The Pullman Outskirts - You're Not Going Out To The Golf Club Dance Looking Like Something Out Of The Sweeney - Atom Bomb Farm ABF1

One of the best aspects at the cassette scene was pretty straightforward: if you didn't like something, use the tape for something else. For free music, the risk was usually limited to the cost of an stamped addressed envelope. For shop bought tapes it might be a quid or so over the cost of the equivalent blank. As an impoverished teenager several of my tapes suffered that fate. This one half did, as side two has only one track on it, so the rest of the C60 has the teenage me mumbling into a tape recorder, reminding in me that I used to have much more of a Midlands accent than I do now and that as always, my ambition outweighed my talent.
As for the original tape, I bought it in Selectadisc in Nottingham back when they had the original shop in St James Street. I remember that it was pinned to the racks behind the counter and cost about £1.50 and came with a small magazine, which like all these things has disappeared in the ensuing years.
In retrospect the music is actually not bad in a very Fall/Swell Maps in a barn kind of way (there is a farming concept running through the titles although the correspondence address seems to be student accommodation in Loughborough) although I probably didn't like it so much when I bought it. There's even a dub track with a faltering drum machine through a Kays amp and fake echoes and dropouts everywhere.
In a time when nothing is obscure, this tape appears to achieved it and The Pullman Outskirts appear not to have a presence on the net at all, not even as another forty-something's summer fun band memory, so this may be it. I guess I'd better keep the tape for a while then, it might be the only one left.

1. Intro
2. Indian Suit Mohican Surprise
3. Tell Me Why Cow?
4. Poultry
5. Tell Me 3 Little Pigs (Part One)
6. Ugly (Billy Goat)
7. Tell Me 3 Little Pigs (Part Two)
8. Baby Lover Dub
9. Yoghurt it's Pear
10. Pullman Outskirts Theme

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Various Artists - Ideal Guest House - Shelter 1

You would be forgiven if you, as a connoisseur of mid-1980s indie, looked at the tracklisting below and thought 'I've got all those', because you probably have. This is a fairly standard lineup of the time, from the Wedding Present to Stump to BMX Bandits with Chumbawumba and a couple of outliers like Stitched Back Foot Airman and  Pigbros thrown in. What makes it more interesting than most is that all the tracks are linked by Ted Chippington, who was on the verge of being an accidental pop star with the Vindaloo All-Stars and his deadpan delivery of 'Rocking With Rita'.
Here though, he presents the songs with the assured skill and delivery that has made him the target of flying pints and derision and not a little acclaim for some thirty years. If you know this, you'll enjoy listening to both sides in their entirety. If not, I'll get around to cutting the tracks out individually eventually, but it really won't be as much fun.
If you want to hear more of a man gamely dying on stages across the country over 20 or so years, the box set 'Walking Down the Road: A History' occasionally surfaces although the original print has long sold out.

Side One:

1. Big Flame - Man of Few Syllables
2. The Wedding Present - You Should Always Keep in Touch With Your Friends (version)
3. The Soup Dragons - Fair's Fair
4. The Creepers - Sharper and Wider
5. The Shop Assistants - Home Again (Live)
6. The June Brides - This Town (acoustic)
7. Rob Grant with Yeah Yeah Noh - Mr Hammond has Breakfast in Bed

Ideal Guest House - side 1 by Sfgreenwood on Mixcloud

Side Two:

1. Stump - Kitchen Table
2. The Legend! - Everything's Coming Up Roses
3. Pigbros - Barren Land
4. Stitched Back Foot Airman - The Deadly Spore
5. BMX Bandits - Sad?
6. Bogshed - Jobless Youngsters
7. Chumbawamba - Kinnochio

Ideal Guest House - side 2 by Sfgreenwood on Mixcloud

An Ordered Life - Rebirth (CBT CBT4)

Another one from Virgin on the Moor when it was the hip epicentre of Sheffield. Allegedly Ian Curtis could be found browsing the racks when he was working in the monolithic Manpower Services Commission building at the bottom of the road, but then again the same could probably be said of most of the musicians in the post-punk Sheffield scene.
Hot on the heels of the Human League's pop electronics and Cabaret Voltaire's art electronics came many other bands who picked up cheap synths and slapped on the eye shadow. Vice Versa were probably at the top of the second division before their miraculous tranformation into ABC but there were other bands who populated the pubs and venues with bright young folk emulating the Bowie and Kraftwerk influenced decadence filtering up from London: I'm So Hollow, Vendino Pact and Y? were all represented on the Sheffield/Barnsley compilation 'Bouquet of Steel' and there were others such as The Naughtiest Girl Was a Monitor and Hobbies of Today who put down the guitars and picked up the keyboards in response to those pale cyborgs and long haired baritones on Top of the Pops.

