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Gone Gone Gone
How can we hang on to a dream?
I used to have a lot of music on tape.
It wasn’t what I’d call a lot now: played non-stop, it wouldn’t have lasted a day. And tape: I’m not talking about cassettes here, those came later: this was quarter-inch magnetic tape, reel-to-reel, running at three-and-three-quarters of an inch per second, with two separate tracks recorded in each direction. And while the machine it ran on was capable of taking direct input, sound sources tended not to include any corresponding output. Most of my recording was done with a small microphone pressed up close to the loudspeaker of a radio receiver. Overlaid on the music were AM hiss, other electronic chaff and often ambient noise: fragments of conversation in the room and, for some months, a cheerful canary, were incorporated for posterity.
Hi-fi it was not.
But it was a way of creating and using a secondary store of recorded music at minimal cost, which was important in those days. My primary store, my vinyl collection, was not large but took all of my spare money. I became an avid radio-recorder, and listened over and over to what I’d collected. Those few hours of music were, for some years, the soundtrack of my life.
After I’d treated myself to something I could consider proper hi-fi, long after the machine they ran on had…
