Do you remember when MC meant 'tape'?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

So we're moving house. This means a) that I'm spending a week painting a black ceiling white; b) that I ought to slim down my collection of 'cassettes'. I do this every time I move, and the last time was two years ago. In that time I have listened to precisely... 1, count them, 1 cassette (Dogs D'amour, In the Dynamite Jet Saloon, thanks for asking). Anyway I thought I'd combine both tasks and listen through my old tapes while doing the decorating, and share the results with YOU, the people of poptimists, while I do so. (Tom -- if this is a bad idea, I'll take it over to my own journal!).

So far I have listened to:

Brian Eno, More Blank Than Frank, Songs from the Period 1973-1977.
Still love this -- I like the rock with odd angles, the affected voice, the gimmicks, the sound and feel of it. I got this just when i was starting university I think (1993) and I can remember listening to it while working down to Sainsbury's Savacentre at Cameron Toll on a Monday afternoon after classes to domy weekly food shop. (This level of organisation lasted about a month, I think). I think I felt... sophisticated, maybe, for liking it. Not sure if that's quite the word, but it seemed a long way from the last things I been mad for, and which I was cooling rapidly on -- grunge, and early Britpop (in the form of Modern Life is Rubbish-era Blur) which I hated. But I can see how Eno has more in common with the bands I did still have time for -- Pixies, Pavement, Pulp -- than Nirvana or Blur.

The Orb, Blue Room pts 1 & 2.
I think this is about 40 mins long, but because the tape player has auto-reverse, this was just going round and round last night. Also great, still, although for some reason I totally stopped listening to the Orb. I can remember buying the Ultraworld album a bit later than the rest of the world and his wife, but never really devoting much time to it. Because I had this on tape I heard it a lot more -- I just find it... absorbing, I guess.

Mark Germino, Caught In the Act of Being Ourselves.
Totally uncharacteristic of my taste then or now, this must be one of the first four or five tapes I owned. It's dated 1987, which is the year I started at boarding school, and just after I started 'getting into' music (at 13 -- I've confessed before to being a late starter). I think I heard this on one of the rock shows -- Tommy Vance or Fluff Freeman -- I listened to. I liked the ballads, pretty standard singer-songwriter fare, with the usual trite sentiments (you can't put a price on the truth; everything you read in the papers is propaganda; people live lives of fear and loneliness). I can remember listening to Michelle Shocked and Suzanne Vega about the same time, and maybe this reminded me of Springsteen, but I think I may have heard them the other way around (I can definitely remember buying my first Springsteen album, in WH Smiths in Winchester, early 1988). Another track I remember from those radio shows was Roland the Headless Thomson Gunner by Warren Zevon which I only just found again (having a) misheard the title as 'Ryan...' and b) forgetting that I was looking for it) on a free CD with a magazine. Hurray!

To be continued...

Comments

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i have the long blue room single on CD - i didn't include it in my purge of singles because it barely counts as one coming in at 40 minutes.

if you'd like a digital version...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

:-) yes please! YSI?

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

ooo that would be great - i only have it on vinyl so it hardly ever gets dusted down for a listen

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i am currently digitising 'little listened and compilations'. i will do it v soon.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have one already done BUT I encoded it at 256 so gawd knows how big it is (or how long it wd take to upload) - I may leave this assignment to the jaunty one.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Blue Room brings on intense memory-rushes for me from my year between school and university - I still play the 40m version sometimes, it's a good piece of work.

Eno I had a few months of listening to really intensely but I've always had very polarised reactions to his vocal work - ppl seem to see the four mid-70s albums as a piece but I find Warm Jets and Tiger Mountain seriously annoying and Before & After and Green World intriguing and lovely (though his voice is still occasionally crap). I was going to say the first two are too crossword-puzzley but then that doesn't really explain how I can tolerate "Backwater" or "Kings Lead Hat".

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I am ABSOLUTELY obsessed with Warm Jets at the moment -- I can see why someone might find it irritating, but it's one of the few pieces of self-consciously 'quirky' rock I can stand.

Also I have just named our new club night 'Before and After Science'!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The 7" edit of Blue Room was and is my favourite Orb track. My tape of Rave 92 got chewed up at the end because I rewound it back to the start of Blue Room constantly. It's that bass hook that makes it - the 40 min version doesn't have it and it's just not the same.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Surely it's in there somewhere!