An Ordered Life did that too. They were named for a quote from James Anderton, notorious evangelical Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, and took their cues from Iggy and Bauhaus and I believe came from the west side of town. They were minimal, drummerless and swathed in effects and the tape sounds like it was recorded live in the rehearsal room - this was even in the days before the revolution of the Portastudio. They created a sufficient stir for their look and sound but only existed for three years before calling it a day.

I think I paid about £1.50 for the tape. The text looks like was printed on someone's Dad's office printer, probably harnessing the phenomenal power of a mainframe of the time, which would now run in emulation on your watch.

While doing a bit of quick Googling for the band I found that they had uploaded their output to IUMA at archive.org, so as well as my copy, here's their own.

Side One:

1. Rebirth
2. Ordered Life
3. Flowers
4. I
5. Mass Production

Side Two:

1. Futurists?
2. Tidy Scratch
3. Alone
4. Ordered Life (Instrumental)
5. Rebirth (Reprise)

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Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-1976 (Industrial Records IRC 35)

Inspired by this blog post I thought I would post my one Industrial tape. I really wanted 24 Hours when I heard about it in Gordon A. Hope's Flowmotion magazine (his tape 'Synth Bites Man' was what got me interested in the tape scene in first place - long since taped over unfortunately) and 24 tapes of basically noise in an attaché case seemed like both the antithesis and apotheosis of DIY, but at the age of 15 I didn't have £88 for anything.

I had just started out on my record buying though, and made trips to the Virgin shop at the bottom of the Moor in Sheffield when I had money to spare. As well as buying singles and the occasional LP I also came across tapes from local bands. It's how I got my copy of 'Fragment' by Clock DVA and how, despite it being, at £4.99, actually more expensive than any single or LP I had so far bought (LPs were usually £3.99 or less), I got this. It took me several visits to decide to buy it, while in the meantime also acquiring more Cabaret Voltaire and indeed Throbbing Gristle, so for the sake of completion I finally paid out for it.

Industrial was more than just TG's label. It became a repository for counter culture artists and artefacts from all over the world, including Sweden's Leather Nun, Monte Cazzazza and William Burroughs, so a tape of early Cabaret Voltaire fitted in perfectly. The sleeve was in the house style, greyscale almost samizdat design, typeset with letraset or possibly some pro setting but with a hand-completed catalogue number on the tape label.

It's primitive tape and synth experimentalism filtered through a teenage haze and like much of that genre was probably more fun to make than do. Some of the sounds that informed early Cabs records are there such as tape loops and manipulations, the jet pedal that made 'Nag Nag Nag' so awesome to my young ears, treated drum machines and the fruity synth noises which seemed to be replaced by the Vox Continental when they started making 'proper' music.

None of these tracks appear on the 'Methodology' set, which to my ears attempted to make the move to being a band more deliberate, but they are as relevant to Cabaret Voltaire's early history as that set.

By the way, when Mute reissued 24 Hours as TG24 in 2004, I succumbed, for only two and a half times the price of the original, and still more desirable, tape set.

Side One

1. The Dada Man
2. Ooraseal
3. A Sunday Night in Biot
4. In Quest of the Unusual
5. Do The Snake

Side Two

1. Doubled Delivery
2. Venusian Animals
3. The Outer Limits
4. She Loved You

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Instant Automatons - Blues Masters of the Humber Delta (Deleted Records DEC 010)

I learnt today that Protag, or Martin McNeish to give him the name he was born with, died recently, so brought this tape forward in the schedule. He played bass and/or guitar for a long time in a number of incarnations of Blyth Power and assorted other bands of a punky nature and had a reputation as one of the good guys of the scene, and will be missed by many.

