Taking tape mountain by strategy: home taping didn't kill music

Yes, that's right, I've been sorting out my mountain of tapes, the cassettes onto which I recorded hundreds of albums back in that golden age of home taping - the 1980s and 1990s. In my opinion such a notable event is easily worthy of a blog in its own right, but this rather massive exercise (taking the best part of two days) has also thrown up an interesting issue or two. I say "interesting", but that's debatable. Anyway, read on ...

So, yeah, tapes. Home-recorded tapes. I've got hundreds. Thousands. Probably getting on for 2,000. For years I used to bulk-buy packs of TDK C90 tapes and record more or less anything half-decent that I could get my hands on: records I was allowed to borrow from the HMV shop in which I used to work (a maximim of three at a time was the rule, I seem to recall), stuff borrowed from public libraries in various places where I've lived, things I've cajoled friends into lending me. I can trace this home-taping mania back to a conversation I had one day in - of all places - Skegness in the summer of 1983. I got introduced to a couple of guys older than me (in their early 20s versus my super-naive 19) who had strong views on music. Their likes: PiL, the Birthday Party and similar slightly "uncompromising" post-punk stuff. Their dislikes: anything commercial and especially the rip-off nature of buying music. How do you get hold of your music, then?", I asked. "We just tape everything." "What, everything?" "Yeah, we never buy any records, why should we?" Wild. Anyway, impressionable teenager that I was, this made a big er, impression. Although I stumbled on buying (despite my penniless state) the odd record here and there, a seed had been sown. I got my first hi-fi the following year and the great home-taping operation was underway: the Virgin Prunes, the Cure, the Stranglers, anything decent by outfits I'd heard on John Peel, emerging hip-hop and Chicago house, classical stuff from the record library, you name it. Anyway, scroll forward to ... er, this week. Having done a bit of much-needed reorganisation of my CD shelves (charity shop CDs being something I seem to buy all the time these days), I glanced uneasily at the tape shelves. Hmm, should I do something with those as well? But what? No, it'll take too long. It'll be a disaster if I start going through all those (and so on). Anyway, reader, you can guess the rest. Here's what happened:

Skyscraper sounds: 19 years of John Peel 

And lots of this:

Good Morning Blues: some of the Ls

So here (finally) are the supposedly interesting bits from this two-day slog up and down Niluccio tape mountain - removing, dusting, sorting, assessing, discarding, reshelving and generally wallowing in all things cassette-ish. First and foremost: there's a phenomenal amount of great music (if I say so myself) and probably a good half of it I haven't listened to since the day I recorded it 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. Gulp. So was it all a failure? No. True, I should have listened to these excellent tapes far more than I have, but I think Umberto Eco was still right when he said of the 15,000 books he owned that reading them all wasn't the point. It's knowing that you could read any one of them on any given occasion if you suddenly had the desire. Knowing they're there on your shelves, this is what matters. (Grazie, Umberto). That said, where I undoubtedly went wrong was in failing to properly sift through them during the whole time I've amassed them. Not to mention only fitfully playing them. This week was the first time in 24 years (since moving into our super-deluxe Hackney apartment) that all the tapes have come off their dust-clogged shelves, and it's probably the first time in four decades I've ever gone through them end to end. So another lesson: you need to do some quality control. Tastes change, what was once "vaguely interesting" no longer is and the mediocre stuff just gets in the way, dragging down the average. This week I've culled the music I never really liked or have increasingly come to dislike: anything by David Bowie, the Beatles, R.E.M., Nick Cave, the Pet Shop Boys, stuff like Suede, the Stone Roses, the Manic Street Preachers and Daft Punk, some (rather dreary) orchestral classical music, and quite a lot of big band jazz (Ted Heath, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller et al) for which I blame my dad's influence. Sorry, everyone, you're out. Another mini-life lesson: don't cave into the hype aound artists you instinctively realise are not for you - did I ever really like Suede and co's music? Yeah man, search and destroy. Another big realisation from my trek through these treacherous tape terrains has been to see how the land lies with my John Peel tapes. I embarked on Peel taping in 1986 and kept it up until the end (Peel's death on a walking holiday in the mountains of Peru in 2004). The first of the photos above show the results year by year, starting at front-right ('86) and winding through the years to the high-rise period at the back: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. The tape towers for each of these last years was so high I had to stop piling them up for fear of a horrible, case-splintering collapse. What's (vaguely) interesting is how many are from 1988. I was at university then (sadly separated from my hi-i) so I think I did most of these recordings during end-of-term holidays. I also, rather amazingly, got my long-suffering mother to record a few JP shows when I was away sweating over essays - it's easy mum, you just put the tape in here and press these two buttons. Anyway, the first of the Peel tapes (Jan 86) includes music by Stump, Terry & Gerry, the Janitors, the Shop Assistants and Stars Of Heaven. Great stuff, and more proof, I think, that Bowie and the other rejects have rightly been jettisoned. And then there's another realisation that comes from going through these 19 years of Peel home-taping: there are dozens with nothing written on the inlay cards whatsoever except for merely "John Peel". Agggh! No date, no year even. And there was I thinking I'm quite a meticulous person. Pathetic. Anyway, in my brisk present-day manner I've decided to ditch these. Yes I'm a fan of John Peel (sort of), but I just don't have the desire to listen back and do low-level detective work to establish when they're from. Look man, there's new music to listen to. Time is short. Life is short. The world itself is coming to an end ...

So that's my story of how I climbed to the summit of tape mountain and made it safely back down so I could write this little blog. That chance meeting with the two record refuseniks in Skegness 41 years ago definitely had an impact and I don't regret a thing. That summer of '83 all I ever heard coming from the radios playing along the seafront were Paul Young's Wherever I Lay My Hat and New Order's Blue Monday. I didn't buy either record and instead I mulled over the idea of expanding my mini-music empire well beyond the confines of what I could actually afford to buy. You could say I was thinking of getting a Bow Wow Wow-style bazooka. So yeah, fuck your limited-edition 12" and your gatefold album in electric-blue vinyl limited to 200 copies. As Annabella Lwin used to say, "I don't buy records in your shop / Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'".