It’s the Easter holidays and as I’ve got some time on my hands I decided to sit down and try and write something for the blog. Other commitments have been getting in the way of late and so my blog has been very much neglected.
So, with not a lot in mind to write about, I thought I’d trawl through some notebooks and accompanying scraps of paper in order to see what poetry I have knocking about. It turns out that there are quite a few that have either been started or simply finished and then just left and so, after quite a bit of reading I decided to add this one to the blog. It brings back a lot of memories and I really like it.
Willow
As the spots of rain get heavier and begin to change the colour of the roads and pavements around, you scramble for the familiar shelter of the giant old weeping willow.
Everyone is out, the house locked up, but you chose friends, football and the top of the hill Wembley of a pub car park over the visit to family, and now that team mates have chosen bricks and mortar for cover, solitude in nature is forced upon you.
A mass of leaves and sagging branches provide ample sanctuary, so you position yourself so not to be seen from either road or the neighbour's house, shift your knees up to your chest and enjoy this place where there is no shouting, no conflict and no storm of any kind.
The willow tree in question here is the one that we had in the garden of my childhood home. Everyone else regarded it as a nuisance because of its sheer size and mass of leaves that would be shed in autumn and litter the surrounding area, but I loved it.
I’d play in it as a small child, inventing games and characters and swinging on those branches. As I got older it became somewhere to hide and just be on my own, away from what I remember now, rightly or wrongly, as a lot of shouting and anger in our house. Sometimes, as in the poem, it was just a convenient shelter of a different kind as the rain just didn’t seem to get through it. As I got older, I’d often stay at home when my parents went across to see family, but would rarely remember to take a key. These things got forgotten when there was a game of football about to start! And so, I’d end up just sitting under the tree to escape the elements.
In later years, after we had moved out, the tree was cut down. I still kind of miss it to this day.
This is a relatively new poem, written about one of my grandfathers. I barely knew him, but a while ago I got one of those DNA kits as a Christmas present and as a result started to research my family tree. At the end of it all, not only was I disappointed to have no sign of any Viking ancestry, but I felt I knew my grandfather even less.
It’s always been something that held an interest to me. Both my mam and dad come from big families and so, growing up, we were surrounded by aunties, uncles and cousins whenever there was some kind of ‘family’ occasion. However, for any number of reasons I never felt that I really knew them that well. Being quite a shy kid probably didn’t help.
We lived in a different part of Newcastle to the rest of the family and so didn’t see them on a day to day basis and then as I got older I was busy with friends and different interests. Going away to university didn’t help my cause either; if anything, it made me stick out like a sore thumb! When I finally moved away from the North East entirely, I pretty much drifted away from all but immediate family.
The relationship with my grandparents on both sides was difficult, to say the least. With this grandad, he died when I was very young and there always seemed to be a reluctance on my parents part for them to take us to see our grandparents. If I’m honest, it doesn’t look like they were at all interested in us and I literally can’t remember ever meeting my grandma. However, I do have one extremely vague recollection of my grandad which is where the poem comes from.
'The old tyrant'
If I close my eyes, I still see him from exactly the same vantage point, every time. A dot of a man, his appearance betraying every terrifying snippet I'd ever heard. Brown shoes, dark trousers, midnight blue raincoat and a black trilby hat, shadowing his features, making those eyes even darker, so that it felt like he looked straight through me as he crept closer, a shining silver coin grasped in bony fingers. The childcatcher had come, bearing gifts. Then, with a pat on the head, he was gone.
Everything else is mystery, legend, even your name uncertain. "The old tyrant", my mam would say with just a hint of a smile, "a villain", but maybe an entertainer, singing and dancing on the West End stage, if that was to be believed, the cold, hard presence passing your distance through the generations, many leads to your life, but never a final destination, many strings to your bow, but barely a finger print of recognition left behind, the untraceable ghost, continuing to haunt despite the fact that none ever really knew you at all.
