As I listened to this, specifically the "specially recorded new version" of The Wedding Present's Give My Love to Kevin, a moment flashed back to me: playing this song in a hire car in Caister when I was there working with the Princes Trust. I suspect most of my memories are assembled not in the remote past, but in the moments just before I "recall" them. I believe psychological research backs this up, or something like it, and exposes our memories as projections back from the present, and thus often fictional. Still, I worked out when it was that I was in Caister, and it must have been April 1988. When did the issue of Underground magazine — I think it was the first issue — with this covermount cassette come out? April 1988. Coincidence.
I love the design of the case for the cassette, so snug yet effective — why didn't that ever catch on more widely?
Underground magazine, yes, I'd forgotten it too. My cassette was on a shelf next to two other covermount cassettes from defunct music magazines. They weren't in my database, but I've added them now, because, well, I'd forgotten how cassettes sound. Especially old cassettes. This one, happily, hasn't suffered in the sunshine like Bush Fire. I fiddled around with all the combinations of Dolby B or Dolby C and different kinds of MPS filter, trying to get the clearest sound. It was still a little on the soft, muffled side. As I turned up the volume, it increased to a point, and then just got bigger and softer, but not louder.
I'd forgotten about the Go-Betweens song, Karen, included here, and I'd forgotten completely about The Raw Herbs, Miaouw! and The Vandals. But the song that jumped off the cassette and lodged itself in my brain, years before I'd even heard of Big Star, was Alex Chilton's despairing AIDS song, No Sex. With its chorus, "Can't get it on or even get high/Come on baby, fuck me and die," it could be a protest song, if it were possible to protest against a virus or immunological disorder.
Despite, or perhaps because of the short life of Underground magazine, this cassette seems to live on in collective memory. If you google it's title, you can even find a link to download digital versions of all the songs (virtuously, I haven't tried the link, so can't say whether it still works). If you click the Buy link below, you can even get the original magazine as well as the cassette — my copy of the magazine is long gone.
| Buy via Discogs.com | Discogs entry for this album |
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