Until its bill withers

Bing Crosby bankrolled magnetic tape to rescue his golf game. It bought him flexibility and kept work and play separate. The tape lived in the studio. Tapes ran from reel to cumbersome reel and the machines that played them needed a floor or table as support. Tape wasn’t portable.

In the 1950s, listeners could choose what they listened to at home but not on their commute, so tape started to shrink down. William Powell Lear — the Lear Jet guy — launched the 8-track cassette in 1964. “Tracks” here didn’t mean songs. The tape ran in a continuous loop for 80 minutes so each cassette could hold the best part of a double-album. The 8 were individual tracks, living side-by-side along the length of the tape, like swim lanes. Each track held a different set of sounds, but they traveled together so stayed in sync. Mono, stereo, quadraphonic, then 8-track. Doubling the tracks made the sound more layered and more able to offer a sense of space.

The 8-track was kind of portable. In the 1976 remake of A Star is Born, Kris Kristofferson, Barbra Streisand’s drunken, has-been rock star husband, puts a paperback-sized cassette on in the car just before he wipes out on a country road. The 8-track was car-portable.

The next shrink down was the big one. Or the small one. And it was the fruit of a very concrete design decision that Lou Ottens made.

Continue reading “What a pocket-sized block of wood and the Sound-about taught us.”

Hello, hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye, I thought you’d left. Now and Then, the Beatles’ final final song came out last week.

We have it thanks to a new AI solution. The last song on a tape John left for Paul was dropped in a big bucket of said solution and all its impurities – hiss , pianos – sank to the bottom leaving pure John voice floating on top, to be scooped up and mixed with some 90s George guitar parts, some newer Paul and Ringo, and strings.

The AI was MAL (Machine Audio Learning), the system Peter Jackson’s team put together for the Get Back documentary.

Continue reading “You say AI and I say I don’t know”

China Crisis wrote and recorded a song in 1983 called Soul Awakening.

It’s the first song they play live in Seattle after a long gap. The last time they toured around here, the Queen was half way towards the Diamond Jubilee that she’s three days into celebrating. The first single from U2’s Joshua Tree was about to come out.  According to setlist.fm, the last time they played here was when they toured on Santana’s ticket, when Santana’s stock was somewhat low, somewhere in time between Black Magic Woman and Smooth. So, it’s been a while.

Continue reading “Dreamy weather to make you stay”

Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood is selling his Holland Park house. 

He’s a prior owner of the Wick, now Pete Townshend’s house. It stands near the north-west entrance to Richmond Park, and half a mile from Ian Dury’s magical musical bench. 

The house was designed in 1775 and sold to Wood in 1971 by Mary Hayley Bell and Sir John Mills. The sound of the wind around the house inspired Bell to write the book (later film and musical) ‘Whistle Down the Wind’.  

Continue reading “Woodhouse”

Ian Dury has a bench in Richmond Park, at King Henry’s Mound.

The Mound has a direct line of sight to St. Paul’s Cathedral to the east and uninterrupted views of the home counties to the west. The view across London has been protected from interference by new building through royal decree since Henry VIII stood there in 1536 to see a rocket launched from the Tower, confirming that Anne Boleyn had been executed and he was free to marry Jane Seymour.

Continue reading “The Benchmark”

Late 1970s Kerkrade, a Dutch coal town across the German border from Aachen. High unemployment. Hemmed in by heavy-browed slag heaps. The futures on offer are coal, border-town crime, and escape. But every teenagers’ ‘now’ is being in a band. Metal heads or synth kids, mutually exclusive. Kids scrub off the town’s black coal dust for a night out and emerge from music clubs drenched in sweat and blackened again by smoke from Kiss cover bands’ pyrotechnics.

Continue reading “Life and music – Vincent Wehren”

Two strong women were fêted this week. Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician to whose calculations John Glenn entrusted his life, passed away at 99. And Elizabeth Warren, the last woman standing in this year’s US presidential race, stepped out. We wait at least another four years for the US to break the gender barrier for the White House.

One constant through the last 78 years of steps forward and back has been Desert Island Discs. More than 3,000 note-worthies have shared their stories and choices on the program. You can hear most of them here (and one of them by visiting a bench in Richmond Park).

Continue reading “These women’s work”

Elvis Presley, Andy Warhol and Marc Bolan walk into a bar. If it’s the early seventies in Los Angeles, it can only be Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. Rodney Bingenheimer was ‘The Mayor of Sunset Strip’ and, from 1976, ‘Rodney on the ROQ’. The ROQ was KROQ, Pasadena radio station and pulpit for ‘tastemaker’ Rodney for 40 years. Rodney on the ROQ broke Blondie and the Ramones and introduced America to the Sex Pistols and the Smiths.

In the summer of 1983 he put a new German singer on a path to brief global domination. Nena’s “99 Red Balloons” was top of Rodney on the ROQ’s chart for a month. The song it succeeded at number one had been there twice as long. It was Donnie Barren’s “I Love My Cat’s Meow”. 

Continue reading “Life and Music – Donnie Barren”