Cluttered Like My Head

 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...