This is how we started in the early ’90s. Back then, we knew we’d really made it when we managed to buy a secondhand eight-track recorder. An old Fostex A80, I think it was. To us, it felt like a professional studio. This little reel of quarter-inch tape held eight tracks and gave you around 18 to 20 minutes of recording time if you were lucky.
A few years ago, curiosity got the better of me and I had the tape digitised. I don’t own an eight-track machine anymore, so it was the only way to find out what was hiding on there after all these years. The verdict? It wasn’t exactly a masterpiece. The recorder’s head was already pretty worn out back then, which meant we really only had about six usable tracks. The rest of the gear surrounding it wasn’t much better. By today’s standards it was terrible. Noisy, unreliable, sounded terrible and was incredibly limiting. I recall the mixing desk had a spring reverb!
But somehow, that’s how we learned. We learned how to make decisions because we didn’t have endless tracks. We learned how to work around problems because every piece of gear had them. We learned how to record because there wasn’t really any other choice – we couldn’t afford a studio, plus we really wanted to be self-reliant. Listening back now, the recording quality is rough. Really rough. But that’s not what makes it valuable. What makes it precious is that it captured a moment in time.
I’ve still got an original mix that came from this tape. From memory, it was mixed down onto a Digital Compact Cassette, which seemed incredibly futuristic at the time. That was a briefly lived format using tape which was effectively 12bit – still it was much cheaper than 16bit DAT recorders. That mix eventually found its way into my computer, and I recently had another listen.
The lead singer was an old friend of ours, Teeps. A brilliant singer with a distinctive voice. The song was one of his, called Until the Seas Run Dry. The backing singer was Julie!
The same Julie on lead vocals for OLDER but more than thirty years ago when we first got together in another band Driving Morris. Hearing her unmixed younger voice again was something special. It sounded different, of course but it still had the qualities I fell in love with all those years ago. And honestly, I think she could still pull it off today!
Listening to old recordings is a strange experience. The gear was terrible. The recordings weren’t great. But they were ours. And somehow, after all these years, that makes them priceless. I probably won’t ever do anything with these recordings. They’re far too rough to release. But that’s not really the point – sometimes nostalgia is enough. Hearing a piece of your own history come back to life after thirty years is pretty special.