When I was very young my parents ran a business. As part of the business we had a shop and a market stall, I think. My dad would be away buying crockery – plates, cups, bowls etc – in Stoke-on-Trent for the business (that’s what we sold…everyone needs stuff to eat off, right?) and my mam would be running the shops. As I was a poorly child (yes, heart nonsense even at that age!) I’d often find myself in the shop.
One day, when both parents were there, my grandad paid us a visit. I was perched on a stool in a corner of the shop, like some gaunt, pale kind of mascot and he came in, spoke to my parents a little bit as far as I can remember, and then made his way across to me.
As the poem says, he just came over, pressed a coin into my little hand and then left. That was the only interaction that I recall. No talking, no affection. He might have smiled, but I can’t remember.
Growing up, I picked up nothing but negativity around him, which comes out in the poem. Apparently, he wasn’t the greatest dad – although times were very different back then – and was very tough on his children, one of them my dad. When it came to seeing his grandchildren, he just didn’t seem to be interested. Well, not in this one anyway! So, I’d hear the types of descriptions that come up in the poem, labelled at him time and again.
When I came to research my family tree, he was just as big a mystery as ever. I’d been told that he was ‘a dancer and singer’ on stage in London by my dad when I was a kid, but there wasn’t much evidence of that. In fact, what he actually did remained a mystery and I uncovered bits of evidence that he had possibly led a bit of a double life a times. I won’t go into it because it’s obviously quite personal, but also because it left me no closer to knowing a great deal about the man!
So there we go; my grandad, man of mystery and little affection or it might seem, any kind of feeling whatsoever!
When I first started writing this series, I wondered how far back I’d be able to go. I’m trying to write more about players that I actually saw play, rather than just delving into the history books – and Wikipedia – and providing you with a list of stats. So, in essence I’m restricting myself to going back as far as the late 70s at best and even then, my memory won’t always be reliable.
The third player in the series is one that I only just remember, as well as being one of my first ever black and white heroes.
Imre Varadi was signed, with not a great deal of fanfare from Everton in the summer of 1981. A 22-year-old Londoner, with a Hungarian/Italian background, he was brought in by manager Arthur Cox to help solve what had become a major goalscoring problem. With the previous season’s strikers – the likes of Bobby Shinton, Alan Shoulder, Mick Harford and a young Chris Waddle – struggling to find the net, Varadi faced a challenge. However, he must have felt that he couldn’t really fail, given that the previous season’s top scorer had been Shinton with 7 goals. And so, a memorable, but brief chapter began.
Newcastle were languishing in Division 2 (now the Championship) at the time but in his first season (81/82) Imre scored a commendable 20 goals in 47 appearances. However, it took him a while to actually find the net. When he did eventually did though it was spectacular as he bagged a hat-trick in a 0-4 away win at Cardiff. Suddenly, things were beginning to click into place. In the next game, this time at home to Derby he scored a brace in a 3-0 home win.
Varadi had electric pace, an eye for goal and was more than capable of an eye-catching piece of skill. He was unpredictable and brave, doing the number 9 shirt proud. It was easy to see why a success starved Gallowgate would take to him so quickly. But things were about to change on Tyneside.
In the summer of 1982 Newcastle United grabbed the football world’s attention by signing the England captain Kevin Keegan from Southampton. How we’d managed to sign the twice Ballon D’or winner is anyone’s guess, but we did and he would go on to help change the history of the club. It was the beginning of the end of Varadi though.
The season started well, with Varadi providing the assist for Keegan’s winning goal in the first game of the season at home to QPR. In goalscoring terms though he made a slow start. While strike partner Keegan scored 3 goals in his first three games, Varadi didn’t score until the sixth week of the season.
However, by the end of the season he had scored 22 goals in 43 appearances and was again a roaring success as he finished as top scorer. Keegan himself only made 16 league appearances, scoring 21 goals and was rightly idolised. And this was possibly what would cost Varadi. Newcastle, having finished 5th that season went all out for promotion the next, signing John Ryan for a then club record fee of £250k, David Mills and a 22-year-old called Peter Beardsley in the summer with Imre being sold to Sheffield Wednesday for £180k.
