Home Taping the '90s Vol. 1

Way before mp3s, the cassette tape was considered to be the major threat to the record industry. Personally, I never understood why recording a song off the radio was supposed to stop me wanting to buy music. If anything else, the more I listened to a song I liked on cassette the more I wanted to find that record and add it to my vinyl collection.

Apart from acting as a gateway to buying even more vinyl, my home taping habits of the '80s and '90s has also left me a valuable archive of the music I was discovering at the time while listening to the radio. Mind you, these are not the kind of songs that got major airplay - it's quite possible that some of them might got played just one or two times on a specialist radio show and if I wasn't standing by with a radio-cassette recorder, I would probably never had the chance to listen to them again.

To put these old tapes to good use, we are starting a new series of posts where from time to time I'll be dusting off one of these cassettes and try to reproduce its playlist here with the help of Spotify and internet videos.

For starters, we're going exactly 20 years back to a tape recorded between January 27 and February 12, 1994. These recordings took place in London and several of these songs were played on John Peel's Radio 1 show, including a session from the mighty Fall which was first aired on February 5 and it was later released on cd on "The Complete Peel Sessions 1978 - 2004".

As I expected, not all the songs on this tape are available on Spotify - the missing entries are from Shellac, Madder Rose, Tiny Lights and Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia. And since the last two of these names are the least known, I've included videos of them from this period just a after the Spotify playlist. So, here's a taste of what good was on the radio twenty years ago:

Side A
01 Sleeper - Swallow 02:41
02 Renegade Soundwave - Renegade Soundwave 03:54
03 Suede - Stay Together 07:26
04 Therapy? - Die Laughing 02:48
05 Smudge - Impractical Joke 02:16
06 Prolapse - Doorstop Rhythmic Bloc 05:22
07 God Is My Co-Pilot - I. Cream 00:39
08 The Nightblooms - Hold On 02:11

Side B

09 Orbital - Sad But True 07:48
10 The Fall - Hey! Student (Peel Session 5/2/94) 04:09
11 Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine - Glam Rock Cops 03:41
12 Papa Brittle - Status Quo 03:47
13 Inspiral Carpets feat. Mark E Smith - I Want You 03:10
14 Bad Religion - 21st Century 02:47
15 Unsane - Body Bomb 03:41
16 Don Caballero - For Respect 02:43

Tiny Lights - Fishing Season

Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia - Out Now!