Home Taping the '90s Vol. 2

With Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 10th and the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death coming up, 1994’s music is high on the agenda right now. This gives us an excellent opportunity to go once again through the good old tape collection and use the wonderful internet technology of today to try to recreate the playlist of one of the 60-minute cassettes I was taping off the era's radio shows.

Volume 2 of our Home Taping the '90s series brings you an hour of excellent music selected from radio recordings made during March 1994 and mixes tracks from some of the protagonists of '90s indie rock (Hole, Meat Puppets, Sebadoh, Superchunk) along with obscure gems from bands you might never heard before (Done Lying Down, Monsterland, Breed, Aenone) unless you hold a PhD in '90s rock music history. A handful of these songs come from sessions recorded for BBC Radio 1 shows and I’m very pleased that we could find them available for online streaming (Inspiral Carpets covering Black Sabbath, the collaboration between Frank Black and Teenage Fanclub, and Th' Faith Healers track). Press play and enjoy an hour of the finest music that was playing on the radio during March 1994, right before the sad events of April 5th:

Side A
01 Meat Puppets - Backwater 03:42
02 Lotion - Tear 04:17
03 Done Lying Down - Septic 03:36
04 Monsterland - At One with Time 04:11
05 Jale - Promise 04:34
06 Hole - Rock Star 02:42
07 Breed - Wonderful Blade 03:52
08 The Charlatans - I Never Want an Easy Life If Me and He Were Ever to Get There 04:10

Side B
09 Inspiral Carpets - Paranoid 03:20
10 Frank Black & Teenage Fanclub - Sister Isabel 03:59
11 Crowsdell - Sad Eyes 03:31
12 Aenone - Celestia 03:15
13 Cornershop - Born Disco, Died Heavy Metal 03:40
14 Th' Faith Healers - Ooh La La 04:00
15 Archers of Loaf - Ethel Merman 02:42
16 Superchunk - The First Part 04:12
17 Sebadoh - Rebound 02:12

If you liked what you’ve just heard, here are the albums and EPs that you should be looking out for, in order of appearance in our mix-tape:
Side A: Too High To Die, Full Isaac, John Austin Rutledge, Destroy What You Love, Dreamcake, Live Through This, Violent Sentimental, Up to Our Hips 

Side B: Radio 1 Sessions, John Peel Session, Meany 7" and Dreamette LP, Saints & Razors EP, Hold On It Hurts, John Peel Session, Icky Mettle, Foolish, 4 Song CD EP and Bakesale LP.

And here's a little something in honor of Kurt and Nirvana from their historic Reading Festival headlining appearance in August 1992:

Nirvana - Come As You Are (Live at Reading 1992)

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!