John and I had planned to go out for dinner on this particular evening, but then, a couple of weeks before the due date, John e-mailed me to ask if I still had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, as he and Pippa had uncovered a couple of reel-to-reel tapes when clearing his late parent’s house.
I said yes.
I didn’t say that my machines (by the end I had two by way of insurance/back-up) were in storage in the City.
Anyway, I trolleyed my Sony TC-377 back to Clanricarde and established that it more-or-less worked. So I suggested to John that we dine at mine instead and do some archaeology on his tapes.
I played a poor game of real tennis ahead of our reel evening, followed by a bizarre incident in Waitrose, in which, because I was given an unannounced/unlabelled bargain offer giving me an unexpected £6.50 off my basket of goods, I had failed to reach the magic £50 tally which meant that I could be fined some huge amount (£20? £60? Can’t remember) for parking in the absence of jobsworth at the till letting common sense apply.
It took me a good 15 minutes to get the “Balsamicgate” incident resolved, by which time I feared being late for John except that…
…John had, in the meantime, texted me to say that he couldn’t get near a tube and would be late.
Chill…
…I texted him, while probably still shaking with heated rage at the Waitrose incident and still feeling that I was running late.
In the end, I had time to prepare a salad and get most of the food ready ahead of John’s arrival with his tapes…
…and what amazing tapes they turned out to be.
There’s John’s parents encouraging a very little John to speak, on a tape labelled December 1963 which we think must refer to the date of that historic recording, together with John’s dad playing the piano and practising a speech to his Cuprinol colleagues around Christmas 1964.
John was a bit disparaging about his dad’s piano playing abilities, but I actually think that he plays very well for an amateur. I bet John’s dad was better at playing the piano than Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould or Daniel Barenboim would have been at managing Cuprinol’s Services Division or selling bottles of Cuprinol Timber Treatment. Here’s a whole load more of dad on the piano (c 30 minutes of the next clip, plus 15 minutes from a radio light entertainment programme):
The most interesting material for the general reader are some extracts from very early broadcasts of Pick Of The Pops. The one below, which has been dated as 14 Janaury 1962, was only the second ever Sunday broadcast of that show and seemingly a rarity – a recording thought lost.
Here is another, short Pick Of the Pops snippet, probably early March 1962, including the introduction to the programme. Just the first three minutes, after which is other pop music, perhaps from that programme but probably from a variety of programmes:
One more Pick Of The Pops recording, from late January or early February 1963, by which time John’s dad was editing out Alan “Fluff” Freeman’s voice:
For some reason, John’s dad also recorded a BBC television programme about freemasonry:
There is some more family-oriented material. Here is a three minute snippet of John and other kids, perhaps a party in the mid 1960s, followed by a poor six minute recording of John’s dad having a French lesson:
There is a lot of light entertainment material, much of which is not so well recorded:
But sandwiched between those last two light entertainment blocks is a truly surprising find, which I only myself uncovered a few days after John’s visit, while I was ripping the content of both tapes into digital form.
I have not yet had a chance to discuss this element with John, so I don’t feel entirely comfortable reveling this to the entire world at the same time as I reveal it to John and his family.
But the fact of the matter is, that John’s dad clearly continued to nurture an interest in modern music for longer than John knew about or even suspected. There is a 36 minute section which must date from the early 1970s which I can only describe as “rock”. Some would even describe some of it as “prog rock”. No-one could deny that some of it is even “glam rock”.
My guess is that John’s dad probably wasn’t a clandestine apron-wearing, breast-baring member of the Freemasons, despite the BBC recording about that subject. But we cannot possibly deny his dad’s clandestine rock phase. It’s unmistakably there on one of the channels of the big tape, buried between 50 minutes of light entertainment lounge music and a further 10 minutes of same. Now you know, John, now you know.
Joking apart, it was a lovely evening in many ways. John was clearly moved to hear this family audio material, probably for the first time ever and certainly for the first time consciously as an adult.
It reminded me so much of some of my own family trove of such material, only some of which has so far found its way to Ogblog: