Cassettes for the Charity Shop

I took these three cassettes to the Charity Shop recently. The first is a souped up version of Frank Ifield's She taught me to yodel, an old favourite; then there's After the break by Planxty which I now have on itunes; the third is a bouzouki album I bought in Cyprus years ago. I think this is it here. Cassette technology - really missed said no-one.

Another cassette

Another cassette I found is Volume 1 of a two volume collection of 28 classic rock numbers. I don't think I ever owned Volume 2. I bought it in a sale and Volume 2 was missing then.

Volume 2 contained T Rex/Ride a white swan, The Who/My generation, Peter Frampton/Show me the way. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel/Make Me Smile, Canned Heat/Let's Work Together, Fleetwood Mac/Albatross – which I would have loved (the rest are okay - Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity/This Wheel's On Fire, Pink Floyd/Money, Dire Straits/Lady Writer, Lou Reed/ Walk On The Wild Side, Lynyrd Skynyrd/Freebird. Meatloaf/Dead Ringer For Love, Far Corporation/Stairway To Heaven, Deep Purple/Smoke On The Water).

If I remember rightly I bought the cassette for Free/My Brother Jake plus Derek And The Dominos/Layla, Thin Lizzy/Waiting For An Alibi, Status Quo/Caroline, Santana She's Not There, Electric Light Orchestra/Roll Over Beethoven, Jethro Tull/Living In The Past, Rod Stewart/Maggie May, Black Sabbath/Paranoid. I'm alsop happy enough with Mott The Hoople/All The Young Dudes, The Jimi Hendrix Experience/Voodoo Chile, Cream/Strange Brew , Rainbow/Since You Been Gone/Traffic/Paper Sun.

In some ways this is a broad range of rock and shows what good stuff was going down back in the late sixties and early seventies. I currently have on my ipod and listen to exactly half (ie 14) of these tracks.

Planxty After the break

I still have this box full of old cassette tapes, mostly classical, that needs sorting. (Remember cassettes anyone?). Among them is a copy of Irish group Planxty's fourth album from 1979 After the break. I have no idea when I bought it (obviously after 1979 and no doubt before 1990, probably in 1980 or 1981) but I remember playing it with enjoyment. It has been good to enjoy them again. There are eight tracks (two tracks recorded at the time were added to the CD). They are somewhere between Chieftains and Horslips I guess. I remember one of my sons enjoying the first album a while back and I have Follow me up to Carlow on my ipod. They are probably due a retro exploration some time soon.

Old Technology 01

It is common to mock older people struggling with modern technology but I came across two examples recently of young people who just don't quite understand old technology.

The first example was a teenager using a cassette tape and not realising that such an item needs to be rewound to the beginning in order to record onto it.

In the second example I may be being unfair but a teenager I know was not only trying to drink a hot drink straight from a vacuum flask but he also didn't know quite where the liquid would come out and so got tea all over him.

Cassette 09 Haydn

Haydn wrote over a hundred symphonies and around 40 of them have nicknames. This cassette that I picked up in dearly deaprted Woolies some years ago contains the philopsher, clock and military (22, 100 and 101). Haydn is quite acessible and good fun.

Cassette 08 Mahler

Just when you thought this series was dead in the water ... Sorry. If you try and get into classical music someone at some point will recommend Mahler to you. I dutiful bought this cheap edition of Mahler's fifth many years ago and didn't really fall in ,love with Mahler I'm afraid.

Cassette 07 Brahms

I've never been big into Brahms but I bought this cassette back in the nineties as I had so enjoyed Thijs Van Leer's version of part of the third symphony (poco allegretto) on his 1988 album Reflections. Sadly the rest of the third symphony seems to me not quite so good as that section. What clinched it for me to buy this particular presentation was the addition of Brahms' Variations on a theme of Haydn. This is the piece that Focus adapted for the opening section of their magnum opus Hamburger Concerto. (See here) When I was in Secondary School the music teacher Mr Measey used to play some classical piece as we marched out of morning assembly. Most of it was lost on me but I remember one glorious morning when he played the Brahms variations. It's a great piece.

