Old cassettes

I'm currently trying to sell my car, and following the principle of turning flaws into features, I'm advertising it with the slogan "Drive a piece of the '80s!" I also offer a free collection of vintage cassettes so you can get that authentic '80s experience. This is made possible by the fact that I have bought a gizmo that lets me transfer my music from cassette to computer, something I'd been meaning to get round to ever since we upgraded our home music system fifteen years ago and lost the cassette deck in the process. Feeding dozens of cassettes to a PC is a long process but a fascinating one, since it gives me a snapshot of what I was listening to when I left England in 1991. It's also nostalgic listening to the hiss and crackle of cassettes recorded from vinyl, since most of these are taped from my old LP collection (or my friends' collections, since this was back in the days when home taping was killing music). Some highlights follow - check them out on YouTube or wherever if you've never heard of these albums.

John Carpenter: Escape From New York & Big Trouble in Little China

Most film soundtracks are just variations on a theme by Rachmaninov, but occasionally you get soundtracks that break new ground, like Popol Vuh's music for Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. Carpenter's film music is as quirky as his films. The soundtack to Escape From New York is dark electronica, while Big Trouble in Little China is as goofy as the film it was made for. Oh, and if you have't seen either of these films, see them. Big Trouble is a wonderful kung fu caper featuring Kurt Russell being Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall before she was in Sex and the City; Escape From New York is a sort-of-cyberpunk classic, marked by the future anachronisms the genre is cursed with, notably the fact that the key item in this dark-future narrative is a cassette tape.

Propaganda: Wishful Thinking

There was a time when dance music used electronic effects to create new, interesting sounds rather than to cover up banality. Wishful Thinking is probably the best dance remix album ever (with the possible exception of Pet Shop Boys Disco).

Peter Gabriel 4

Definitely Gabriel's best album, and a classic of sampling.

Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

While Kate is infinitely preferable to George, I'm still not a big Bush fan. This album, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest of her work.

The Cassandra Complex: Cyberpunx

Back when I was messing around with jazz-rock, jazz-funk and other forms of social death, my friend rodneyorpheus was doing much more interesting - albeit less mellifluous - stuff. The Cassandra Complex was a commercial failure, as the music was too grating for the mainstream market but didn't fit into the Goth or Industrial niches either, but they're still going strong three decades later. Cyberpunx came out of Rodney's obsession (which I shared) with Willam Gibson, but it's also a really good picture of the West European '80s zeitgeist: "The hills are alive with the sound of gunfire / Kill them all, God will know his own / And night falls over Western Europe / Night falls, and we’re alone."

Babel

This was a trio I was in with Graeme White and Tim Beckham in the mid-'80s. I suppose you could call it New Age, but we hated the term - I think Graeme preferred the phrase "modern chamber music". I've put a few tracks on Sound Cloud. To tie in with the previous entry, these tracks were recorded at Complex Studios - i.e., a four-track in Rodney's basement.

Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares

This amazing album of Bulgarian folk music came and went almost unnoticed in 1975, then resurfaced in 1986 (thanks to 4AD) to wow everyone and inspire the theme music for Xena.

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra: Signs of Life

Very quirky - I can't think how to describe The Penguin Cafe Orhestra; you'll just have to follow the link or search for them on YouTube.

The Sisters of Mercy: First and Last and Always & Floodland

Back in the day, Leeds was known to record companies as Gotham City. Someone at the BBC counted 200 bands in Leeds, and I'm sure 90 of them were Goths. This was a problem for us, since the nearest we got to the Goth scene was borrowing Rosie Garland from The March Violets (for both Big EZ and Babel, though unfortunely she never recorded with the latter). While a lot of the music coming out of that scene was complete dross, the Sisters were something else. First and Last and Always is the best of their early work; Floodland marks the turning point from classic Goth to a more polished sound.

Big EZ: Brotherman

Last but not least, the band that took up so much of my time in the 1980s. We started off as a prog rock group called Climate in 1980, lost the singer and became an instrumental jazz-rock group, got a new singer and got into jazz-funk, got a different singer, changed the name to Big EZ (which I never liked) and produced this. It's based on Guy Hatton's 12" remix - yes, we had 12" EPs on those days, though this never made it to vinyl - I just did some cuts to make it sound less like a drum machine concerto. Not everything about the '80s was good: there was Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the threat of imminent nuclear destruction ... and drum machine solos.