I remember rumours about Varadi’s relationship with Keegan at the time and since then have heard the same type of things mentioned time and again in relation to his departure, but I really wouldn’t know. Whatever the reason, it seemed a strange move to get rid of the top scorer of the previous two seasons. Varadi scored goals and was popular with the fans and yet was still sacrificed to a rival. Mind you, Keegan would do the same himself as manager, years later, with Andy Cole, ending up explaining himself to confused and angry fans on the steps of the Milburn stand.
Imre Varadi was the first number 9 that really captured my imagination. I wasn’t old enough to remember Supermac and there’d been precious little else to grab on to during my fledgling years as a Toon supporter. I remember being enamored by Peter Withe, but even then I was only 6! My other favourite player had been midfielder Micky Burns, but there was nothing that excited me as much as Varadi did when he signed. I knew nothing of him, but that first hat-trick had me hooked! I’d fallen in love with a club that felt like it gave precious little back, but when Varadi got the ball and ran it felt like there was a bit more of a point being there.
With 42 goals in 90 games, Imre Varadi had a decent strike rate and was the kind of striker that excited the fans. But with a young Chris Waddle coming through and Peter Beardsley set to make an amazing impact with Kevin Keegan, maybe letting him go was the correct decision. By the end of his career he’d become very much a journeyman pro, ending up with 17 clubs in all, so perhaps his two years with us was par for the course.
In recent interviews, Varadi has expressed great love for his time with Newcastle and for a couple of years, there were a fair few of us who loved him right back. But cult hero or not, nobody could really compete with King Kev, could they?
Given the weather conditions as I write, I’m not entirely sure what led me to write a poem about rain in the summer. We’re in the middle of a bit of a heatwave here in the UK, so maybe it was wishful thinking.
It’s felt like a while since I’ve written anything poetic, so it was a relief when a few lines popped into my head one evening after work recently. I scribbled them down on to a scrap bit of paper and did my level best not to lose it over the next week or so. Mainly this involved stuffing said paper into either my work bag or my laptop case and hoping that it wouldn’t escape when I was taking something else out.
Having only written – and saved – an initial 6 lines, I was pleased when I was able to complete it all with a few revisions one night last week. As is quite usual for me, this came over the course of a couple of nights where I couldn’t get to sleep.
Summer Rain
The sudden splodge and spite of furtive rain
sees the summer masterpiece give way,
pushed aside it would seem, by the fingers of a toddler daubing
the contents of their imagination across a canvas
and transforming this little piece of paradise
into something unrecognisable from what we looked out on seconds before.
Bright colours are dulled as clouds close curtains on the blue sky,
pavements and patios darkened by the rain,
as leaves on trees and shrubs shudder with each almighty drop.
Suburban streets are temporarily transformed into Venetian canals
as the shower bounces off the parched earth and you find yourself
rapt by the shift that you've witnessed a thousand times before.
"It's like a river!" you hear yourself say, before you can help it
and when it stops, like someone gradually teasing off the tap,
the sun will return, almost before you had realised it was gone,
steam will rise from the tarmac,
and for a brief few moments the grass and the plants
will glisten until the heat takes away the very last of the summer rain
There’s always a sense of relief, I find, when the heat of the summer is broken by rain. We do get heat in Summer in the UK, by the way and right now, in the middle of the hottest spell of weather we’ve encountered for a long time, we could really do with a burst of rain.
At any other time, I’m not a fan of rain. In the Autumn and the Winter I really don’t like it at all as I know that not only is is going to soak me to the skin, but it’s going to make me feel even colder too. However, in the midst of a heatwave, it can be a godsend.
