White rabbit, white rabbit, and indeed, white rabbit

I’m sure I’ve started a blog post off with the same title before, but hey, I’m sure you can forgive me, seeing as I’m currently working through 2014 at what is currently a post a month. I’ve been busy, you see. Adding things to the site, updating things behind the scenes and….well, not much I can really type about really. In time-honoured tradition, however, I have been collecting shite record again, and I began to type a blog regarding this, and a recent acquisition, however, I never finished it… seeing as I’m all resourceful and all that, here’s what I wrote…

I’m starting the blog with the title of the last album I bought Because I can, and because I’m ashamed of myself, and need to get this out onto the internet in order to share my pain.

I say this as if buying crap music is a bad thing. To me it’s not, as every record like this I own has some type of deeper hidden meaning, going back to memories of my childhood, and this was no exception.

Let’s go back. Waaay back. Late 80s. I was never allowed to have a big music collection, nor have anything to play it on. the small amount of pocket money that I received, eventually ended up going on computer games or the latest copy of Your Sinclair. therefore, all of the tapes I got tended to be hand-me-downs, from friends ond family. One of my main sources of music was long time troll, prolific negative commentor and dweller of the east, Chad Phillips. Normally the tapes were copies, and not of particular good quality either. Still, to an untrained 8-year-old ear, this wasn’t a problem. they were likely going to be played through a slimline tape recorder, with a speaker so tinny, dogs three estates away would be pricking up their ears.

One of these tapes was a battered looking Philips C-30, exactly like this one…

I don’t have the exact tape to hand unfortunately, so that’s one from the bowels of Google Image Search. I’m sure I’ll update the post if and when the actual tape turns up. Yes, I’m that sad.

And, on this tape was, as you can hopefully have worked out by now, was “Party Party” by Black Lace. It wasn’t exactly a good copy, and part of it was missing, especially the first track on side 2, “Knock three Times”, apparently a remake of the Tony Orlando / Dawn song, or whoever sang it originally. Now, to this day I have still never heard it in its entireity, because the reason why it was missing is that Chad had taped over this particular track with a puppet show. No, really. An audio puppet show. Chad has always been a few years older than me (though by some of this comments on here, you wouldn’t think it), but even I, at the time, thought it was a bit odd.

Oops, turns out I wrote about pretty much the same thing in 2006… here’s what I wrote back then…

Other yearnings towards the business side of things also came in the form of another audio tape, which sadly no longer exists. During his school days, he’d made some paper mache puppets, and Barry, David and Chad held a puppet show in Barry’s back kitchen. I wasn’t present at the time, and considering they were doing a puppet show and recording it on AUDIO tape, most of it was indecipherable bollocks. Except for the end. Chad came on and said the following, despite being interrupted by David…

“If you think(ALRIGHT!)… If you think this puppet show was any good, then…. please give us summing.”

No, he wasn’t requesting mathematical puzzles. “Please give us summing” is best Hartlepool twang for “Please can we have something for our efforts?” The tape then cuts to the last few seconds of Black Lace, performing “Knock Three Times” from their “Party Party” album. It was a beige C-30 tape, manufactured by Philips, ironically enough.

Darnit, I hate repeating myself. I never repeat myself. repeating myself is something that I will never do, such as repeating myself. As for the tape not existing, I’m sure it does. Dunno where though.

You can see the details on the record in all its glory here And that’s that. I never finished the post, as the whole reason why I wrote it, was that it was taking my mind off a doctors appointment. God, I still hate that fucking place.

I digress. As you can probably tell, that’s another part of the site I’ve resurrected – the music collection. Yes, once again, you can have a static HTML view of my ever increasing record collection. I’m sure you can’t hold the excitement down. I’m also planning to do something I’ve been planning to do for ages, but haven’t managed to do it, and that’s to help possible fellow music collectors out, and do a review / directory of the charity shops in this fair town, along with how they fare when it comes to music collecting… what the size of their stock is, price, condition, that type of thing. I’m totally aware that it’s an incredibly niche subject, but it’ll give me something to do. Watch this space.

Weird musical things again.

Wow, two posts in as many days. You should be excited. Well, it is, until you find I’m going to warble on about music again. See, I’ve made another musical discovery.

Turn the clock back to 1989. I get my very first stereo the year before. It had a radio, cassette deck and nothing much else. One thing was important though, I could record things off the radio AND my own voice! And I did, in abundance. I still have tapes filled with radio clippings from the early 80s and early 90s.

One tape I had, was a Yashima brand tape. Chad will remember these (if he even reads these anymore) as they had a pungent aroma of cheese, had the inability to store Spectrum games, and were prone to snapping easily.

There are plenty of little snippets of music, some I’ve identified, some I pretty much wore out (particularly the 9 seconds of “The Way it Is” which was my only source of the song for about 5 years), and some I thought were too obscure to ever hear again, particularly this little snippet. It’s not even 2 seconds long. I’d some little searches in lyrics for possible solutions, and wouldn’t you know it, nothing even came close. Listening to that clip, it’s quite easy to pick up “Laa-aand of make believe” (oh, and yes, that’s a 9, possibly 10 year-old me shouting “testing”)

Up comes my bus ride to work this morning. It wasn’t unusual. I was listening to a 2003 episode of “Crap From The Past”, a US radio show, which I must talk about in greater detail later.

