The Early Tapes (1977-1983)

Some people are boring enough to pretend they came out of the womb listening to The Damned. Or King Tubby. Or Noise Factory. There's a special place in my heart for the music I first enjoyed. It was a window into a very different world to the toxic one I was brought up in.

 

This will have been the first album I owned. My father must have bought the record and dubbed it onto a cassette for me. I don't recall ever seeing the LP with its illustrated cover or booklet. I didn't see the film until many years later, possibly as late as the early nineties. Therefore the recording, which has speech and sound effects from the film in its mix, had a mystery to it. Imagine never having seen a Pixar movie like "Toy Story" and only hearing the songs from it? One's imagination had to work a lot harder in the seventies. I especially remember being alone a lot and listening to this in the snow in an old wooden chalet in Switzerland in 1977.

 

This came out in 1974, but I must have had it on cassette in 1978. I listened to this so many times. I knew all the lyrics and once my best friend Ben Ovington and I performed the entire show for his family on a surfing holiday at Polzeath. His delightful and loving parents must have been so patient. Later on in 1979 at boarding school in Bristol (when I was 8), we presented the full musical to assembled parents. My housemaster got me to play Potiphar's wife and to everyone's amusement I took my dress off as I was walking offstage.

 

 

I don't remember a huge amount about this. But in 1978 I was listening to it a lot. Because my aforementioned housemaster was a Goon Show fanatic, and had reel-to-reel tapes he had recorded of the original radio shows which he played to us, I knew who Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers were. I have a distinct memory of listening to this in the summer sun on holiday in Devon.

 

 

Geoff Love rides the Star Wars hype. My father must have bought this for me in 1978. I had an old TEAC top-loading cassette deck and the remains of his old hi-fi in our house in Cirencester. I was quite handy with the stereo I remember. I have a particularly strong memory attached to this. My grandfather visited for lunch and I asked him to accompany me upstairs and listen to the song "UFO". In the first five seconds it has a snippet of morse code which transfixed me. The bleeps! Bless him he was so patient. Fast forward to 1993 and I remember playing Reese and Santonio's "The Sound" to him which he greeted with the same gentle enthusiasm, "Very soothing" was his comment on that.

 

Once again this reveals the influence of the same housemaster at my boarding school. This album, which came out in 1978, will have been a new record for him and he would rave about it. His real obsession was Pink Floyd and he often played us his reel-to-reels of "Meddle", "Dark Side of the Moon", and "The Wall".

 

My relationship to this album, which I will have heard in 1979, was complex. Richard Burton's voice-over could not be more bleak and world-weary. In the song "The Spirit of Man" Julie Covington pleads with Phil Lynott, playing a suicidal, maddened parson, "No Nathaniel, No!" As thrilling as I found it I associate the record with feelings of depression which I think it either catalysed or crystallised. I especially remember playing it one time as I was set to return to boarding school on a miserable Sunday evening. It took forty years to lick that...

 

Madness were huge for children. My best friend Ben Ovington was a committed fan. We could not contain our delight as Lee Thompson flew in the air playing his saxophone in the video for "Baggy Trousers". My brother Toby was another Madness fan. Toby was more involved in buying their subsequent albums for us to share. I particularly remember "One Step Beyond" (1979), "7" (1981) but also our quizzical reaction to "The Rise and Fall" (1982) which, although we enjoyed it, we must have felt was a bit "musical".

 

I had a deeply troubled friend Ari Salmon, a Jewish boy from a broken family who I got to know in transit as he was shuttled by expulsion through a series of boarding schools. Ari was also a huge Madness fan but, in what I now recognise as musical brinkmanship, used to praise The Specials and Bad Manners. I remember The Specials from his copy of their debut album but mainly from seeing the eerie "Ghost Town" video on Top of the Pops. I used to like Madness very much but, sensitive bastard that I am, I don't think they ever quite touched my heart - I think I was really just "joining in" when it came to them.

 

 

My mad uncle Jamie gave me this tape for my birthday in 1980 and I listened to it absolutely non-stop. I also got hear things like The Beatles "Flying" and Giorgio Moroder's "The Chase" on tapes he gave me. I still think this is an absolutely incredible album. This might be the first music that really touched me at the most profound level of who I am. What goes with that intense connection is a feeling of one's most intimate core being recognised. It creates at once a sense of belonging and spiritual unity. I still keep a copy of this.

 

Adam and the Ants were completely thrilling. When it came to this album, which I remember from the summer of 1980, I think I had total autonomy. Like "The War of the Worlds" I bought it at the WH Smiths in Cirencester - but this time without the influence of any intermediate adults. I have two vivid memories of it. One, aged nine, putting it on the tape deck in our family car whilst we were at my grandparents having lunch, and putting the volume up to ten so the sampled Burundi drums (Tambourinaires de Bukirasazi) on the title track were ear-shatteringly loud. I also remember listening to "Ant Music" in Devon. I still have a copy of this cassette. I always thought the filigree beneath its track listing (visible above) was very pretty.

 

There's LOTS of dodgy and unfashionable music in this blogpost of course! Shrugs. Most of it, barring the Geoff Love and this "Hooked on Classics" cassette from 1981, I can still see the appeal of. This, however, is terrible drek. A suite of classical themes set to a disco beat. I loved it!

 

 

This will be the final entry in this little trip down memory lane. To emphasise: this isn't music that I heard on the radio or TV - which included all manner of things. It was music which I owned physical copies of. I suppose it's hard for people growing up today to fathom that.

Now 1, from 1983, was a real landmark. It was very exciting to have rounded up in one place all these recordings which one knew. Historically it's got some cultural energy also, as it is imbued with the Post-punk chart-entryist paradigm. Malcom McLaren, UB40, Heaven 17, The Cure, Culture Club, The Human League, Simple Minds, and Madness - none of these would have existed were it not for punk. What a great time for music it was!