I still have a bunch of old cassettes from back home, kept in an adidas shoebox unplayed. It’s such a retro item now that even the image of a cassette feels like something from some cool bygone age. I don’t have a tape player any more, since I threw away the old CD/tape deck a long time ago when it stopped playing the CDs properly, and then I stopped playing CDs altogether. Times have moved along. I did however get myself a cheap walkman type device recently, one that supposedly can turn your old cassettes into mp3s (it does, kind of, but not very well), but these old cassettes, well I wasn’t really ready to give them a listen. I only have a few with actual real music on them, mixtapes made for me by my wife when we first met, or ones my mates gave me when I was living in France, and one compilation of old jazz numbers that I taped off of a CD I had checked out of Edgware Library (called “That’s Jazz”, it opened with Fats Waller “Aint’ Misbehavin'”), listened to constantly on my five week trip around Europe on the trains in 1998, each number putting me in mind of foggy early mornings passing through the Austrian Alps or sweaty bumpy nights rumbling across somewhere in southern Poland. You had to carry your music with you in those days on physical things, played in a small cheap device operated by batteries you had to go and buy, it was a different world. That tape is unplayable now, not passing the test of time, I keep it as a souvenir. I do have a couple of old tapes going back to the mid-80s, as evidenced by the Glenn Hoddle sticker on the case, and likely full of stuff I taped off the radio when I was 10 or 11; I am definitely not listening to those, in case I come ear to ear with my 10 year old self, and he asks me what the future is like. Spoiler alert kid, you end up in America, but you are still obsessed with spurs (and we still ain’t won the League). Most of the cassettes I have are actually of my own music, and that’s an even scarier listen. Nobody’s getting their ears on that. Sure I have the tapes of my old band at school, Gonads (great name eh), dreadful recordings on my old rattling yet indestructible tape deck. I actually managed to digitize these teenage recordings way back in about 2007 for posterity with some cables plugged into the back of my pc from my tape deck, and I put them onto a CD and mailed it to my old schoolfriend who sang them. I never liked singing, I played the guitar and wrote songs. Many of the other cassettes are just other tapes from the 90s and into the early 2000s – whenever I would have a song idea I would play it onto a tape so I wouldn’t forget it, and then I’d forget it and often tape over it. I was never a ‘good’ guitarist, I was adequate for what I needed and ok with that. I just had to play and write songs though, even though they were with no intention of others hearing them. I would go through waves of writing songs or bits of songs. I wrote a bunch at school between the ages of 14-17, basic as hell and lyrically simplistic but with some fairly solid chords and melodies (and drawing heavily on the Pogues and the Jam), on my old Westone Concord electric. I got an acoustic guitar from Charing Cross Road at the end of 1996 (which I still have, my beloved Hohner) and suddenly starting playing and writing like there was no tomorrow, like there was all this creative energy that needed to go somewhere and it went there. I taped some of it, occasionally with one of my mates playing a tambourine in the background. I still have those tapes, and I recently listened to them; some decent tunes, but mostly just throwing things at my guitar to see what came out. It’s important to come up with a bunch of utter drivel before you can get anything you like. The ‘doing’ is what’s important, it’s a journey, and there may not be a destination and it will sound awful on the way. We also recorded a few of my friend Terry’s old silly stories from our old days writing the ‘Silly Goats Gruff’ magazine at school, and I had not heard those in twenty-five years, so I digitized them (with poorer quality sound transfer than I managed in 2007 – I need to fix that) and sent them to him – this time instantly over Messenger, not burnt onto a ‘CD’ and mailed in the ‘post’ (it’s a different world now). It was a bit scary re-visiting the late 90s, when I’d sit in my Burnt Oak bedroom with a guitar and a cup of tea, but it felt good to be listening to a time when I felt at home.

The tape I was interested/nervous to listen to though was one with a label “Charleroi 99-00 Songs”. That’s why I drew it, it’s a recording of a year (well, ten months) spent in Charleroi in Belgium, a formative year for me that’s as mythologized as it is barely remembered. I’m always banging on about that year I spent in Belgium, leaving out that most of the time I was bloody miserable and it rained constantly for months. What I did have was my guitar, and time on my hands. I had brought my acoustic guitar over from England after the first couple of months there, carrying it with no case on the old Eurolines bus, and instantly my mental state started to improve. My next-door neighbour in La Vigie – the tall university residence where I lived when I worked at the Université de Travail, a tall tower block with clean floors and so much echo – he had a habit of playing one particular Celine Dion song every single morning over and over and over, at full blast. My guitar evened the score a bit. I would sit at that window on the thirteenth floor overlooking the rain and the smoke from the factories and the car crashes. I bought a cheap notebook from a shop called Wibra, and I used that for song ideas. In Charleroi I wrote a lot of words and thoughts in a different book, that I would take to the pub or to the park or just in my room, so it was good for me to direct that energy into something else. I was not drawing in those days – even though I’d drawn since I was a kid, back in my early twenties I was just not doing it, and I regret that I didn’t spend that year filling sketchbooks. I made up for it since. Most of the songs I wrote were complete pants – probably 95%. The interesting thing listening to this old tape is that there’s a clear progression, too. The earlier stuff, from about late October or November or whenever, this was basic and uninspired, dreary and self-pitying, whatever would come out. I wasn’t in a great place, didn’t really know many people and my relationships weren’t so much train-wreck as leaves-on-the-line. It was a painful listen, the 23 year old me writing more weakly and feebly than the 15 year old me, when I was cocky and didn’t care. The occasional fun song came out, but mostly it was diabolical dross.

As the tape went on though there was a definite improvement, and a growth in confidence. I remember listening to a lot of Bob Dylan and Burt Bacharach, and there was definitely one song I wrote where I was trying a bit too hard to channel that to gut-wrenching degrees (though I have not stopped humming the tune since, so it was obviously catchy). That song is funny played back though, not for the cringe lyrics and poor country singing, but that when I finished I could hear a loud bang on my door and me saying “oh for fuck’s sake, what now”! As the tape moved along further there were more songs I had forgotten about, some terrible, but some were pretty good; by about April, I definitely had a couple that I still play now. By about June some were decent enough for me to show other people in the building where I lived, most of whom could not understand English well enough to tell me the lyrics were still cheesy, but alright. I wouldn’t show them now. Overall I was a bit reticent to listen to this old tape, and a lot of it was a scrunched-up-face cringe at 23 year old me being bored, but it was interesting to listen to the progression. I always said you had to create 99 shit things to get 1 good thing. It’s the same with drawing, you might get 99 drawings you are not showing anyone until you get to the point where you’re like, yeah that’s alright actually, that turned out like I meant it to, and you build off of that, what didn’t I like, get rid, what was cheesy, get rid, what can I improve, work on that. I’m still doing that thousands of drawings later, the point is to apply yourself if you want to improve, but you also improve by just doing, over and over and over. After that year of not having much to do and being stuck in Belgium I was usually busier with life so never kept that up as much. I’m still not exactly great at guitar (I just love playing what I play), I still can’t sing (never tried), and I never write songs any more (I used the music memo app on my phone to remember chords and tunes occasionally then forget about them). But I have been playing my guitar more the past couple of years, and the ukulele, and my Hofner bass I got last year, so it’s just fun having music as another thing to fall back into to relax. The old cassette tapes though are a thing of the past, and at some point I might listen to the others. Not any time soon though…