I wrote about it, as I said, because some of the lines for the poem simply popped into my head, but also because of the spectacle of that kind of unexpected rain that we regularly seem to get in the UK on what should just be a sunny day. It often seems to come without any real hint that it would be there and then all of a sudden there are black clouds splurging water all over the place and changing the look of the landscape. The lines about rain flooding the roads are there purely for my benefit and they make me smile. I seem to gravitate towards our front window when this type of rain happens, often grabbing the kids when they were younger so they too could view the spectacle. I don’t know why it fascinates me so much…I mean, things getting wet because it’s raining is about right, isn’t it?
I hope you enjoyed reading and that maybe the poem evoked some memories or feelings for you. It can’t just be me that still gets excited by a summer rain storm!
I’ve written about sleep and sleeplessness quite a few times before. It’s a topic that I keep returning to because every once in a while I’ll find my sleep pattern disturbed and often for a few nights in a row I’ll find myself either lying awake and unable to focus on sleep because my mind is racing or just out of bed, sitting downstairs in our house, wide awake.
This is a poem that focuses on the former of those two scenarios, although as a result of my mind racing, I eventually got out of bed and wrote the poem. It was a night where, if I’m honest, I’m not sure whether I was awake or sleeping fitfully and suffering with nightmares. One thing’s for sure; it wasn’t a pleasant night’s sleep and there was a lot that disturbed me. You think that nightmares are things you left behind in childhood, but then get reminded that you’re sadly mistaken!
The cold does not embrace you
yet, for a short time its shiver soothes your skin
like a smooth palm comforting you through illness, fear.
An uneasy dream shifts and your thoughts are strangers
caught in the void between the fevered images of disturbed sleep
and the disquieting thud of your heart as you realise you're awake again.
Without warning, the rough skin of working hands grabs at your jaw,
takes hold, clutches.
A strangers eyes stare out from a familiar face,
gripped by a mood you know all too well,
before one last squeeze,
then the calloused hand, shoves your face away viciously,
like an imperfect toy on a production line, rejected
not good enough to be loved.
You blink to try and wake only to find another face now,
her hot breath invading your nostrils,
her gibberish bringing spittle to your skin,
her disapproval at the runt of the litter writ large
in neon across unloving eyes and twisted expression
informing you again of what feels like their hatred,
before words are put in your mouth and you flounder,
helpless against a place you don't belong,
a jigsaw you don't fit.
Shaking free, you brace yourself,
turn your collar against the piercing winter and stumble forward,
in search of somewhere warm.
And while these ghosts will always haunt you
with their chill,
every once in a while the winter sun will warm your skin.
It feels like there are two antagonists in this poem. The first I’m not sure of and it would be unkind to speculate. However, the second is definitely my grandmother, who was someone that I had a fractious relationship with, at best. She was a woman who never seemed to display any warmth whatsoever to me, which as a child was quite perplexing. In company with my many cousins, I remember she’d frequently refer to me as ‘this one’ while everyone else got called by their name. Let’s just say that it was clear I wasn’t her favourite! I can’t say that her treatment of me didn’t bother me, as it did. But as I got old enough to make my own choices, I just decided to avoid being in the same room as her. Even now though, there are occasions when she comes to mind and it’s never pleasant. Hence, the words in the latter half of the poem.
I tried to end the poem on a more positive note, just explaining what I’ve just mentioned, really. Childhood memories will always be there and will always crop up and affect your day. But there’s always a positive to be found.
I hope you enjoyed the poem or at least it had some kind of effect on you as a reader. The memories I’ve written about were incredibly vivid and I hope that feeling is conveyed by what I’ve written. As ever, feel free to leave a comment.
This is a poem that I wrote around Christmas time and then spent far too much of my time either poorly, relaxing or just eating and drinking to remember to write it up properly for my blog. As a result, it’s a little out of date, but I think the sentiment holds up, whatever the occasion.
It’s a poem about reflecting back and remembering those that we’ve lost, which I suppose we tend to do at important points in the year. We do it all year round, I suppose, but at times like Christmas and birthdays, when you’re maybe at your most relaxed you’re more prone to thinking about how much a particular person is missed or maybe even just how much they themselves would have enjoyed that occasion, it’s a little more pertinent.
