Tapes (2)

Since I found my interest piqued after my last rather lazy blip of old cassettes, I was inspired to dig around and I came up with these, hidden behind some art materials on a bookshelf in the dining room. The top one is a self-produced bootleg of a Roy Harper show at the Spring Street Theatre in Hull in 1992, or at least those bits of it that were well enough recorded to save. Beck taped it on a walkman, embellishing it along the way with coughs, and I edited down to a TDK D46 (remember those - they weren't that common because they were no cheaper than a D90 and you could fit two albums on one of those...?) and designed the cover art. I've never been a big fan of bootlegs, per se, apart from those occasional 'legendary' ones, like Dylan at the Free Trade Hall or Black Flag's 1982 demos, that usually end up getting polished up and released officially anyway - they always remind me of those table top sales you'd get in the students union where you could buy a couple of 'boots' of the Fall to go with your 'Betty Blue' poster to finish off accessorising your 'digs' with all the necessary undergraduate essentials. That said, I did have a few Harper bootlegs - I was a massive fan during my student years and beyond (and I'm still a fairly regular listener to the old hippy even now), to the extent that I even hitched on occasion to strange gigs in unfamiliar towns. In fact, I remember once spending the night on Hebden Bridge railway station with a couple of mates waiting for the first train back to Leeds when it was as near a lift as we could get after a gig at the Mechanics in Burnley. Happy days, indeed!

I mentioned the selection of tapes of which the bottom of these is one to middleman just the other day. They were my introduction to the full variety and joy of eighties American punk and hardcore, compiled, possibly randomly, by my friend Dave from his massive vinyl collection whenever he went home from Nottingham to his mum's for the weekend, during 1990-91. For some reason he only ever labelled the tapes themselves and then wrote all the track listings on scraps of paper that I had to transcribe onto the labels myself. This particular example has Youth Brigade, 7 Seconds, Government Issue, D.O.A., NoMeansNo, Reagan Youth, Spermbirds and M.D.C. - some truly classic stuff. There are about eight of these tapes in all and I'm going to hang onto them to put in the glove box when I finally get my VW van...!

The one in the middle is 'Obscured by Clouds' by Pink Floyd. It's one of Beck's and I'm not really sure how it's survived apart from the fact that I've never acquired it in any other format and I really rather like it. It's lived by the stereo in a number of kitchens over the years, a fairly typical Sunday afternoon bit of listening. It's the slightly ramshackle soundtrack to some early seventies art film I've never seen and it's got a certain laid-back charm as it lacks the pretentiousness of some of their more 'considered' work of the time (they put it together, I think, in downtime whilst they were making 'Dark Side of the Moon.')

Don't worry, I'm not going to keep inflicting these reminiscences on the bliposphere, especially since I've now run out of tapes. That said, I'm sure I must still have my original copy of Blondie's 'Parallel Lines' (the first album I ever owned) somewhere - I may have to have one last poke around in the loft...