HACS 'Failed to set up'

My HA instance running on a RPi3 is up to date. When I attempt to install HACS I go through all the instructions from purging cache through entering token yet the HACS box is red with the ‘Failed to set up’ message.

The log entry (below) means nothing to me so I don’t know where to start. Help Please! TIA

Logger: homeassistant.util.json
Source: util/json.py:33
First occurred: 10:14:10 (3 occurrences)
Last logged: 10:19:41

Could not parse JSON content: /config/.storage/hacs.repositories
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/util/json.py”, line 33, in load_json
return json.loads(fdesc.read()) # type: ignore[no-any-return]
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.9/codecs.py”, line 322, in decode
(result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)
UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0x8b in position 4: invalid start byte