I still remember the thrill of our first ‘music centre’ in the mid-70s. Since I was little, in the mid 60’s, I’d played records on a red and grey Dansette. I loved that machine, stacking 8 singles to drop and automatically play. It was the only thing I knew until I was 14. I played my first albums on it, even Pink Floyd’s Meddle. Then one day, the music centre arrived. How it was chosen and where it was bought from, I don’t remember. It was just there. A Panasonic. Tape deck with a built in radio, a turntable and a smoked plastic lid. It sounded great with big speakers, speakers ruined when mother pulled all the wires out in the delusion that ‘the Russians are listening to me.’ Luckily I listened mostly on headphones. I just laughed… because what else can you do when your mam is a paranoid schizophrenic? And I still ate omelettes despite her telling me “they” poisoned them! Assassination by a foreign power through egg-based meals seemed unlikely.
I lived on that machine every day. I was just starting to collect records properly and it was the centre of my life, a portal into other worlds. Not least because it meant I could tape other lad’s records, which I did at a rate of knots, taping anything and everything, including ‘In Concert’ radio broadcasts of acts as diverse as Rory Gallagher, Bruford, John Martyn and Lone Star. All of which, I think, have since received an official release. I used the twin decks to make mix tapes to show off my taste to my unimpressed contemporaries. I compiled live albums, putting together tracks from Rory’s Live In Europe and Irish tour 74 with Johnny Winter And Live, Wishbone Ash’s Live Dates, the Allman’s Fillmore East, West, Bruce and Laing Live, Live Cream volume 2 and Traffic On The Road. I imagined myself a kind of record producer putting these ‘new’ albums together. It was an education and I absorbed every detail of those records and knew them inside out.
The only downside was that I could no longer pile up 8 singles like on the Dansette, so instead, I taped all my favourite singles to better play them all. You could get about 25 onto a tape. I just loved the whole process, timing the track if it didn’t have timing. For some reason, I got joy out of knowing exactly how long a song was. It was part of the details of the whole culture. Then there was the chart run down to record, which I did every week until I realised they were mostly stuff I’d never play and stopped doing it.
At one point, I noticed that some live albums were recorded live at the same venue, so I started trying to group these recordings onto tapes. I remember I had tracks from Humble Pie’s Eat It’s live side recorded at Green’s Playhouse, Glasgow, that became The Apollo, Status Quo Live and AC DC's, If You Want Blood, Roxy Music’s Viva. It felt like I was archiving the venue’s history. I did the same for Newcastle City Hall, putting together tracks from ELP’s Pictures At An Exhibition, Live Dates, Lindisfarne Live, Roxy Music’s Viva again and the Grateful Dead. Other venues to get their own live album were Hammersmith Odeon, Fairfield Halls, Croyden and Leicester De Montfort Hall. It felt like being more deeply involved in the culture than just listening. I went through a phase of thinking all I wanted out of life was to work in a second hand record shop, but I was convinced to go to college instead, where I met Dawn, so that was probably a good move, especially as vinyl became unpopular in a way we couldn’t ever have imagined.
TDK C90’s became my favourite tape. C60’s were too short, C120’s seemed to break or spool out easily. The thrill of unwrapping a new pack of tapes from their crisp cellophane and carefully transposing the album info onto the card was one of my young life’s big moments. I don’t expect people to empathize with this really, but I see now I was a dreamer looking for psychological ways to leave my turbulent life, with my mother in and out of hospital and institutions. If I could imagine myself as a kind of rock librarian, I was released from my daily grind. I found an escape in deep rock knowledge. It was my happy place and along with Stones Bitter, got me through seemingly endless difficult times. People tut and say a 16-year-old shouldn’t be out boozing five nights a week. And I know four pints a night to numb reality is suboptimal, but they don’t appreciate how the drink and the pubs saved me from much worse fates than I’d have otherwise suffered. In a very real sense, with the help of that music centre, I was saved by rock n roll or at least picked up and placed onto a different path.
My sheer obsession made a few ripples, probably because it was such an extreme lifestyle that I talked casually about like everyone did it. I didn’t realise. It seemed normal to me to know the length of an album, the label it was on, who produced it, who engineered it, who played on it, where it was recorded and its highest chart position. In the 6th form my knowledge and passion were noted by the teacher organising the school play; a sort of hippy, druggy performance. I was to put together an appropriate soundtrack, but the play was abandoned when the leading man got into Rada. I still occasionally see him on TV - Guy Manning was his name. He was a handsome dude who, though only a year older than me, felt impossibly mature and aged.
The result of having that Music Centre, probably the best thing my parents ever bought, was that by 18, I had hundreds of tapes. I started with a case, but soon outgrew the plastic monstrosity and when I moved to college the tapes were shifted in a black bin bag and formed a wall in my Halls of Residence. People would look at all the records and the vast number of tapes and say, in that eternal refrain that all record collectors have heard many times, ‘you can’t ever play all these’, failing to understand that having the option to play them, not the actual playing of them, is the thing which drives us on. You don’t disparage libraries because you can’t read all the books, do you? Exactly. I think I thought people were impressed, but I see now they just thought it was weird or unhealthy.
Do Music Centres still exist? Tape deck, turntable and radio, all in one package. I realise there’s more tech now but back in the 70s this new facility was magical and you felt like you were at the helm of the Starship Enterprise while operating it. It was brilliant and though I play records on a £2.00 deck bought from a carboot, I think I shall try and get a music centre again and try to revisit the thrill they brought me.
The Music Centre, the best thing my parents ever bought...
