I was sorting out some long-ignored boxes at work recently and at the bottom of a particulary dusty one I came across some battered C90 tapes. One of these tapes, as soon as I saw the scribbed handwritten label on Side A, caused me to travel back in time to 1993 and remember a Danish girl I liked quite a lot. Let's call her Christina, for that was indeed her name. It was a bit complex though. A friend also liked her, you see, but he was with someone else. Anyway, things kinda happened and she made me a few compilation tapes over a relatively short period of time and, yes, you guessed it, here one was - staring me in the face - daring me to press play. And so I did. Christina had awesome music taste. She is up there with my ex-flatmate Erik in terms of introducing me to great music I'd never even heard of before. Sand Rubies were on this newly re-discovered tape, the wistful track below. It made me smile hearing it again, making a rainy day a bit brighter. I really love the album as well, even though it's a bit, well, 'rock' for my delicate twee tastes. But it's not so much the music, you see, it's the memories that go with it. And I'm just fine with that, really, for they keep the 'wolf of insignificance' from my door, as Saul Bellow put it so well.
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Sand Rubies - 'Bar Room Light' (6.46)
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Track taken from the album 'Sand Rubies' (Universal, 1993). All about them (it is quite a sad tale). What Rich is up to now. With sincere apologies to Frank Deford.
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She had to be Scandinavian didn't she.
ReplyDeleteGlad you called it a compilation tape and not a mix tape. I know I am a bore about this but mixtapes were something completely different well in this part of the world anyway they were always called compilation tapes.
I was usually the one handing them over, used to spend a fortune on TDK AD90's and I suspect that with Ingrid my long term, on and off girlfriend through the late 80s and early 90s they were tossed into a drawer without being listened to. The ones I received were and still are, although cdrs these days from my mate Stiff.
Most certainly compilation tapes, I agree Drew. That's not fucking semantics. And, yes, what made Christina different, special, was the fact she was almost as obsessive about music as myself. Every note mattered to her, every melody. And she introduced me to Miss Smila's Feeling For Snow.
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