I first came across him and his first band The Instant Automatons in the back pages of, well, probably the NME as that's what I used to read, when it had a brief flirtation with the burgeoning cassette scene of the early 80s. The principle was simple, you sent a blank tape and an SAE to an address and it came back filled with someone's music. In the case of the Automatons, it was to a farm in the hinterlands of Humberside, and the music that came back was determinedly lo-fi, powered by ancient beatboxes and hissy echo pedals and flavoured with the sort of psychedelia that came from smoking too many clove cigarettes. There were woozy Beatles and Motown covers and a couple of reasonably good original songs that nodded at post-punk as well as live recordings from places such as the legendary Meanwhile Gardens and the London Musicians Collective.

To my 15-year old ears it represented something different to chart music and even to the punk and post-punk that I was discovering through the music papers and John Peel and showed that it was possible to make a joyous noise unhindered by equipment or ability, and using the fanzine network and even the bigger boys, like ZigZag (who even published a guide to cassette music) and the NME (who had a column in the back of the paper for a while but which was probably seen as taking small ad revenue), it was possible to get it out to people who were receptive to it. This blog has recently equated Bandcamp with the tape scene and I'm inclined to agree, with the added immediacy of being able to hear and decide immediately.

Being a boy of slender means I didn't send off for many as even blank tapes were hard to come by on my paper round money (which was mostly committed to buying a synth on HP), but this tape and the Deleted 'compilation' Magnitizdat (of which more soon) were regular fixtures on my cassette player. distressing my parents and driving me to do something of the same.

Sometime in 1982 or 1983 Crass acolytes Zoundz (and I'm fairly certain Crass themselves) played at the slightly unlikely Bentley Pavilion in Doncaster. My friend (and other half of almost-imaginary punk band Plus Support), Dean and I walked along the abandoned railway line that linked my home to the venue to see if we could get in. Crass gigs were usually open to all ages and cheap and we had scraped the money together to get in, only to get cold feet when we got there despite seeing that both the Astronauts and Instant Automatons were playing as well.

When Blyth Power played at the Empire in Middlesbrough in 1987 or so, I told Protag that I had copy no 064 of 'Blues Masters of the Humber Delta' and he was pleased if not rather taken aback.

RIP Protag, this tape might not what you'll be remembered for, but it's the one that brought you to my attention.

I've just found that the tape was, perhaps strangely, reissued on CD in 2002 and is now available for download here, with most of the rest of their output, starting here.

North Bank:

1. All You Need is Love
2. Laburnum Walk
3. Mr MacPhee
4. Esoteric No.2 - Blazing Pedals
5. Catacomb (Live at Meanwhile Gardens)
6. Catacomb
7. Prisoner of the Grapevine
8. I Think Somebody Must Have Poisoned Me

South Bank:

1. Then He Hit Me
2. Esoteric No.5 - Brains Under Glass
3. Restless Night (live at LMC)
4. Ballad of the New Things
5. Disillusion (live at LMC)
6. August '78 (live at LMC)
7. When The Pubs Close (The Bonfires)
8. Outro (Meanwhile Gardens)

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Aims and Objectives 2

I stepped off the train in Middlesbrough with my tape deck and my suitcase sight unseen having got a place through clearing after collecting a set of unspectacular A level results. I left my luggage at the station and walked through the town to find the Halls of Residence to get the keys to my accommodation. As towns went, it didn't seem much different from my native Doncaster although the existence of the polytechnic seemed to add something to the place, not least the friction between town and gown in a town whose industry was being dismantled while bright young underachievers piled in every year to talk loudly with funny accents.

Once settled in I went to look at the place and found the local alternative clothes shop Phaze back near the station. I bought two things the first time I went in, my first copy of Viz, issue 8a and this tape, as was my habit. It was made by the local music collective, had a rather lumpy title (which, thinking about it, either comes from dole forms of the time or the council bureaucratese the MMC had to battle with continually. I played it, and was intrigued by the DIY weirdness of Ball and found a couple of other things interesting but nothing really stood out. As time went on I started a band with a like minded incomer and played many Collective gigs at the Empire Hotel and annually in the open air at the Middlesbrough Festival. Ball turned out to be local boys done weird, powered by home made synths and drum machines and who had a Frank Sidebottomesque childlike but slightly sinister alter-ego called Bill (of which more later). Icy Eye were semi-acoustic folky types who took their name from one of the big local employers (and the graffiti 'ICI burns holes in the sky', which could be found overlooking their Billingham complex). Flower Drum People represented the goths from Hartlepool (there were quite a few there). Teargarden played expensive synthpop (well, at the time, it's the sort of thing you can knock up on an iPad now). Thirst were dark and arty. In general probably the sort of thing you'd expect from a northern town at the time.