Up steps a particular song. Hey, I like the guitar intro of it, not bad. And, the vocals sounds strangely familiar… could that mystery line actually be in this song? The answer. YES! 41 seconds into it, that particular 1.6 seconds of audio is featured, and it turned out that the line was actually “No amount of make believe”. No wonder I couldn’t bloody find it.

Thanks to the wonderment of the interwebs, I can, of course, embed the entire song here, so you can listen to it. It’ll mean far less to you as it does to me, but still, you might enjoy it

Turns out the song was “Dreamland” by Australian band Midnight Oil. Now comes the tricky part…. trying to find the CD it was on. Oh, wait! I already HAVE the CD! Turns out I actually bought it 12 days ago, paid 40p for it and never even knew that song was on there!

Writer’s block. It doesn’t come any tougher than this!

Well, OK. I can’t exactly class what I do on this blog as writing, but I’m doing it anyway. It seems over the last few months, the part of my brain that converts the thoughts in my head into “words” (some of them, admittedly made up), and then down my arms, to the fingers, finally onto the inky blackness of my keyboard, has been playing up. I’ve had loads to write about despite the fact I’ve been on the dole, but every time I sit and start typing, I get about three lines down, the whole thing turns to shit, and I end up with yet another barely-started entry in my “drafts” folder, helplessly waiting for the precise moment that the mixture of caffeine, sugar, and quite possibly alcohol, finally kick that part of my brain into gear, and the words cascade into this blog, like some weird form of UTF-8 diarrhoeah.

So, let’s start off by stating the obvious. Both of the people who read this, have found out through Facebook that I do indeed have a new job. It starts tomorrow, and yes, I’m as shocked as anyone.

That’s the last I’ll say on it for now, as you should know what I’m like, for my infamous “splots”. Basically, this is the sound of my arse imploding, after I get overly paranoid about what I say on here, and that my place of employment may very well be spying on me.

I don’t know what I’m bothered about, if I’m honest. It’s been a fact for centuries, that nobody actually reads a blog, and instead they just stop off to look at the purdy pictures. And that just goes to prove that in the world of social media, the humble blog doesn’t really have anything to say anymore. You’re probably not reading this now, you’re just looking for the next photo, so I could go on from here and literally slag off every employer I’ve ever worked for, however, that would leave me without references, and that would be a bad thing.

So, admittedly, it’s been since January since I last updated this site properly. I do apologise. February was pretty much a write-off. I had a chest infection that laid me up on the couch for a good long while. Pretty much the entire month, if I’m honest.

I really can’t be arsed with a timeline of what I’ve been up to, places I’ve visited, that type of stuff. That’s what I have Twitter for. I can, however say that I’ve been trying to further my education. Back when I initially signed on, I bumped into an old security guard who worked at Employment Palace. He informed me of a cabling course running in the grounds of HUFC. Hartlepool United Footba… etc. A trip to the job centre later confirmed me as being on the course…

Unfortunately, due to the job, I’m not actually able to complete the course, and this was pretty much the “fear” all along. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish, as I didn’t plan to be on the dole for 12 weeks. Still, I’ve left with some skills I never had before. Not many people can say they’ve done this…

This is 100 core cable, routed into 100 RJ45 sockets for voice communication. Or something. My brain's not really switched on at the moment.
This is 100 core cable, routed into 100 RJ45 sockets for voice communication. Or something. My brain’s not really switched on at the moment.

… and know exactly what each strand of wire does. The downside is now, that my head is full of absolutely useless anagrams which I’ll probably never use again. “We Ride Big Yellow Vans” and “Be On Guard By Six”. both refer to how you terminate 20-core cabling, and the colours of it. It was all genuinely interesting, even though I am usually shit at anything practical. for someone who could barely wire a plug, building a working RJ45 ethernet cable has got to be one of my proudest moments to date. Well, OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but yeah, still proud.

so, that course took up 12 hours of my week up. I have also been converting some of my old audio tapes to digital format. I can’t remember if I mentioned I picked up a USB tape deck a few months back. Well, I did, and it’s pretty awesome. It was spurred on, once again, by Chad. I’d got a bit drunk the other night and headed off to Youube. During my time there, I’d discovered that the demo version of one of my favourite albums, “Bridge of Spies” by T’Pau, not only had been released, it was on Spotify. Oh my word! Off I went to Facebook, to show my approval of this…

Me: I’ve just found a demo version of “Bridge of Spies”. The first album I ever owned, despite it being on a C90, supplied by Chad Phillips. Recorded 2 years before the album’s release. Every single track is a demo version. I’m up to track 3 on spotify, I must own this.

Chad: I have no memory of ever owning, copying for you or listening to this album. How do you remember all this?