Absent Friends
Absent friends sparkle even more at this time of year
and we raise a glass to remember more intensely now
than over the passing months,
more distant now, yet somehow our focus tunes more
than before and we toast our absent friends,
tears punctuating what is still a celebration,
staining cheeks and mixing incongruously
alongside cracker borne paper hats and party poppers.
our absent friends are guests once again and we all see
those smiles, hear those voices, cradle each other in arms
used just hours before to shatter anticipation and tear at wrapping
covering all manner of happy shapes.
Now, a moment hovers longer than a moment,
sharper than the year before until you can almost see them,
almost touch them, hold them again as they stand in the kitchen,
glass in hand nodding wistfully, gone but only a thought away,
yet agonisingly too distant for one more conversation.
And all we have left is love...
I must admit that when I looked again at the draft of this poem in my notebook, it didn’t make a lot of sense. The start of it, anyway. It was another poem that I’d written in the early hours and given that the first couple of lines didn’t seem to make any sense, perhaps I was more tired than I thought! After reading the rest of the poem a couple of times I was able to re-draft and change those lines in order to give it some clarity. I was tempted to leave it as it was – poetic license and all that – but decided that something that made sense was better than something so confusing. I’d love to know what I meant with the initial first line though!
‘Absent Friends’ is a product of both Christmas and New Year. I think we’re more likely to look back at New Year, but I know that having lost a close family friend relatively recently, our thoughts were with them on both occasions, both this year and last. I suppose it’s natural that we look back at these times. As I said earlier, it’s obvious that when we’re relaxed and happy we might reflect on those that aren’t around anymore and what they would have made of the situation that we happily find ourselves in.
In a different way, we found ourselves explaining to our children about another absent friend this year. The absent friend in question – still alive, but moved overseas – lived in the UK as a student teacher years ago and joined us for Christmas Day as he had no family around. He’s from Australia – hi Andy, if you read this – and so everything he knew and loved was on the other side of the world. As our mate, it was only right that he joined us and it was a fantastic day. We still think of him every year at Christmas and this year it was lovely to re-tell the tale of that particular Christmas Day, even if it left our kids quite perplexed as to why we chose to share our day with anyone else, when we always just have Christmas as a family these days! It was funny to hear their almost outrage at the fact that our guest wasn’t grandma or grandad, uncle or auntie, but Andy!
I hope you’ve enjoyed the poem and that, if it brought any memories back, they were fond ones rather than bad ones. Sometimes, despite the obvious pain that it can cause, it’s just a nice, warm feeling we get when thinking of those absent friends.
This was a poem I wrote during our first period of lockdown. It was early summer and I sat down outside with an idea for a poem; something to remember lockdown by. Now, when you think about it, we’re not going to need anything to remember lockdown by. I think, for most of us, it’ll be firmly etched on the mind forever. For some of us lockdown brought the heartache of not being able to see family and friends, alongside thoroughly bizarre sights like fleets of empty buses on the roads, pubs and shops remaining closed and the sight of an oncoming family during your daily exercise stint striking fear into your heart as you played a strange game of chicken about who would cross the road first. And then there were the sounds…oh wait, with everyone locked away there were hardly any sounds!
For other people lockdown quickly lost its importance because apparently they weren’t allowed their human rights. Human rights such as being able to get ridiculously drunk in pubs every weekend, being able to walk down supermarket aisles any way they wanted and having to forego their right to ignore people’s personal space in shops. The term Covidiot quickly became a tired label, but it never lost its accuracy. It’s a hard life for some.
I decided – for some unknown reason – that I wanted to use rhyme in this poem, which is something I rarely do. It was a bit of a challenge to come up with rhymes that didn’t feel forced and, as a result, the poem took me a lot longer than usual. Another result, in my opinion, is that it sounds like I wrote it in Year 8. Sadly, I didn’t. So, a glowing reference for the poem from its writer then!
Anyway, here’s the poem, so I’ll let you judge it and its merits. You, dear reader, might just prefer a bit of rhyming…
Lockdown Museum
With 2020 fast being referred to as a hell of a year I’ve come up with my own commemorative idea. A grand exhibition with a pandemic theme, I’ve decided to create a lockdown museum.
With schools closing in early March, some educational artefacts would really look the part. Board markers, a highlighter, some stickers for praise, my own now redundant planner to prove I worked some days, a well worn copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a metaphor for the tragedy, disruption and the stress.
For the NHS and all of the intrepid frontline staff there’s PPE, rubber gloves and the obligatory mask. A child’s painted rainbow and a Thank You sign, pots, pans and applauding hands to represent that time, a video of Captain Tom, later made a knight, a latter day icon to help ease the nation’s plight.
A plethora of lockdown paraphernalia would make up all the rest unusual items that helped every day as the virus put us to the test. A beer pump, idle, to mark that pubs were closed, A ‘No Entry’ sign for supermarket aisles as well as empty roads. A ‘PE with Joe’ T-shirt and trainers for the boom in exercise recordings of Zoom quizzes, Teams meetings and House Parties arranged and on a giant TV screen, those daily briefings play to remind us that everything changed.
And perhaps, if hearsay’s true and this virus means there’s a new normality, our museum will grow and never be complete until a vaccine sets us free.
So there it is. A poem, that now I’ve read it through a few more times, I’m a little more proud of. I hope it captures the tone of those times, although I don’t think it quite cuts it where our second period of lockdown is concerned due to the sort of half baked nature of it all. Clearly, the first lockdown was very different.
I feel that there are some references that might need explaining, as I’m aware that not everyone who reads my stuff is from the U.K. So here we go.
Firstly, let me assure you that the first rhyming couplet works. The words ‘year’ and ‘idea’ clearly rhyme and I’ll have nothing said against it, even though if I read it in my accent it clearly doesn’t rhyme at all!
Then, in the second stanza, the reference to my ‘redundant planner‘ is there because just before schools closed I was sent home as I was classed as vulnerable to the virus. I didn’t work again until this September, spending 6 months attempting to work from home and fighting with a particularly unwilling and rebellious laptop. Thus, my planner was largely left unused. Oh, and I’m a teacher by the way, for those who didn’t realise.
The ‘pots, pans and applauding hands’ refers to our weekly clap for the NHS, performed at 8pm in doorsteps all around the country. To show appreciation for their heroic work people would stand outside their houses and clap for two minutes. This then quickly took on a new dimension as people added bashing pots and pans, bin lids etc to the noise they’d make to show their appreciation. Very, very British if you ask me!
‘Captain Tom’ from the same stanza was a 99 year old, retired soldier who took it upon himself to perform a sponsored walk of laps around his garden in order to raise money for the NHS. His aim was to raise £1000, but as his efforts became bigger and bigger news, he ended up raising £30,000,000 instead and was later knighted by the Queen. Arise Sir Tom and God Bless us all!
The penultimate stanza then references several things that stood out about everyday life in lockdown, my favourite being ‘PE with Joe’ – the fitness expert Joe Wicks would run exercise classes every morning via his YouTube channel and even on a quiet day thirty thousand people would be squatting in unison! What an endearing image! I personally became borderline obsessive about this – exrecise in general, not just squatting – even going as far as writing a poem about my bromance with the man himself. You can read it on the link below.
So there we have it. Hopefully it’s an upbeat poem that brings back some more tolerable and perhaps even happy memories about a remarkable time in all of our lives. I hope you enjoyed it and feel free to leave a comment.
The mix tape. In a sense, a history lesson needs to be given before this piece can really get going. So here goes…
For the younger reader – I’m talking late teens to adults in their twenties and onwards, not toddlers – the mix tape was a thing of beauty. It was literally a blank cassette tape, often known as a C45 or a C-60, and then you’d record some of your favourite songs onto said tape, for a variety of reasons which we can go into later. A cassette, by the way, was actual tape that recorded the sound, on two spools encased a a plastic rectangle. Like this one below; glamorous, huh?