Yet the place wasn't really like that. Monday nights at the Empire were generally fun and involved a wide range of music, both local and from elsewhere. The redoubtable Rob Nichols ran the show and got in bands like The Ex with their fire engine-cum-mobile home, The Darling Buds just prior to their brief brush with stardom, Darlington pop-punk from Dan and their successors Sofahead, Rob's own band, Shrug, self described as 'half-Fall half biscuit', and many more that I was probably too drunk to remember, even when I was on the stage. In fact we were Pinny's House, the gloomy two piece with a drum machine that held up many a night as the first band on.

It was a great time in my life and I liked the place a lot. I don't think there are many other documents of the time apart from Shrug's fragments and a few other tapes of other Monday nights that I was party to but if anybody has any, including other compilations from the time, I'd love to hear them.

Side One

1. St. Christopher and the Scum Disciples - Everyone Loves a Loser
2. Ball - Elvis Parsley
3. Thirst - Ghost Dance
4. Icy eye - Man in Her Life
5. Billy Oblivion and his Band - All my Friends
6. Ball - Maureen Peevor Has No Bloomers
7. Teargarden - Smack and Shiver
8. Pandora's Box - Sunday
9. In Vain - Journey's End
10. Wreckage - Sketches for the Close of the 2oth Century
11. Ball - Nobhead

Side Two

1. The Euphoria Case - Purity and Pearl
2. Ball - Keith Phils Maggie's Bin
3. Thirst - Monkeys
4. That's A Renault - Soap in My Hair
5. Flower Drum People - Naked and the Dead
6. Ball - Rog on Plod
7. Steve Graham - untitled
8. Icy Eye - Crashing the Party
9. Billy Oblivion and his Band - (My Love is) Black and Cheap
10. The Prams - Return to the Stone
11. Ball - Pea Head, Fork Eyes, Bum Hole Mouth
12. Stilletto Pigeonetto and the Blow Out - Lots and Lots of Bacon

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Skin and Bone - SB01

Now, I can remember buying this one... It was not long after I had started college at Teesside Polytechnic in September 1985 and it was advertised in the NME. I sent off for it with the second cheque in my Midland Bank cheque book (the first had paid for my student accomodation) - only for it to come back (with the tape) as I hadn't signed it. So it cost me another 20p stamp to send the cheque back duly monikered. Funny how these things stick in your mind.

This was another sort of fanzine affair that was packaged with a neat and densely handwritten magazine folded up in a concertina which had extended information on the bands and music but of course with my usual filing skills it too has disappeared, although I know it's in the study somewhere.

Anyway, the music... very much of a certain type of northern English indie with both the north-west and Yorkshire well represented. It parallels what could be heard on the John Peel show (which, let's not forget, was really the only outlet most of us had for new music) at the time plus some common fanzine obsessions: two poets/ranters in Swift Nick and Nik Toczek (who was also a fanzine writer, the man behind Bradford's Wool City Rocker): John Robb with his band the Membranes and as MC in preparation for the role of post-punk national treasure that he reluctantly wears today: a cross section of early Ron Johnson bands such as Big Flame, A Witness and Splat!, a couple of In Tape's finest in Marc Riley and the Creepers and Yeah Yeah Noh, that rough and ready scratchiness that accounted for a large part of the independent music scene at the time. Of the most interest are probably the Very Things interview as the band were always very entertaining in a low key West Midlands way. Leading behemoth The Shend's future as Big Ron in Eastenders was still merely a vague thought in a script writers mind. There's also something of an oddity from the Mekons, seemingly catching them between their punk and electric folk phases with an electronic version of 'Roger Troutman'.

Track count and listing don't match as there are interjections from John Robb in a number of places.

