Cluttered Like My Head

 Maybe ten years ago, I started picking up the odd tape from Fred Thomas' tape label, Life Like. Because of the per unit shipping costs, this only really allowed me to pick up the ones from his various ancilliary projects, a City Centre tape here, a SLGTM live tape there. I love the DIY feel of it - the way that it allows him to put out something a little less polished, a little less ready for prime time, a little more intimate.  And that's how I've got an Anna Burch tape. Fred and Anna have collaborated a fair bit over the psat few years, notably on the side project "Failed Flowers" so when Anna's first solo LP came out a few years back, there was a tape released around the same time on Life Like.  I'm not really sure what it is. It might be demo versions but there's audience noise. It might be a live show, but the audience noise doesn't exactly seem adjacent to the songs. What I can tell you is that it's stripped down versions of 6 of the son...

 Tape 3 again shows my capacity for putting tapes into mismatched boxes and not labelling them at all. In a BASF "Sound Level 1" Box, we find a garishly styled Memorex dbs 1 cassette, with no indication as to what might be on it.  Pressing Play, and we find the unmistakeable sounds of the Radio 4 show, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", specifically Episodes 2 and 3, featuring Hugh Laurie and Jimmy Mulville as well as series regulars John Sessions and Stephen Fry. I don't know when these were dated - I know I became aware of the show when it transferred to TV, so these must have been repeat shows, and I know they are taped from the radio because both episodes also have a snippet of "Today in Parliament" afterwards, though annoyingly, neither of them mention the date.  Side 1 also, after the extra snippet of Radio 4, segues into a few tracks from Mercury Rev. The first one is the tail of "Girlfren", a jam from the end of their second LP "Boces...

 So, to a second tape. Although it was in a different case, this is a solid looking Type II tape from Maxell, with a label on side 2 proclaiming Chris Isaak's 1991 compilation LP, 'WIcked Game'. Turns out that the label is actually correct and the tape does contain that LP from our 80s/90s throwback crooner, released after the title track was featured in David Lynch's 'Wild at Heart' and propelling him to (short-lived) stardom on this side of the pond.  This LP, made up of tracks from his first three LPS (which, I believe were only available on Import at that time) is an excellent primer to his work, with all the obvious standouts ( Heart Shaped World, Blue Hotel, Heart Full of Soul) and I know that it encouraged me to dig deeper once the albums became more widely available. I suspect that my sister had this on CD and I taped it off of her, so at least I can understand why I made this tape.  I'm less sure about the other side though. There's no label on ...