I left a lot of myself in the UK. Oh it's not surprising; I have left bits of myself everywhere I've spent time. Part of me still lives in Provence, looking out for dogshit on the sun-drenched cobblestones; another part of me still stands in line at Belgian post offices waiting to buy one stamp. But this time when I went back to London I brought some of me back with me, namely my guitar, my records and my old cassettes. My guitar, which I've had for ten years exactly now, has served me well over the years. It's pete's guitar, you know? I'm not that good on it, but I don't mind, it made me happy when I was very sad. When I was in Charleroi I was pretty bored, so I would sit on the windowsill of my thirteenth-floor room with my guitar writing songs and looking out at the rain and the slag-heaps. The night I met my wife-to-be I played her some of them in my French bedroom. Yeah, me and that guitar go back a long way. And now I have a record-player again, my not-very-extensive-but-good-enough-for-me (mostly original Beatles LPs) vinyl collection has gone across the Atlantic; blimey, records aint half heavy, ain't they! So tonight while taking down the Christmas decorations we listened to a bit of George Harrison warbling about his Sweet Lord as nature intended. And rubber Soul as well; certain Beatles records can only be played on vinyl, for the simple reason that on the CD version the Ringo song is in the middle of the album (What Goes On, Act Naturally) rather than the easily-skipped-over side 2, track 1. It was put there for a reason you know. Finally, my cassettes. Now I didn't go buying albums or anything on cassette, how lame would that have been. No, my tape collection consists of stuff that I've recorded over the years, half-written songs, things like that, but mostly tinny out-of-tune tracks I recorded with my old school band fifteen or sixteen years ago. My band was called, I kid ye not, Gonads. I was the rhythm (like we had any rhythm! ) guitarist and songwriter. Listening to this vast anthology, the Gonads Anthology, really takes me back. The proto-Eddie Argos lead vocals of Mr Hooker, the (hydrochloric) acid jazz keyboards of Mr Malcher, the enthusiastic riffs of Mr Fleischman, and the fairly rudimentary, hopefully political ('get lost jacques delors' was my most well-known song at school, written as a school homework project years before I officially embraced europeanism) lyrics of mr pete (in those days i was simply 'scully', as in 'oi, scully!') . Jeez, I've not heard this stuff for years. I wish I could figure out a way to convert these tapes to cds somehow. However bad and unlistenable they are, they still piss all over the rubbish in the charts today. Kind of. Maybe.
the sounds of a younger pete
7.1.07 09:21
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Roshan (7.1.07 19:14) There must surely be companies that transfer audio tape to DVD. It's probably not cheap but you'd only ever have to do it the once. |
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petescully (7.1.07 20:56) I'd want to do it myself, I'm sure it's not that hard to hook up a tape to a computer program and just record, I just don't at this point know how. |
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petescully (7.1.07 20:58) Hey guess what was in amongst my records though - Instant Guitar, the little plastic record thing, remember that? |
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Open Grove Claudia / Website (8.1.07 17:16) How fun! My husband has 8 track tapes... sadly there's no player. Of course, if there was one, I wouldn't play the Osmond's Christmas album, but that's another story. I have cassettes in a box of the Clash at the Deaf Club in Los Angeles.... I wonder where those are... |
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Red Queen / Website (9.1.07 09:09) How about not only transferring it all onto a CD, but also publishing it on your very blog? I dare you. |
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petescully (9.1.07 16:24) Believe me it's utterly unlistenable except to those who were actually there. Like the sound of a cat being dragged reluctantly across a blackboard. |
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