Day 228. There's every possibility...

Sometimes things show up when you need them.

Those tapes of my old bands that I lost years ago? That I knew were somewhere up in the loft (I say knew, I mean believed and hoped)?

They finally surfaced today. In the second box that I looked in. Sitting at the top in the cassette carry case that I always knew that they would be in, the one with the sticker carrying our name and the three balloon sign that we played with for a while. 

In the car. Round to Aldi. £8.99 on a cassette to MP3 converter and suddenly I'm digitalising the past.

The obvious is here. The three songs that we recorded in SOS studios in Liverpool on the 8th and 9th of January 1985. 1985.

Nineteen. Eighty. Five.

A tape from nearly thirty years ago, recorded on a four track tape in a freezing cold studio on the second Tuesday and Wednesday of the year. I was 21. Geoff, Mal and Mark were younger. 20? 19?

The toilets were frozen. Wouldn't flush. If you really needed to 'go the toilet' (you know what I mean here don't you? I don't need to get graphic) you needed to go next door to The Lisbon pub. There was no Cavern Quarter (there was no Cavern), no Met Quarter, Liverpool 1, no McDonald's, no reliable public loos; just those in an ale house. We kept it in.

We had our three songs ready, ran through each a couple of times, added some overdubs. A second guitar here or there, a bit of acoustic to add a bit of flavour, a Stratocaster that was laying round the studio because my Tele suddenly packed up of its own accord. First chance I ever had to get my hands on a Strat; a grown up guitar, a musician's guitar.

It's rushed but it's enthusiastic. There are dropped notes, missed beats, strings that ring accidentally but, and I'm biased here, it sounds bloody great. We sound like we're having the time of our lives. You can hear the future, we're paying it no attention. All we have is now and that now is still here on thechbology that we couldn't have imagined while we were copying our tapes to post to record companies in the distant past. 

There's White Horse and Here We Are recorded in Station House on the Wirral where we dragged a bloody heavy Hammond organ up a spiral staircase to find out whether it worked or not (it did) and the 'cursed' version of White Horse from Pink in Aigburth.

There are gigs at The Mayflower, The Rendezvous, Kirkby Liberal Club, The Fire Station; all long gone.

There's a tape from the 30th of January 1983 recorded on a Ghetto Blaster in a side room in the church that my Mum still goes to. I have a horrible feeling that I'm on vocals on it. The tape that convinced us (if any convincing were needed) that we needed an actual singer, preferably somebody that could hold a tune in a bucket. 

I'm scared to listen to it.

And there's the stuff that I didn't realise had ever been taped;

Some songs that I taped with a guy called Matt Dean after my time with Vanilla Beserk ended. Some of the songs are pretty damn good but you can't hear any fun. 

Some Vanilla Beserk songs taped after me and Mark decided that we were going our own way; recorded (I presume) in a room in Vulcan studios. There's a fiddle on them, a girl called Sian. They're good but they're not the versions that I go back to. I know the versions that I go back to, they're the versions that existed in a short period between January 1985 and June 1986 back when they were all that mattered to me.

Now? Now I've so much more in my life; I've got a real life, I'm a 49 year old grown up.

But the music I made when I was a 21 year old kid?

Still sounds sodding great.