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[by Andy Partridge]

EXCERPT ONE
Hit Record and Play, or A Brief History of Home Sound Capture
I never wondered too much as a kid how records were made. I rightly assumed that the orchestra or group went into a room and performed their tune and probably a man in a doctor's white coat put up a microphone near them. This went via a wire into another room where somehow the sound was put onto a disc... the very disc you would buy. My sense of junior reason easily grappled with fade outs. The group would play quieter and quieter until boldly striking up the next song on the album. Lots of echo or reverberation meant the singer was yelling into a well or over the edge of a cliff-like place. As for sped up voices, the backbone of most '50s novelty records, well they were simply done by the cartoon characters themselves or the diminutive puppet/elf/Martian.

By the age of twelve, I'd twigged some connection with the world of pop and a device called a tape recorder. So I dutifully pestered my parents for one. Christmas 1965 came with a small transistor radio sized device, topped with two mini open tape spools. A clip on lapel microphone only added to it's air of secret agent and spy gear. I was away.

Everything got recorded. Goofy voices, eavesdropping, toilets flushing, TV programmes, homemade battle noises, traffic and, of course, pop records. I taped The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" from the tweedy cloth speaker of our radio obviously unaware of the steadily ebbing life of the batteries. But I was delighted by clicking in a new set and listening under the bedclothes as Brian, Carl, Mike, Dennis and Al were transformed into The Chipmunks before my very ears, belting out their tune with renewed punky vigour at nearly twice the speed.

EXCERPT TWO
The Poor Machine
By 1967 the poor machine gave up the ghost of Our Man Flint and ceased to function anymore. Nevermind, I was becoming interested in a new noise-making device, the guitar. Then it all becomes a bit of an Op Art blur. Guitars, Kinks, Beatles, Stones, Small Faces, Sgt Pepper's, Satanic Majesties, girls, youth clubs, wrist ache and The Monkees. Aha! The Monkees. Important for me, as they further compounded the ‘Hard Days Help' ethos, where groups live together in a kooky house, have adventures and get girls without trying. This sucker was reeled in. Two friends of mine, Steve Warren and Brian Foster, seemed plugged into the mainline of their favourite bands by getting Beatles Monthly and The Rolling Stones Book respectively. These were pocket-sized magazines full of photos and fan news. I should therefore take Monkees Monthly. Now, this august periodical held a drawing competition with the princely sum of £10 as a prize. I could draw, I loved to caricature and if I could win that money perhaps I could get a better tape recorder to capture my early musical fumblings.

Bloody flip! There it was in issue 23, December 1968. My scruffy, scratchy cartoon of Mickey Dolenz (the easiest one to draw) had won, along with four others, £10. I think we got hold of that second hand Grundig for about £21. My dad generously helped me with the extra cash. It was so heavy and chunky with smooth ivory coloured push buttons and a funny optical eye device which I never knew what it's purpose was. Something about the amount of tape left on the reel?

Do you know, I think just having a recorder again really went hand in synapse with me opening up as a person. My inquisitiveness grew with each sound I taped or each album I heard or each chord or lick I learned. By 1970 my tastes were getting pretty out there. I'd been exposed to Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Terry Riley and a host of others. Why, I could make sounds like that! Home recording took a more serious turn. That was not just a gas fire or paraffin stove, it was a percussive device of awesome scale when struck with a knitting needle and slowed down. A reverberative gong from the palaces of Saturn, the gold door of the sun slamming shut. A kid's glockenspiel could twist into the fuzz dimension when recorded ultra loud and blended with it's own feedback. Those brass flower vases, when struck together, emit a note of E (but only when my mum went out to bingo). I stumbled on the fact that I could D.I. (direct inject) my guitar into the Grundig and, using it's tiny elliptical speaker, could broadcast glorious piping fuzz tones out to friends in the street below from my bedroom window. I think I was beginning to grasp how records were made. I kept hearing about musique concrete and how it's done by chopping up tape. Trouble is I can't afford to hack up my only spools, that'll have to wait.

EXCERPT TWO
Then Along Came a Cheaper Revolution, the Cassette
Got to get one. Small, light, take them to band practices. Every band I was in had to be captured on cassette -- Stray Blues, Stiff Beach, Tongue, Clark Kent, Star Park, The Helium Kidz. Yep, The Helium Kidz had to have their turgid renditions of my hopeless songs (e.g "My Baby Was A Reptile From A Horror Movie On TV") captured for posterity. We taped rehearsals at Hook Village Hall or in the garage of of our violently ginger haired, Gollum-like roadie. Of course we knew that groups made discs if they were serious, so I hatched a plan.

I wrote to British Rail headquarters to ask which was the nearest station to Swindon that had one of those "Record Your Own Disc" booths. These were a favourite with drunken balladeers who would return home stinking and resplendent to their loved ones armed with a seven inch record of something like "Only Your Paper Roses," their boozy bawling accompanied only by the distant roar of steam trains or the cries and clanks of station porters. The plan was for me to go up on the train with my portable cassette machine, sit in the booth, hold the speaker up to the mic and press play. We would pool enough money so that I could press play about a dozen times and hey presto... a dozen Helium Kidz discs. It was probably a good thing that British Rail wrote back to say that the last of these booths had been taken out of service a few years earlier. It's no good, we'll have to save up and go into a proper recording studio.

God! What an eye-opener. Our early trips to demo studios had the same effect on me as when I saw my first porn at age 11. The sickening reality that, yes, they do really do it like that! The giddying exposure to ‘overdubbing', ‘double tracking', ‘echo', ‘reverb' and expensive microphones etc. The crushing reality that you'll never be able to afford this kind of equipment yourself. Yes son, there's more to it than just pressing play on your cassette and the stork doesn't bring the babies. Okay, if I can't make records at home, I'll use the recorder just for writing songs and capture them. I can strum a guitar and bang my foot on the floor, that could almost sound drum-like. At least it'll give the other chaps an idea of the key and tempo. Then at some point past the failed and spectacularly hopeless career of The Helium Kidz and just into the bright new five-year plan of the budding XTC, I came into the possession of a drum machine. How it dropped into my lap I can't
recall, but what a boon! I think it was made by Hammond, the organ people, and was originally intended to sit atop one of their keyboard behemoths to tap out cheesy bossa novas or cheddaresque cha cha cha's. All cream smooth push buttons and ersatz oak casing... I loved it. This was how yours truly struggled on for a while, demoing live into a Boots audio cassette recorder, guitar and Hammond bonk box plugged into the two inputs of a small practice amp. Amassing about 300 truly rotten songs in this fashion (e.g. "I'm From Outer Space Baby, Smash My Face" or "Suzanne's In Love With A Monster Man," etc). Life went on.

October 2, 2006