Side One:

1. Five Go Down to the Sea - Another Spark
2. A Witness - Kitchen Sink Drama (Live)
3. Big Flame - Sargasso
4. Marc Riley and the Creepers - Hole 4 a Sole
5. The Bomb Party - The Great White Hope
6. Swift Nick - Mr Bottomley
7. Leven Signs - Sedes Sapientiae
8. Thrashing Shit - Relax (huh!)
9. The Very Things - Phillips World Service + Interview

Side Two:

1. The Membranes - Kafka's Dad
2. The Metal Doughnut Band - Glamourous Nights
3. Splat! - Eve
4. Nik Toczek - West Yorks Nurse
5. Yeah Yeah Noh - Prick Up Your Ears
6. The Mekons - Roger Troutman
7. The Legend -  The Rugby Club
8. The Old Contemptibles - The Bells are Ringing
9. Brix Smith and Criag Scanlon - Interview

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Only A Northern Song

This compilation has become a bit of a mystery with time as it was accompanied by an A4 booklet that gave more information about the bands on it but which has since been lost so I only know the names of the bands and not the titles of the songs. I can remember that the compiler was called something like Gris Boojum (presumably not the name his mother gave him).

I believe the bands are mostly from the Huddersfield area and I probably bought it in Virgin in Sheffield in its halcyon days at the bottom of the Moor some time in 1981.

Provincial compilations are still an interesting thing to me, especially from that time as one appeared in most towns, driven by the access to studios, record pressing and cassette duplication that came out of punk and that made producing 500 or a thousand copies of an LP viable. In many ways this tape is very typical of many of them: a bit of new wave/power pop (The Guests, Glossy Mags), a couple of punk bands (The Noise, The Xpozez) a ska band (Jab Jab), a couple of synth bands (Boolean Operations, E2R) and a couple of unreconstructed pub rockers, plus the grumpy experimentalists who sat at the back being snide at music collective meetings.

Of course, with its title (and almost certainly copyright lawyer taunting cover) it’s not the easiest thing to find any information about, so this might be it. If anyone has any more information I’d love to hear it.

Fit the First:

1. The Guests
2. Treatment
3. Chapter V
4. Gentle Ihor
5. Boolean Operation
6. The Noise
7. Glossy Mags
8. The Xpozez
9. Or Was He Pushed

Fit the Second:

1. Jab Jab
2. Private Dicks
3. L.E.D.
4. Triangular Hour
5. The Floor
6. Big Fat Women Wot Can't Add Up
7. E2R

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Dreams and Desires - Pleasantly Surprised 006

I can't remember where I got this but I must be allowed some lapses over 30 years. It's the sort of thing I'd find in a record shop on an excursion from school somewhere, and its origin suggests that it might have been when I went on a university visit to Stirling in early 1985 before putting paid to my dreams of media studies with a mediocre set of A-level results. It would have appealed at the time because it includes a bunch of tracks from 4AD bands, plus Artery, Pink Industry and Ambrose among others. for all that, I don't think I listened to it a lot as the 4AD tracks are all demos or instrumentals of existing tracks and the tape quality really isn't good. In retrospect it's like most independent compilation tapes, a snapshot of the time in what can only be described as a gothy corner of the universe. The Ambrose track is perhaps the most interesting as Ambrose Fletcher, the instrumental half of Pink Industry, made one LP, 'Greatest Hits' a combination of bass, electronics and drum machine over verite recordings of famous assassinations and killings from US history, and this one featured Martin Luther King.

Pleasantly Surprised was a cassette label from Glasgow. Inevitably there's someone who knows more about it than I do here.

Side 1:

1. Intro
2. Nervous Choir - Richard Killing
3. Artery - Diamonds in the Mine (Live)
4. Vazz - Silver
5. Colourbox - Sex Gun (Demo)
6. Wolfgang Press - Ecstasy (Instrumental)
7. Pink Industry - Pain of Pride
8. Band of Holy Joy - A Glorious Morning in Orton Street
9. Outro

Side 2:

1. Intro
2. Clair Obscur - Pilgrims Progrees (Instrumental)
3. Dead Can Dance - The Arcane (Demo)
4. David J - Can't Get Used to Losing You
5. Illegitimate Sons of Christ - In One Move
6. Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops Drops (Demo)
7. In the Nursery - Iskra
8. Ambrose (featuring Martin Luther King) - Free At Last
9. Andrew Gray - Illustrated
10. Virginia Astley - Tree Top Club (Demo)
11. Patrik Fitzgerald - Smile
12. Outro

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