Us older people would make mix tapes by playing music from another source – maybe the radio, another cassette or vinyl – and then recording the tracks straight on to the tape. In many ways we were pioneers, early superstar DJs, as long as you ignored the quality. And the superstar bit.
This blog was prompted by a BBC 6Music programme that I listened to one weekday morning, a while ago now. It was Lauren Laverne’s mid morning show and she was talking to a guest, the writer Jane Sanderson. Jane had written a book called ‘The Mix Tape’ and so the interview concentrated partly on the book (which sounds great, by the way) and partly on the idea of mix tapes, while also getting Jane to contribute a mix of songs that she herself would put on a mix tape. I scribbled down some of the ones I liked, but as I was working during a free period, it made it difficult to keep up! I’ll include the list at the end of the blog for you though, dear reader, and perhaps you might want to check them out.
Of course, the interview got me thinking about the days of mix tapes and my own experiences. For me, mix tapes had a dual purpose, as I suspect they did for many others. At first I’d share them with friends as we discovered new music. Usually this would be either purchased from our local record shop – Music Box in Blaydon – or borrowed from the library. Both places were like a kind of Mecca to me in my formative years and I’d happily spend hours in either, perusing what there was on offer, searching for new sounds that I’d read about or maybe even taking a gamble that would invariably not pay off, by rooting round the bargain bin! And while this makes me sound like a very lonely individual, I wasn’t. I had genuine friends. No, honestly, I did. Real, tangible human ones, not just voices in my head or shadowy figures at the bottom of our garden!
Anyway, once sourced I’d tape this new music, adding it to what I laughingly referred to as a ‘mix’, on yet another blank cassette, even though there was no mixing; just the end of the track and the clunk of the stop or pause button, followed by a similar clunk and a hiss as I started recording the next track.
Part of the idea with mix tapes was to offer a taste of new music to the recipient. Us mix tapers somewhat automatically set ourselves up as experts and svengalis who would open the minds of our devotees with the startling choices we made; the musical gems we unearthed. Often the idea would be to try and outdo each other, in a kind of ‘I’ll take your lo-fi garage band mix and raise you my underground East coast hip hop.’ And we would outdo each other with music that we loved, not simply something that we hated, but knew that the other person wouldn’t have ever heard of. In many ways we were a bit sad, but not that sad! Sometimes though it was a simple case of hearing something that you loved and knowing that the person on the receiving end of the mix tape would love it too.
Mix tapes would also be a good way of communicating with the latest object of our affections too. Music was something that I knew quite a bit about and something that I soaked up as much as I could. So it was a subject that I could talk about with at least a bit of authority and hopefully not sound too dull. And a good job too, because my other area of expertise, football, was not of much interest to the girls of 1980s Newcastle. But as quite a shy boy, who inhabited a world of self-doubt, the mix tape was an in with girls. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t some kind of predator; often it was just a good way for a girl to get a free cassette and that was where our interaction ended, but on some occasions it actually worked! On one occasion the girl I fancied payed back my gift of a mix tape full of songs I thought she might be interested in, with a copy of Pretty Woman on VHS, leaving me puzzled as where she saw our potential relationship going. It turned out that she simply loved the film and seeing my enthusiasm for the music, thought she’d reply with something she also loved. And despite our obvious unsuitability, a brief romance ensued. It didn’t end very well, but it definitely started! And all because of a mix tape!
My approach to mix tapes became more sophisticated as I got older. As well as developing my musical tastes, I also developed the look of my mix tapes and started to design front covers for them rather than just presenting them to the recipient with an inlay card containing names of tracks and artists. When I say ‘designed’ it would often amount to cutting pictures from a magazine that might fit with the general feel of the mix tape and manipulating them into the cassette case as neatly as I could. Sometimes though, when my confidence was at its medium level best, I might do a sketch and use that as the front cover. So in some ways I was trying to create some kind of art, I suppose. And until now I’d thought that I hadn’t been remotely pretentious in my teenage years!
