Taped crusader: my cluttered collection of cassettes

I’ve had a pile of cassette tapes gathering dust for maybe 15 years. I figured it was time to go through them. Sorting through some old belongings, I discovered an old walkman that still worked. Bingo! What would be on these dusty old tanglers? I was mostly hoping to find a phone interview I did with Nivek Ogre, or a face-to-face with Fear Factory, neither of which saw the light of day thanks to a mishap in a house move. They must have been in the other pile of tapes, which got damaged. Nope. On this one, I found …

TAPE 1

It’s in a Smashing Pumpkins sleeve, but is actually a bootleg of Ministry in 1994. I went through a brief phase of picking up dodgy tapes – cassettes and videos – from the Camden Market. The bloke on the stall claimed to be mates with Killing Joke, and said they let him onto the stage to stand at the side to get the best footage. I never bought one of his Killing Joke tapes, but I did walk away with Skinny Puppy’s 1986 Ain’t It Dead Yet and NIN in Dallas, 1990. I’m guessing this is from that market stall.

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Top 100 singles of all time: 91 – KLF – America (What Time Is Love)

There were two very distinctive things about the KLF: number one, everyone liked them. Everyone. Number two, there was nobody else quite like them. The first incarnation of What Time Is Love? was catchy and pleasant in a bland trance dancefloor-filler sort of way, but its reimagining was one of the most vital songs I’ve ever heard. It had this energy, this exuberance that was the most infectious shot of adrenaline to the heart since The Ace Of Spades (which it sampled heavily).