Been meaning to dig out a few of my old tapes from the loft, ever since Annick emailed me about dEUS the other day. But somehow, that trip up the step-ladder (followed by worming between boxes and then digging through 800-odd cassettes looking for “just the one”) keeps putting me off. So I’m doing the next best thing instead, plundering my record collection.

It’s funny the differing characteristics of my various music collections. Tape is the one… a history of my musical education. From a few early pre-recorded jobbies when I bought my first Walkman (Thomas Dolby, David Bowie) through taped copies of my early vinyl, for use on the Walkman (mainly The Cramps) mushrooming out to cover copies of friends LPs (Hendrix and other late-60s/early-70s stuff, Soft Machine, Gong, 30 [30!] Hawkwind albums, Yes) and then even further to anything I could borrow from a record library (experimenting with stuff I probably wouldn’t normally buy - the fringes of jazz, ambient and the avant-garde, lots of Eno and Jon Hassell) and of course the few pre-vinyl Ozric Tentacles tapes that didn’t get lent out never-to-be-returned.

Vinyl is a much more mixed bag - starting off before the tapes (sure I must have the Adam and the Ants LP somewhere) and continuing right through, the bulk of it is stuff I picked up at charity shops, old classical and jazz LPs, again stuff I wouldn’t have splashed out full price on, but don’t mind wasting 50p for. So most of my LP collection is stuff I’m not too attatched too, but is nice listening to once every blue moon. Oh, and there’s also just about everything released by Bill Laswell in there somewhere, from the time in the late 80s/early 90s when I used to treat myself to an LP from Revolver Records in Bristol every week if I finished my college work (or, usually, if I didn’t too). I must have enough Celluloid record inserts to wallpaper a room.

And then CDs… my first was Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd, and then (a birthday present) New Tijuana Moods by Charles Mingus - my first ever Jazz LP and probably still my favourite. Of course, pretty much everything I buy now is on CD - and for that reason it represents my more recent musical tastes, also perhaps (hmmm… then again…) more carefully planned purchases than the other stuff, CDs being so damned expensive. But also lots of it is… I dunno, I seem to have lost musical direction a bit somewhere along the way. It’s all a bit… sanitized. Well, that’s not quite right, but it seems to lack some of the rough edges of my tape and, in particular, my record collection.

So anyway, going back to those rough edges - today I dug out the absolutely awesome Big Beat compilation Rockabilly Psychosis and the Garage Disease (hmmm… the Amazon CD has a couple of tracks that aren’t on the vinyl version… should I upgrade….?). Something made me think of it lately - I forget what - perhaps I saw it in a shop window in Antwerp, something like that. Anyway, glad I rediscovered it. It has a few dodgy tracks on it (mainly the 80s psychobilly ones), but the rest… wow! All those 60s originals, superior versions of stuff later covered by the Cramps, like Surfing Bird, The Crusher and Love Me. The Sonics singing Psycho… wow! Has there ever been another band in existence as good as the Sonics? The original Seattle sound. They fucking ROCK. And The Legendary Stardust Cowboy - fucking mental. I gotta get some more of this stuff. In fact, time to update my Amazon Wish List.

OK, more vinyl… on to Bill Laswell’s Baselines (did I really write that review?)

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