The Sifting Begins

Quote from Steve: "I think this is going to be a pleasurable long-haul flight down memory lane!"

So, having agreed that this is something we all want to do, the tricky task of working out which songs we can collectively bear to re-learn begins, and this requires a sift through a pile of old cassette tapes.

Being a late '80s, early '90s band, all of our work exists in cassette form. Live tapes, home demos, demos we recorded on a 4-track recorder in the caravan shop, and professionally made demo cassettes we used to sell at gigs. There's a LOT of stuff to sift through, and none of it exists in easy-to-process digital form. We've all got the means to encode it onto mp3s, but it's a big job. Steve doesn't actually own any of it any more - it's very Steve that this is the case - Snips is waiting for a new soundcard to arrive in the post and as you'll have seen, James Agnew has promised to do the lot, but it'll take him a year. Agnew is quite the perfectionist, y'see.

So, this morning I spent a very annoying  three hours fighting with my old cassette player and trying to get it to talk to my PC. Something I was SURE was already set up and ready to go. The upshot is we now have digitised versions of our first four demo tapes.

Snips has made his choices of the songs which, in his words "I could think about doing without cringing too much". It's important to note at this point, if you've never heard us, or heard OF us, that this is no false modesty on James's part. We were young, we were foolish, we were smartarses, we were attempting to SAY THINGS without the experience or vocabulary to articulate them well. Plus sometimes we literally wrote songs about whatever we happened to be thinking about or looking at when it was time to put pen to paper.

Maybe a look at Snips's List (a film Spielberg will never make, sadly) will clarify what I am trying to say. Remember, these are songs which James could think about doing WITHOUT cringing.

Made Of Spit
My Favourite Tree
All Kinds Of Fruit (Up Your Bottom)
Please Mend My Fridge
Cyril The Mouldy Piece Of Bread And Butter Pudding
Bobby Gillespie's Legs
It's A Definite Plus To Go By Bus
Excretion 2000*
I Want To Eat You
Dogs Must Be Carried On The Escalator
Crap Plastic Dinosaurs

You would not, it is fair to say, get this kind of thing with Oasis.

 *Come on, that's amazing! If we were still around now, we'd have a song called Illicit Bang, that's for def.