Cluttered Like My Head

 Back in the midst of the pandemic, I was meant to be going to see The National at Brixton Academy. There was a lot of talk about how they were going to probably play "High Violet" in full to mark the 10th anniversary of the LP. It didn't happen. The gigs got rescheduled and then cancelled, and although they did come over last year for a few outdoor dates, I didn't want to pay the big prices to see one band.  This year, they announced dates at Alexandra Palace. They first announced a date for this Tuesday, and then followed it up with a Wednesday show as well and I bought tickets for both shows, partly to compensate for the in-between years, and partly because I thought something special might happen.  The shows finally came around this week, hard on the heels of a surprise second LP of the year. You'd expect shows focussed on those new LPs but the setlists of recent have shown a willingness to mix it up, and long long sets. The first show was fantastic - they pla...

 When I was getting into music, there were a lot of tribes, and it wasn't just based around the music that you were listening to. Fair enough to say that you were a Goth, or a Mod, but the paper that you read was also a good indicator of your taste, and although I did read the NME and Sounds, I was always a Melody Maker reader. Partly its because they had writers who were allowed to be exuberant and pretentious. Partly its because it had glossy covers which made it stand out against the bland newsprint of the NME, but mainly it was because of the music they championed.  I bought 'Surfer Rosa' on the back of a glowing review in the Maker, and I never looked back. There's a chap on Twitter who has been posting the contents of both MM and NME over the past few years, and looking back, I can see how many of my favourite LPs were originally shown me by Chris Roberts, Simon Reynolds, or Jim Arundel.  Does it stand the test of time? Obviously some of these bands are not as wel...

 The saga of the errant Peel session continues. I found a box that said "John Peel - inc Pixies" and thought that was it, but for some reason the tape within the box was actually a misfiled copy of Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots" EP. However, it did show that the Pixies session was probably on an SA90, and I found one of these as well so popped it into the tape player. It's pretty apparent that it's not a radio recording but more of a compilation showing Miller's state of mind. Opening with "I Can't Help Myself" by Gene and "The Chemistry Between Us" by Suede, I think its pretty easy to place it as a mid-nineties tape (probably 1996) and its a quite typical one of my mix tapes in that Side B is blank, and the third track in is "Katy Song" by the Red House Painters, which lasts over 8 minutes and suggests I was, only three songs in, already trying to pad it out. 

 As it's now 40 years since its first release,REM decided to mark the occasion by re-releasing the first version of "Radio Free Europe" as close to the original as they could. Let's call it a facsimile edition. It's pretty cool.  Even more excitingly (for the purposes of this blog at least) they also decided to release a version of their first demo tape, limited to 1,500 copies, and only available by jumping through an expensively placed hoop.  Naturally I bit, so I am now the proud owner of a set of REM button badges, a new REM t-shirt, the 7" of "Radio Free Europe" and the demo tape, titled "Cassette Set" Following on from the 7", it's very close (I guess) to the original release. There's 3 tracks on side 1 of the tape, although it takes a couple of goes for the first one (Sitting Still) and there's a snippet of White Tornado after the actual full track of the same name, as if they taped over their first attempt at the s...

 This is a glorious tape. As well as their various releases, Sonic Cathedral also has an excellent track record at putting on shows, and back in 2013 they hosted a show with Luna / Galaxie 500 lead Dean Wareham at St Pancras Old Church.  Dean and his band (Britta, Anthony & Jason) played a set including material from both of his (then) previous bands as well as solo material from his forthcoming album (also released by Sonic Cathedral) and the label released this cassette version of the show in 2014, around the same time as that very solo album.  Now - the curious thing is that the tape version of this show has 12 tracks and whilst there was also a CD version (which I think was available as a promo with the solo LP) that only has 6 tracks, making the cassette version the one to get. It's never been re-released, nor has it ever been available on vinyl.  The tape was available as either a green shell or a red shell. As the picture shows, this is obviously the green...

 When I was first getting into music, I had a mate in the Sixth Form who had similar tastes and we'd occasionally swap tapes with each other. I did him a tape of the Pixies - he did me a tape of the Brilliant Corners. Even that far back, it's fair to say that he was trawling a slightly more indie branch of indie than I was.  Maybe 30 years later, we bumped into each other again on Facebook, and naturally our talk went often to music. When I mentioned earlier this year that I'd bought the tape deck and started going through my tapes, he dug into a box, found a load of tapes that he thought I might be interested in, and sent me them to have a listen.  Naturally his tapes are far more efficiently catalogued than mine. We're not going to get into a situation here where there's nothing on the inlay card. But they're not my tapes - so although it's going to be a different voyage of discovery, I like to think that it will still be a voyage.  The first tape I dug ou...

 Some tapes in the stash aren't labelled at all - there's no clue as to the contents, and this one is a case in point. A nice BASF Type II with a sturdy casing - what jewels could have been given the privilege of residing on such a quality tape?  The reason I dug this one out is because I remember taping some Pixies Peel sessions back in the day, and I thought they were on a tape like this. Although I've since purchased those same sessions on a dodgy bootleg CD and the subsequent official release, I thought that this might be the motherlode.  But no - it turns out that it's a tape containing pretty much the entire recorded output (at that time) of Fleet's tweepop legends, Jim Jiminee. At the time I loved this band. I listened a lot to their debut LP "Welcome to Hawaii" and the singles that were released to support it, and I guess I made this tape to let me listen to them when there wasn't a record deck around. Home taping is killing music and all that....

 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 ...

Our first tape is a C90 in a rather special clamshell type box, emblazoned with "Limited Edition" blurb, bragging about the "Unique Design" and which for some reason I have given the title "Really Very Good Songs". What delights could this tape possibly hold?  Unfortunately, I think I must have had the idea of making a killer mixtape and then got bored pretty quickly. The first side is a bit of a hotchpotch, which somehow manages to find space for two live tracks by All About Eve. The second side saw me just recording some tracks from some of my favourite EPs at the time. There's a couple of tracks by Ride, followed by a couple from the Pixies, and a few from the Primitives before the revelation that these tracks were probably recorded over Act's "Laughter, Tears and Rage", the remains of which survive to close out Side B.  An early lesson in hype - it's a good reminder of the sort of thing that I was listening to at the start of the ...

 n the 80s and the 90s, my cassette deck was glued to my side and my headphones to my head. I'd walk to school, or I'd do my paper round, or I'd go to town, and I'd be in my own little self-contained world listening to those cassettes. As time went by, technology moved on, and the tape deck gave way to the minidisc, to the ipod, to the smartphone. When you've got a musical library at the tip of your fingers, who would want to listen to a cassette anyway? Well - over the past few years, I've bought a few tapes from smaller labels. Because people have historically been able to make tapes themselves rather than sending them off to manufacturing plants, there's a DIY ethos to tapes that has somehow held true and, although tape sales are tiny and we're not going to get a cassette revival to challenge that experienced by vinyl, I'm happy that this plucky little format is still holding it's own.  But, for years, I've not had anything to play those t...