Headphones On

When I was a girl of 16... all of the money I made teaching lil kids to swim went to the record stores¹. My paychecks were spent on either the latest import singles from the UK or the music mags. I would bring home the latest issues of Select, Melody Maker, the NME or Vox every time I could get my hands on them. My desire to know more about the strange musical phenomena going on halfway around the world was insatiable.

The English music press was always bundling singles or compilations with the issues of the magazines but it was incredibly hard to find record stores in the Chicago area that were importing them illegally (the US gov't used to remove the promos for reasons still unknown to me). Then, as if by magic, my favorite somewhat-close-to-home record store (Record Swap in Naperville R.I.P.) started having the singles attached! It was as if the hand of god had come down and found a way to bypass the American import laws. I didn't have to shell out $9.00 per EP to hear some of these bands anymore. I could actually hear who was good or bad without having to shell out the little money I had in my pocket (since I was buying the magazines anyway). I discovered many a band that way I never would have given a thought to² otherwise.

Then in 1996, the magazine compilation to end all magazine compilations came attached to the glossy "Vox" ³... Vox and Radio 1 Presents The Mark Radcliffe Sessions. I hadn't a clue who Mark Radcliffe was because unlike the British kids my age I didn't grow up huddled around a receiver glued to Radio One⁴. I was addicted to each and every song on this cassette. I would listen to nothing else in the car for at least a month. I knew all the words to Mark's between song banter (and strangely still do). I giggled every time the guitarist in Salad would "meow" in the middle of "Kiss My Love". I smiled everytime the Boo Radley's song would end and Sice and Martin would start cheering (Mark: "Going down a storm with themselves, those are the, uh, Boo Radleys.") I would smirk when Brett screwed up the vocal bit after Bernard had already messed up the guitar intro of "My Insatiable One". This compilation was perfect in it's imperfections.

As tapes did back then, it started to wear out, especially since I'd listened to it a hundred times in a month. As it started to sound a bit warbly, it was slowly relegated to a drawer instead of my car's tape player. Somewhere over the years I'd misplaced it. A few years ago I discussed my love of this random compilation with a friend in North Carolina who amazingly knew exactly what I was talking about and made me a new copy, on a new cassette. This was brilliant, I could listen to it again. But come on now, how often do any of us listen to cassettes anymore? Yesterday, after a conversation about Nick Cave re-sparked my interest in the compilation, I inquired to my mailing list if anyone could make mp3's of this particular cassette for me. Low and behold I had several people reply but one of them had found his copy of the cassette and was in the process of taking it to a cdr to mp3. BRILLIANT!

01 Intro - Mark Radcliffe
02 O'Malley's Bar (Part One) - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
03 Goodnight - Babybird
04 The Shadows - Teenage Fanclub
05 Interlude - Mark Radcliffe
06 Kiss My Love - Salad
07 She's Gone - Tindersticks
08 Side B Intro - Mark Radcliffe
09 Car Fiction - Echobelly
10 I Don't Know Where It Comes From - Ride
11 My Insatiable One - Suede
12 Find The Answer Within - The Boo Radleys
13 Montagne d'Orb - The Orb
Art Outside | Art Inside

The Whole Cassette as a zip - 56.5M

¹ Except for the few dollars in gas it took me to get TO the record stores.
² My Life Story immediately comes to mind because the press were constantly slagging them off and yet when I heard "Motorcade" on a MelodyMaker compilation I instantly fell in love.
³ Before anyone goes all "C86" on my ass... My issue of the Maker didn't have the tape on it so while I read about it, I never heard a lot of that material until years later.
⁴ Back in the early and mid-90s I was pretty cutting edge to have a Prodigy account and know about this strange thing called "the internet" but didn't even envision that one day I'd be able to listen to BBC Radio live. This was a whole other world I was wrapped up in, I knew very few people who loved it like I did (unless I'd turned them onto it).