39. band recording
Many of our gigs, no-one took any photos. But at least there's a few from several of them, including some of the main ones, like the very first - and this song contest.
The photographer was a schoolfriend of Pat's called Bo, one of the people who hired us for the birthday party at University College. He'd taken some at that bash, and this latest lot were even better - because he didn't use a flash. You get a sense of what the lighting was really like at the time. And they're black and white, which works better.
Because he shot from ground level, you're looking up at me on the front edge of the stage. So my shapeless cords make my legs look thick, in contrast with the top, where my shoulders are very narrow and Bernie's little jacket pinches me in from the ribs down. But I think the shades do a job, and the rest of the band look the part.
Bernie's on the extreme left as you look at the photo, in profile, facing right, towards the rest of us. On the other side of the stage, Harry's looking across as if he's returning Bernie's gaze, while there's movement in Patrick, right leg up slightly as he concentrates on what's he's playing. Their black ties stand out against their white shirts.
Pat in his glasses and white socks, his stance, reminds you of Gary Busey in The Buddy Holly Story, which came out the following year. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Bill's in profile behind my legs. Amplifiers and speakers in the background.
It's a proper rock 'n roll picture. We used it as an advert, though nowadays I'd leave out some of the writing and just print the phone number, which is cooler. And I turned it into a cassette cover.
People taped a number of our gigs. I xeroxed the original photo many times over, cut out our individual images to fit the cassettes, then handed them round. The ones I copied for Patrick had him on the front, mine were all me, and so on.
On the inside of the photocopy, I typed the date and location, the running order of songs, and who we were. Good to see your name on a recording!
They were more fun to put together than listen to. The photos are a sweeter record than the sounds: if you can't sing but fancy being in a rock band, photographs of me are what you think you sound like. The tapes are what's really happening!
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A word about cassettes. Important things in their day. The nearest thing we had to CDs.
People stopped mass-producing cassettes decades ago. Mainly because they weren't much good. The reproduction was pretty crap apparently.
But someone told me recently they had a meatier sound than other media. Something to do with compressing the sound waves. So they were fine for rock music - which meant perfectly OK for me. I listened to the overall thing, not every fucking instrument through headphones. If they weren't as crisp as vinyl LPs, so what?
Their main benefit lay in being portable - which made them so exciting. No needle and arm like a record player. Bit of a buzz every time I slid one into a cassette player.
And when they broke down, you could repair them. They broke down quite a lot. Just rolls of thin magnetic tape, and sometimes they'd come off their moorings or get twisted while they turned. But that was easy enough to fix.
The well-made cassettes had a screw at all four corners. You took those out with a tiny screwdriver, turned the tape the right way round (if it was badly twisted, the creases distorted the sound, but only for a couple of seconds), or used a tiny sliver of sellotape to stick the start of the tape back on to its plastic spool.
You could slit the tape with a razorblade, but mine were safety razors, which weren't marketed for cassette slicing. Instead I went in with a scalpel blade, which I use for other things, like cutting superfluous parts out of photos or putting stamps in albums. Expensive stamps, too. I've never so much as pricked one.
Cheap cassettes didn't have the screws, but you could still prise them apart with a knife, though you had to watch where the components went because they tended to explode open.
A classic sunday activity was taping the Top Forty from the radio. Millions of people poised beside their sets, to save buying the individual 45s. You became good at pausing a cassette just as the DJ started talking between tracks. I did it once, but it was a hassle, for songs I didn't like all that much, so I raided friends' vinyl collections instead.
Most cassettes were C90s, which gave you that many minutes of music. The C120s meant two hours, but cassettes had to be all the same size, so the tape was made thinner to fit, and C120s used to simply snap.
You couldn't record on a pre-recorded cassette. On the top edge, there was a very small indentation near each end. The indents were caused by pressing down on a tiny bridge of plastic, which broke off. Cassettes you could record on, they still had those bridges. After recording something, you could break them off, so you couldn't accidentally record over them, which meant you kept them as they were. If you changed your mind, a fingernail of sellotape over the gap did the trick, and you could record again. Physical and basic, but well thought out.
Here's a thing that's always baffled me. It was illegal to tape from an LP or pre-recorded cassette. For all I know, maybe from the radio too. But cassette players had a recording device. You could say it was their main function. Why did the law allow firms to make all those billions of blank cassettes? They were used for illegal purposes and cost recording artists a fortune. I never understood it.
Cassettes couldn't go on for ever but were superior when it came to editing. Although itunes lets you trim the beginning and end of a track, a cassette lets you leave out the middle too. Whole Lotta Love goes off on that psychedelic ramble for a minute and a half. I held down the pause button till the drums brought the freight-train riff back in. Same with Ramble Tamble by Creedence. And you can fade out long endings. That way you squeeze more tracks on.
As well as albums, you could buy singles on cassette (my last one was Common People by Pulp in 1995). Plus, unlike vinyl record sleeves or CD cases, on cassettes you can actually read the spines!
They've never made an actual comeback - but there's a market out there. I sold my old portable twin-deck in 2023, and when I decided to bin my collection a year later, I thought I'd try social media first. And people started offering a fiver for each cassette. I had a hundred or so, so I've done very well out of them. The buyers were guys in their twenties and thirties, which made me feel young again!
Great things, those rolls of magnetic tape in cheap plastic cases. They used to be just right for what I wanted.