Oh no, the tape's stuck again ...

This time last year I was banging on about an old bit of hi-fi (a Philips 1040) knocking around at my partner's house in Italy. Cheap and (relatively) cheerful mass-produced gear for your non-fussy music-loving Euro household circa 1985. Hit fast-forward, hold it down for half a minute, and voila, it's a year later and ... I'm banging on about another piece of old hi-fi equipment knocking around at my partner's house in Italy. Namely this ...

Your pretty face is going to hell: the Renas C2

What is it? Evidently, it's a Renas C2, a heavyweight monster-brick of a thing dating from the early 60s, possibly manufactured in Milan. It's a portable (just about) household tape recorder which - as you can see - uses large-reel tapes, obsolete but pleasingly geeky-looking. Anyway, it's kind of intriguing. My partner has no memory of it being used in her childhood (mid-70s on) so I'm assuming her parents barely used it and just stuck it at the back of a cupboard when they got tired of seeing it around. Could it have been a wedding gift? Were "ultra-modern" gadgets like this in vogue in Italy in the early-60s? Non lo so. No, I don't know. I wasn't there and it doesn't seem easy to find out. Leaving aside the specifics of this one being in this particular (not-very-hi-fi-orientated) house in northern Italy, I think there's something interesting about how portable tape recorders become ubiquitous consumer items in the 60s and 70s. When I was about 12, we had one of those shoebox-sized portable tape players (another Philips, I think) in our house, on which my brother and I would play the handful of jazz/big band tapes that my dad had haphazardly acquired. Or a bird song cassette (another dad thing). Naturally a few years later we experimented with live-recording Top Of The Pops from the TV (to not very good effect) and I think I even had a go at trying to live-to-air record John Peel a couple of times when I was about 16 (again, the murky sound was painfully bad). And that, dear reader, is that. Or ... it could have been. Though this primitive equipment didn't produce immediate results I think a seed was planted. By the mid-80s I had a half-decent hi-fi in my bedroom and was taping John Peel every other night or doing copies of borrowed albums on my bulk-bought blank TDK tapes (Magazine or Cure LPs wheedled out of friends for a week or two, anything remotely interesting borrowed from record libraries). Shelves and shelves of these "dubbed" cassettes occupy valuable space in my flat to this day. Fascinating, no? Er, no, not especially. But wait ... I'm getting to something slightly more interesting. Scroll forward about 15 years (to November 2000) and picture me at a gig in an upmarket hotel by Liverpool Street station in east London. I'm at a freebie show by Schneider TM. Entirely on a whim, I've taken along a dictaphone on loan from the place where I work, a clunky old thing using standard audio cassettes. It's 1975 all over again - I'm mucking about with a recorder. Yes, you guessed it! The results sounded surprisingly good and I went on to try it at the next gig and the next (and the next ...). Needless to say I've subsequently turned into a total bore about recording nearly all the gigs I go to. I'm like Andy Warhol taking his recorder to dinner parties in midtown New York, or Tony Benn at his cabinet meetings discussing the IMF and energy policy. 

These days certain commentators like to pontificate about whether "selfie culture" has ruined social occasions. People busy taking photos of themselves having fun are not, so the argument goes, having fun. Or at least not in the old-fashioned "spontaneous" sense. Dull debate though this is, I do sometimes think people are a bit too fixated with the visual side of life, ignoring the audiological. True, there's a whole class of people who do field recordings (often to excellent effect), and experimental music derived from this stuff is generally well worth checking out. But not that many people seem to record the actual gigs they go to (I know of just one other person on the London gig scene for the past 20 years who apparently always does a recording of the things he goes to). Is it weird to record rather than simply enjoy? Er, I think you can do both. And anyway, was the person (Brigid Berlin) who recorded the Velvet Underground at Max's Kansas City in New York on 23 August 1970, weird? Well, OK, she might have been but who cares? It may seem weird to record rather than to experience, but what about if you're enriching your experience by re-experiencing via the recordings? Hold on a minute, not quite sure I understood that myself. Let me just rewind the tape and play that part back again. Vrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeegggggggghhhhh. "But who cares? ... but who cares? ....  but who cares? ... but who cares?". Oh no, the tape's stuck again ... 

C30 C60 C90 go: the Renas C2