Cassette 06 Gershwin Addinsel Litolff Liszt

I think I bought this one for the Gershwin which I heard in some bowdlerised form first. Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto I first heard on an early live recording of the Carpenters that we had at home. The Litolff Scherzo and Liszt Fantasy never got much of a hearing.

Cassette 05 More guitar music

After you've listened to Rodrigo and enjoyed him you look round for similar stuff and at some point in the nineties I bought this cassette of guitar concertos by Villa-Lobos and Castelnuevo-Tedesco. Very nice indeed. (Naxos do a nice CD with these two on it plus the Rodrigo).

Cassette 04 Mussorgsky Stravinsky

I think I bought this for Pictures at an Exhibition (Emerson Lake and Palmer were inevitably there first in my case, of course). Pictures was originally written for piano I later learned but Ravel scored it for orchestra, which seems much more natural somehow. The bonus was Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which is okay. Indeed, Russian ballet music tends generally to be attractive in my experience.

Cassette 03 Saint-Saens

Not sure when I got hold of this Camille Saint-Saens tape from the eighties. It contains the organ symphony (Peter Hurfiord and the Montreal with Charles Dutit) and the Carnival of the Animals (Dutoit again with the London Sinfonietta and Roge and Ortiz) which is such great fun (I think I first had it on a cassette for children). I must have been aware of the third symphony before the film Babe (1995) which uses the Scott Fitgerald, Yvonne Keeley song (If I had words) based on it but may be not. I saw it performed at the Royal Albert Hall recently. The Danse Macabre I have known longest via the Dutch band Ekseption.

Cassette 02 Satie

This Satie Piano Collection by Peter Dickinson is part of the Boots Classical Collection and came out in 1990. Not sure how I became aware of Satie. To be honest, apart from the gymnopedies and one or two others, I'm not really a fan. This one contains 13 tracks and lasts 77' 13"

Ancient Cassette Tape 1

I came across a pile of cassette tapes the other day. It included this home made tape, which I wasn't sure of at first. What it appears to be is a series of recordings mostly of 7" singles of mine or that were in my parental home. I must have done it in 1992 or so. Before throwing it away I thought I'd note what was on it.

An eclectic set indeed covering the years 1959-1992 it contains nearly twenty tracks as follows:

1. Autobahn Kraftwerk 1974 (bought it second hand off a boy called Glenn Harris)

2. Bohemian Rhapsody Queen 1975 (Christmas present from my parents) 

3. Laser Love T Rex 1976 (bought this new)

4. Wuthering Heights Kate Bush 1978 (my sister's I guess, not mine anyway) 

5. Time after time Cyndi Lauper 1984 (Christmas present from my sister)

6. If you're looking for a way out Odyssey 1980 (Christmas present from my sister too, a great favourite)

7. Where she goes The La's 1990 (not sure where this was from)

8. The TV theme tune to Thirtysomething This 4 season series ran late eighties early nineties. Eleri enjoyed watching it. I had a favourite trick of coming into the room when it was on and asking innocently how old she thought a certain character was. If I could get her to say thirtysomething, which she did more than once I was happy. I wrote some words to the song which I must dig out some time.   

9. The TV theme tune Cheers Both Eleri and I watched this series (there were 11 seasons) which ran throughout the eighties and into the nineties

10/11. Who's gonna ride your wild horses and Paint it Black U2 1992 (I bought this in Aberystwyth)

12/13. With a little help from my friends Wet Wet Wet and She's leaving home Billy Bragg 1988 (these must be from a copy of the album Sgt Pepper Knew My Father - my sister's no doubt - not sure why I recorded them).

14/15. She loves you and I'll get you The Beatles 1963 (I can't remember a time when that single was not in our house at home)

16. Keep Searchin' We'll follow the sun Del Shannon 1964

17. House of the rising sun The Animals 1964

18. Lovesick Blues Frank Ifield 1962

19. Only Sixteen Craig Douglas 1959

(Those last four would be part of the collection of singles that were in our house - they came from two main sources: my older cousin Gillian and a man in the street who worked with jukeboxes. All four would be from the previous collection.)