I did get a pleasant surprise on Wednesday when Craig from Star Wheel Press came in the shop with their new album on vinyl Machines with the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Thankfully I persuaded him that they should do a CD as well and that should follow quite quickly.
The first album is still one of my favourite albums by a Scottish artist since the shop opened and of course Ian Rankin is a big fan too. I had seen him tweet he had just received an advance copy a couple of weeks ago so was hoping to get copies soon.
The album doesn’t disappoint and immediately showed the mark of an outstanding album when with just three plays in the shop I had half a dozen customers ask what is was. Therein lies the problem for a shop these days as not one person bought the album but all instead tapped the information into their phones.
We will sell plenty of copies no doubt but the days of selling large numbers of an album by simply playing it in the shop are long gone though we still have some success with bands like Whipping Boy and There Will Be Fireworks.
I have just finished compiling a top 100 chart for our sales of albums since we moved to Waverley Market in which Taylor Swift certainly features but by no
means dominates and also updated our top 100 Scottish albums of all time which is always very popular.
There are lots of announcements of celebrations to follow as we plan to do forty things to celebrate our 40 years.
For now though the weekend belongs to the Swifties and Avalanche knows its place so we will leave the considerably sized stage to Taylor.