Cassette Store Day-Totally Shuffled Extract

Heading up to Cassette Store Day, here's an extract from "Totally Shuffled". Memories of cheap Walkman copies and treasured tapes recorded from the radio....

January 6^th

The Upsetters-Revelation Dub

I was sitting on the train at the station, waiting to head off to Florence on a weekday morning about 11.00 o’clock. It was already very hot and dry. The train was not due to leave for at least 30 minutes. Someone muttered, “What was it all about the trains running on time in Italy?” We had already endured an hours’ local bus journey to the station. Gazing out of the window, across parched fields, I could see an old tractor parked beside a ramshackle shed. Nothing was happening. It was a cloudless sky; almost a cliché-though it wasn’t a deep blue, it was more of a hazy white-ish, palest blue you could imagine. The shimmering heat made everything outside the window look like an impressionist painting animated in slow-motion. The station was almost empty with only a few people wandering about. We were the only passengers in our carriage and lolled languidly upon the seats, not really talking much, but staring distractedly out of the windows across the flat, hot plains.

I rummaged around in my small rucksack for my Walkman. (This being the early 1980’s, and Walkman being the technological height of transportable music). Anyway, it wasn’t really a top-end Sony Walkman (which then would have cost an arm and a leg). I had splurged out at Dixons on an own brand “portable cassette player” a week before we went to Italy for the princely sum of £14.00. I think they would have sub-licensed it from Tomy or the Early Learning Centre, but they had managed to find a plastic that was cheaper and tackier to make the casing. It was also significantly less robust than what a 3 year old could expect. To open the front and to insert the tape (unlike the Sony), you had to prise open the cover which snapped with all the sophistication of being held in place with a single wire spring. (Again, unlike the Sony which had some clever pneumatic damping system).   

Once the cassette was clicked into place however, and the wobbly black plastic “play” button had been pressed, your ears would have been regaled with a sound that would have not disgraced a Bang & Olufsen system. Not really. Even at full volume and with a completely new set of Duracell powering the mighty machine, the noise that dribbled out of the headphones was barely more than a whisper. It was that quiet that it was drowned out by the sound of butterflies passing by. My Dixons “Personal Cassette Player” was the Trabant to the Sony Walkman’s BMW.

I had though brought four cassettes-and only four- with me to Italy. I had recorded them from a BBC Radio Lancashire programme earlier that year. “On The Wire” was a Sunday afternoon Radio Lancashire programme which played an even more eclectic and arcane mixture of music than John Peel’s show at the time-everything from early Japanese noise offshoots from the Boredoms, Tibetan throat singing, newly emerging House from Detroit, free jazz-the lot. Goodness knows what the good folk of Blackburn, Burnley and Bamber Bridge thought when they flicked the radio on with their Sunday dinner. My four tapes-now, after all those years, transferred not only to the iPod, but to disc and every hard drive I have-comprised a four hour “On the Wire” special- “Dubs On the Wire.”  This was a 4 hour show, not interrupted by news or any DJ chatter at all, solely made up of a continuous stream of the best Jamaican dub-King Tubby, Lee Perry etc-ever produced.

As I clicked the first tape number on and stared out of the train window, the spacey sounds of dub flickered in sync with the heat haze on that dreamlike Italian morning in 1985.

This is an extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"

        

  and what "Totally Shuffled" is all about:

One track per day for 366 days on a broken iPod. 

366 tracks out of a possible 9553. 

From the obvious (The Rolling Stones), to the obscure (Karen Cooper Complex). 

From the sublime (The Flaming Lips) to the risible (Muse).   

From field recordings of Haitian Voodoo music to The Monkees. 

From Heavy Metal to Rap by way of 1930’s blues, jazz, classical, punk, and every possible genre of music in between. 

This is what I listened to and wrote about for a whole year, to the point of never wanting to hear any more music again. Some songs I listened to I loved, and some I hated. Some artists ended up getting praised to the skies and others received a bit of critical kicking. 

There’s memories of spending too many hours in record shops, prevaricating over the next big thing and surprising myself over tracks that I’d completely forgotten about. 

But with 40 years of listening to music, I realised that I’ll never get sick of it.  I may have fallen out of love with some of the songs in this book, but I’ll never fall out of love with music.     

Get/read Totally Shuffled here

Kindle:
          

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA 

Paperback:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-/dp/149495687X