Me: I literally grew up with this tape. As strange as it sounds, it’s one of the most important pieces of plastic in my life. Remember when my Speccy broke, and you (or your parents) donated the C16 to the “keep Jamie happy” fund? I listened to this tape over and over again while games loaded. Probably something to do with the C16 having its own tape deck. The other side of the tape was even more important to me, with such classics on it as Status Quo’s “In The Army Now”, and Samantha Fox’s “I Surrender (To the spirit of the night)”.

I briefly wittered on about this very tape and album, back in 2008, which is when I first started to digitise my tape collection. Sadly, I have no idea what I did it, but I can at least provide an image of the tape.

Er, anyway, enough about that tape, as there’s been some classic finds… a 30 second clip of the afore-mentioned Chad, remixing the “Why Don’t you…?” theme, involving exchanging Y-fronts for boxers…

Another, slightly more harrowing recording, is one I have absolutely no information on, except I’m on it, and I was possibly in school, in IT class. I was going to post an actual MP3 file of it, but it didn’t seem right, seeing as I don’t know who else is on there, so here’s a transcript.

Person 1: Get off my computer NOW!
Person 2: Hey, Leave him alone!
Person 1: Get off me computer y’ daft cunt, what did you do that for?
Me: Get off! Because I fucking did
Person 1: Did that hurt?
Me: Oh yeah, it did fully.
[recording stops]

Again, I have no idea why this 15-second recording exists, but it certainly leaves more questions than answers. I was never the most popular kid at school, so was I being bullied? Did I record this just to get evidence? Or was I being a twat, and had sabotaged Person 1’s computer in order to gauge a reaction so I could record it for comedy purposes? why did I have access to a tape recorder in school anyway? The rest of the tape doesn’t provide any other clues. It’s all just music I’d taped off records.

I have yet to sift through them in any great detail, but when I do, I shall post some finding on here. And I might also keep you updated about the job.

All this talk about bikes…

Ahh, this takes me back. It’s funny that Chad (aka Randy Lahey in the recent comments) mentioned my very first bike, which was amusingly titled the Bangermobile. Therefore, I shall reminisce a little about said bike.

Actually, if you want to split hairs, The Bangermobile was NOT my first bike, though it was the first one I actually used. Many years ago, my parents bought me a white BMX bike (not the one I mentioned in the previous post) out of the paper. The only problem is, it was huge, and I was tiny. Therefore, I never, ever rode it. It just gathered dust and cobwebs in the washhouse for about 2 years. I hoped I’d grow into it, but I was about 6 at the time, and I’d need to have waited until I was 14 before I’d have been able to get on it without someone’s assistance.

I was frustrated, I knew I had a bike. I wish I was big enough to have taken it out. Eventually, I got bored of waiting, and lost interest. I was about 8 at the time. Suddenly, unknown to me the bike disappeared entirely. The story, as far as I know it, is that my Uncle Jimmy took it to the bike shop up King Oswy, and swapped it for a bike which was more my size. The result was a plain purple coloured pushbike with racing handles on it, shown below…

1-rescan

(Rescanned the image in 2016 to make it less blurry)

Over time, I found the racing handles a little hard to use, therefore they were replaced with standard handlebars which looked like they may have came from one of those little trolleys old people pull behind them. I didn’t mind. The bangermobile was mine, and no matter how much the other kids in the photo mocked me, I didn’t care, I could finally join in with their races, etc. That is, as long as they didn’t go beyond the end of the square. For the record, Chad is the lad at the back with his thumbs in the air.

I loved that bike. I could finally join in when everyone else got their bikes, building ramps in the square and jumping over certain objects, though I seem to remember falling off more times than enough.

I have no idea what stopped me from using the Bangermobile, possibly a puncture, possibly the fact you used to be able to turn the handlebars without the wheels turning, possibly a horrific fall which I’ve subconciously blocked from my mind and now cannot remember.

Either way, if bikes were dragons, the Bangermobile would be called Puff. Purple things and rusted rings made way for other toys. The bangermobile slowly slunk into its cave, located behind my dad’s shed. Well, it wasn’t a cave, I just said that so it fitted in with the song. In fact, it was (and still is) a completely useless piece of the back garden, which has always been covered in weeds.

Some time later (at least a couple of years), the Bangermobile was discovered by me and whatever friends I was with at the time. We decided it would be great to see it back from the dead, and attempted to repair it. Unfortunately, these attempts proved to be fruitless, when after repairing the tyres about 5 times, getting them pumped up at the Shell garage, only for the air to escape 5 seconds later, it was decided that the life of the Bangermobile was at an end. I’m not sure what happened to it after that. I was too old to care. We probably smashed it up.

It’s not all bad news. Remember those handlebars I didn’t like? The ones in the above picture? Well, they’re still with us. They now act as a handrail in our (mainly disused for 10 years) downstairs toilet…

I went out on my new bike again, just for something to do while the sun was shining. Imagine my delight when the front reflector fell off and went hurtling down the road to the side of me. I’m going to replace them with lights at some point anyway, so that’s not a problem, but why did it have to make me look like a cock in the first place, having to stop and pick it up? Someone was walking past at the time, I bet she had a good giggle. Sob.