I’ve written before about how
infuriating it is to have ideas stolen from you without credit or financial
reward; have a look in the ‘Abandoned Projects And Stolen Ideas’ section of
this blog/website for my take on The Glam Metal Detectives,
and my idea to screen a season of bad films so that I don’t have to mention it
again. It’s all very well thinking that someone has a good idea, and it is said
that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but flattery doesn’t pay
the bills. The hipster district of Nottingham city centre, Hockley, will have
to change its name to ‘Idea Magpie’ very soon, as they have done it again.
Last year I suggested to the
music editor of Leftlion, (a man who has never
replied to a single email, nor acknowledged the existence of an influential
broadcaster with local music championing shows on both sides of the Atlantic
Ocean and thought it a good idea to write an article for the magazine about him),
that it might be a good idea to have Leftlion make a
compilation tape of Nottingham artists. At the time I was doing the podcast
series Covermount and envisaged a one-off
revival of the concept of sticking a tape to the front of the magazine in the
same way as NME and Melody Maker
used to do. Admittedly this was going to prove an expensive idea, but I did
also suggest that a cheat could be employed and we could do it on a mail order
basis, (as was C81, which was obtainable by
sending two tokens and a pound to the magazine). Trent Sound had in its
pre-record studio, for reasons nobody could quite fathom, a cassette recorder
built in to the equipment that I could record on to directly. My pitch was for
the tape to contain a Nottingham edition of Covermount as a
showcase of what the city has to offer, along with a good promotion for the
podcast series. Eventually, our correspondence dried up and I suggested it to The Nottingham Evening Post (as I still call it) who
dismissed it out of hand and suggested I pitch it to Leftlion.
Although this idea got thrown out, in my final email to the music editors of
both publications I said that I still think that the idea has legs and would
like to assist in this idea should it ever become a possibility.
It would appear that it has
become possible; I found out today that Cassette Store Day is to become a
reality. Not only are we getting another ridiculous day in which we eulogise
something that we didn’t want around in the first place. As much as we remember
making tapes, (NEVER mixtapes, nobody ever called them mixtapes), recording
John Peel sessions from the radio, snapping the tag off the top so you couldn’t
record over it, borrowing records to tape, writing lists on inlay cards, and
putting stickytape over the hole so you could record over it, we seem to have
forgotten all the downsides. They chewed up, warped in heat and wore out. You
could tell the likelihood of a tape being ruined by how important the content,
the more of a keeper you had, the higher the chance that the tape would end up
in the bin.
Not only has it come true, but
The Music Exchange (an independent record shop in Nottingham which has Leftlion as a neighbour) has announced a compilation tape of
Nottingham acts. What are the chances?
I have given my opinion on
Record Store Day, and how I feel that as noble a gesture it is, it shouldn’t be
needed. The problem with RSD is that what started out as a way to raise
awareness has mutated into a festival of hipster nonsense. Hot on the heels of
Record Store Day we now have Cassette Store Day. Aside from the fact that there
was never such a thing as a cassette store, I seem to remember that tapes were
sold in record shops, this makes me wonder what else is in store (first correct
use of the word ‘store’ in this entire fucking paragraph); are we to expect a
minidisc day, or a sheet music day? How about a whole day dedicated to
cassingles? Eight-track cartridge day? What about a day remembering when CD
singles first came out and they were only three inches in diameter and you had
to fix them in to a special adapter before sliding the whole thing into your CD
player? The possibilities are endless. You can do anything; nothing is too
ridiculous as long as you remember to affix the words ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’ to
it. I am reminded of the fictional magazine Cheekbones, a
publication so fashionable that it comes out as soon as styles change and is
delivered to the subscriber by a ninja.
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