Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Record and Play

Do you remember a time when you would sit and watch a TV show and when it ended, that was it?

A good pair of examples, for the Bwitish amongst us,  would be the weekly "Top of the Pops" or the late night "Old Grey Whistle Test" hosted by the late, great, John Peel.

The show would start, and if you were late to the late show, no-one would wait and there would be no rewinding the tape to review what had already transpired. That was if you were lucky enough to have one of the first Titanic sized VCRs from the wayback years and also if you had the immense wad of cash for a spare tape that did not have your mothers "Rumpold of the Bailey" recorded.

If there was no VCR, the transient show would pass and could not be accessed on some mysterious interweb type arrangement, in the late 1970s, when a music show was gone, it was gone and all that would be left would be discussion or a scant review of the events in the next copy of the Melody Maker or the New Musical Express.

Yet, here we are many moons later, drowning in excess nostalgia (often at a price) and of course, for those who have long lost their videotapes, buying opportunities and repackaged versions of the stuff that we missed abound.

I listened to UmmaGumma for the last time a week or so ago. I say that because I believe that I don't think I can take those four sides of undirected noise once again, funny really as I never experienced the album in my formative years as I was one of the Dark Side of the Moon generation and never had the excess cash to back fill my library with previous offerings from the flavor of the day.

Luckily.

I digress, let me return to the original topic and that man John Peel.

In 1975, late in the night, John Peel instructed me over the airwaves to press "record and play" and it was not on the yet to be affordable VCR, it was on my Philips radio cassette unit. This late night radio show jockey had the pleasing habit of playing entire albums, and that night when he kindly told me he was about to put the needle down, the record he was playing was Ommadawn and forty-five minutes later my compact cassette was filled to the brim with Mike Oldfields latest creation that I played a hundred times in the following months.

They said that home taping would kill music.

I think not.