Regular readers of my distracted piffle will know by now that I drive a red van with a tape player in it. This has led to a few changes in listening habits, not least because I hardly have any tapes left at all.  A bit like what happened to my vinyl back in about 1995, my collection has been shoved in a box at the back of a cupboard, and I honestly didn’t think I would ever play them again.

Unlike my vinyl, though, my parents didn’t eventually get bored of having it lying around the house and then throw it in the fucking bin.  Yes, they did that.  To my vinyl.  Not that I blame them really, I’d copied it all to tape (oh wait…) and was a student at the time, so there seemed little imminent prospect of me ever having a record player again.  How times change.

Now not only do we have a tape player in the van, we have actually bought one for the house, too.  I bought it off eBay for about fifteen quid a couple of years ago when I first got my hands on the Japanese War Effort’s brilliant Snowbird album, which exists only on cassette.  So for a long while, that tape player was simply a Snowbird Playing Machine, and in a sense the album itself, far from the eminently reasonable two pounds I paid for it at retail, had ended up costing me nearer twenty.

However, the box of tapes in our house is actually still stuffed away under the stairs somewhere, so at the moment the van’s tape player is subsisting on a pretty meagre diet.  In fact, due to the fact that even the van tapes have ended up buried under a pile of old crap somewhere under one of the back seats, I have actually only been listening to one single tape for the last month or so, over and over again.

I made this tape towards the tail end of the nineties and I called it, with tongue somewhat in cheek, Let’s Bop With the Brits.  It is basically just a collection of British music which, for one reason or another, was starting to sound quite old-fashioned by 1996 or so.  There was some Morrissey, some Inspiral Carpets, some Wonderstuff, some Gene, one solitary Stone Roses song, a couple of tracks from Parklife, hopefully you get the gist of it.

Anyhow, yes, for some reason I have had that one tape on repeat constantly for the last four weeks and I now know the words to most of the songs pretty much off by heart, never mind the playlist itself.  With modern music libraries comprising thousands and thousands of files, I am not sure when the last time is that happened to me.

Morrissey – Certain People I Know

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Gene – Be My Light, Be My Guide

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Blur – End of a Century

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