However, I suppose what my ‘artsy’ period shows is exactly how seriously we all took mix tapes. Not only did people spend hours carefully selecting not just the tracks to go on the tape, but also what order they would go in to have the best impact on the recipient. Then on top of those hours we’d also add more, collecting images that might look good in a cassette case and even more going through said images in search of exactly the right one for whatever mix tape we were creating at the time. But it wasn’t in any way a laborious process. I’m sure I speak for many of us who ‘curated’ such tapes when I say that it was massively enjoyable. Mix tapes were that important that at times they took over our lives and would often consume entire days. And all in the hope of some kind of connection being made.
As I listened to the interview that prompted this blog, once I’d got past being nostalgic, I began to think about who I might send a mix tape nowadays and what tracks I’d want to include. The whole process would be undoubtedly made easier now because of the internet and things like Alexa. Our playlists are there permanently and waiting to be explored and even a Luddite like me can navigate them.
My obvious recipient would be my wife, but the snag here is that we share a lot of the same musical taste and, having been together for such a long time, there’s very little that we don’t know about each other’s playlists and tastes. Although only very recently she surpised me by being wholly unaware of the song Super Freak by Rick James, preferring to believe that it was MC Hammer who was playing on the radio. For the same reason I’d have to rule out some of my friends. I think I’d still exchange mix tapes with those that I’d class as proper music fans though – David, Andy, Pricey, Emma, Kath, to name but a few. And I’m sure I could put something of meaning together for my wife as well.
After a bit of thinking though, I think the first person I’d want to send a mix tape would be my sister. We’re two very different characters and not the closest of siblings. But I’d like her to know how much of an influence she had on some of my tastes while we both still lived at home together and I’d like to try and bring a bit of sunshine to her life with a few decent tunes. I don’t have an entire mix tape planned out but some of the tracks I’d definitely include would be ‘White Lines’ by Grandmaster Flash, which she introduced me to as a teenager and I’d hope would remind her of better times. Now if you know the song, that might seem like a bad one for a teenager in the 1980s to be aware of, but I can assure you I had no idea what they were rapping about; I just loved the song! Then there’d be ‘Loaded’ by Primal Scream, because I’d bet she’s never heard it and that’s a crying shame (plus I think it might be the kind of track she could do with listening to at the end of every day) and ‘One Big Family’ by Embrace because I think sometimes we need a reminder that we’re actually brother and sister. After that, I could add all sorts of interesting tracks for her to give a listen to. Because of course, that’s the beauty of a mix tape.
In her interview, Jane Sanderson was asked to give 6music a mix tape of her own. Of course, it wasn’t via cassette, but it was a great mix of songs. Unfortunately for me, I was listening during a free period at work and so, had to tune out when it came to teaching again. However, if you’re interested – and you should be as there are some ace tracks – the tracks that I made a note of were, Northern Sky by Nick Drake, I Close My Eyes by Dusty Springfield, Thinking About You by Frank Ocean and I Didn’t See It Coming by Belle and Sebastian. Maybe they’ll be the first four on my first foray back into the world of the mix tape?
Listening to Lauren Laverne and Jane Sanderson got me thinking about the possibility of a cassette revival. After all, we’ve witnessed it with vinyl where after 12 continuous years of rising sales, over 4 million LPs were sold in the UK in 2019. Similar digging for figures revealed that there was a 103% increase in sales of music cassettes in the first 6 months of 2020 with 65,000 cassettes purchased in the first 6 months of the year. Clearly, people are buying cassettes again. Could we see the return of the mix tape? I hope so. How long before I can start sending them out again? Surely it’s only a matter of time! Ladies and gentlemen, we could be witnessing the rebirth of a veritable cultural phenomenon!
As ever, let me know in the comments what you thought of the post. I’d be really interested to know about other people’s experiences of mix tapes too. I’m sure there are some brilliant stories out there!
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