Friday 25 November 2011

The best Teen movies of the 80s

  • Ferris Bueller's Day Off
  • Heathers
  • Class
  • The Sure Thing
  • O.C and Stiggs
  • Teen Wolf
  • Weird Science
  • Back To The Future
Ferris got the most votes. Back To The Future is allowed even though it was also a very mainstream movie, which most Teen films weren't. It does have that warm 80s soul.

Sorry, no room for Pump Up The Volume - because unbelievably it was made in 1990, even though it's undoubtably 80s to the core.

Monday 10 October 2011

The Joy of Tape

They had been nagging for a while, in moments when I really had nothing better to do (apart from real stuff like cleaning windows).

The tapes. The comedy tapes, once revered, now relegated to a cardboard box in the loft. Blessed radio comedy, recorded from the radio in the 80s and 90s. Listened to again and again on my Aiwa boombox, played on my Sony Walkman when I rode my Emelle mountain bike to the shops. I listened to them to go to sleep.

And then they were neglected. I went to university. House moves pushed them to the back of the cupboard, and CDs rose to replace the medium. One day I realised that there wasn't a single cassette recorder in the house any more. But those C90s have been sat there all this time, waiting to be heard again.

I had forgotten the rite of the radio show tape recording sesh, the same every time, be it for comedy, the chart show, or even Andy Kershaw's Ghanaian Banjo hour. It is a lonely ritual. It cannot be performed in company. The ideal time to do it is late at night. The later the better - you are a disciple of radio. Nobody is as dedicated as you to this task.
  • Cue the tape (wind it past the clear bit to the rich brown ferrous oxide, or gun-metal grey chrome if you're posh). 
  • Press record and pause. Wait for it - wait for the continuity announcer to stop waffling - got to be perfect when you release that recording head onto the virgin stream of plastic.
  • Unleash! And listen. This is not a fire-and-forget process. You have to be present when you record off the radio. Especially, you listen for the tell-tale change when with lightning reflexes you flip that baby out of the soft-eject and turn it over, missing valuable seconds of precious airtime. It's a very specialised martial art.
When it's over, you might have 15 minutes of space left to fill. The choices! Leave it running - record half of Loose Ends with Ned Sherrin, or some groovy John Peel. Or just put some random Hendrix on there. Fill the void. 

And then the labelling! The little set of stickers. They must be filled in carefully. You'll wish you put the date on when you find them in 2011. Look at the handwriting, that was you. Not a care in the world, just this tape. And the track listing to be filled out precisely on the inlay - so you have to listen to it all again! Judicious use of the FFWD. No problem if you have a swanky deck with fast seek.

So now the choice is to let them decay in that box, or once more set your nose to the grindstone and rip them to MP3? Good luck, this will take an investment in technology. This is where the New You will shake your head at the patience of the old. To rip tape to digital takes dedication anew. The cueing. The waiting. The godawful slowness and fuzziness of it all. Is it Dolby B? C? Is that tape counter counting is seconds? If not, why not? Do I really have to sit here in real time? Crazy. But you do it for the content. Those nuggets of your past laid down so conscientiously. Transmuted from the spool to your iPod. 

Now you can throw that tangly old plastic crap away and forget to backup your hard drive at your leisure.

Et voila: http://soundcloud.com/zootius/victor-lewis-smith-radio-1