I Made You a Mixtape - Summer 1994

 And a very good morning to you!

This is a post about music. Specifically, music that I put onto compilation tapes in the 1990s and played to people, in the hope that they would say, "Hey, Rob! Cool tune. I wonder if you could spend many hours explaining your thoughts about these tunes, while I bring you wine and stroke your face?"

This particular tape was made in the Summer of 1994. Let's explore the songs that I chose, and together we can try to work out what on earth I was thinking. 

Should you wish to listen along, you can find the Spotify list here.

Just out of shot - housemate Andrew, in a dressing gown, 

hating me with every fibre of his being. It was midnight.

Past the Mission - Tori Amos

The Summer of 1994 was one of warm, beautiful evenings. And how delightful that Tori Amos chose that time to bless us with her second album, "Under the Pink". 

This particular song is carried along on by a gentle breeze, and hazy light. In particular, it brings to mind the evening before we were due to move out of our rented post-student house. We had spent all day cramming things into boxes and now we sat, drinking beer and playing chess in the front garden, listening to Tori Amos and enjoying the dying embers of the day. 

It was at this point a beautiful German girl passed by and said something along the lines of, "Hey, I live across the road. I love chess - we should hang out." I was both delighted and furious at the timing. 

Feel a Whole Lot Better - Tom Petty

A great, breezy song from a fantastic album. This reminds me of zooming along massive country roads in Canada, on a sunny afternoon a couple of years earlier. Which is pretty much the kind of experience this kind of song is meant for. 

Patience of Angels - Eddi Reader

I'm doing pretty well with this compilation so far, aren't I? There's a lightness of touch that suits the Summery feel of those days, and these are excellent songs. This is a particularly lovely entry. I've never really understood what it's about, but it carries that sense of fragility and vulnerability that I often connect with in songs. Because I am very sensitive. 

You should probably write that down. Sensitive. Very.

End of the Line - Traveling Wilburys

Man, this is a great compilation! Why weren't people falling over themselves to hang out with me? Was it all the chess playing?  The obsession with Red Dwarf? Please don't say the personality. 

This is a terrific song that picks you up and carries you along with it as it goes, sweeping you up in its confidence and sense of freedom. I've tried to cover this song in a couple of the bands I've been in, but it never quite worked. There's a magic in here which sounds effortless but is actually the sound of several amazing musicians working really well together. 

Hounds of Love - Kate Bush

I think we all need to pause here and congratulate me for finally realising, several mixtapes into my career, that women can make music too. As I have noted before, my tendency had always been to listen to blokes, making bloke music - whether that's straightforward MOR guitar stuff like U2 and REM, or super-serious synth stuff like Ultravox.

I was never a very confident person when it came to interactions with women, and it's interesting in retrospect to see that play out in my music tastes too. I had girlfriends, sure, but although I liked them and could occasionally fool them into thinking I was a decent human being, there was never a great deal of balance in those relationships. 

But here's Kate, Tori and Eddi to suggest that maybe I don't need to be quite so bleeding uptight all the time. I wonder if I'll listen?

Emperor's Song - Fish

A track here from Fish's third solo album, "Suits". It is not an album I love, but at this stage I am still buying his albums as a matter of duty. And we're still at the point where I have relatively few CDs, so I properly listened to this album many, many times. 

I think we'd moved into the new house by the time I got into this. It was another shared house, with most of the people from the last house, except this time the landlord was a friend instead of an angry psychopath. 

I have strong memories of sitting in the massive lounge playing a computer game about blowing tanks up, called - if memory serves - "The Perfect General". I listened to this album again and again while playing the game, wondering if there would be a point where I'd get properly into it. 

I did not. This song is kind of OK, but it seems quite leaden after the previous few tracks on this compilation

Trip Through Your Wires - U2

This is another song that sweats and burns like Summer days. Not just the Summer of '94, but originally the Summer of 1987. I am in my parents' house, lost in the long hot months between O levels and sixth form, playing the vinyl of The Joshua Tree again and again, laying on my back and gazing out of the window at impossibly blue skies. Starting to feel less like a little boy but nowhere near being a man - this music felt like the pull of impossible ideas and feelings. 

Ah, U2. I loved you once. 

I Can't Dance - Genesis

Well, if anyone was sitting and listening to this tape with me, and was considering how cool I was for my musical taste and thinking maybe they'd like to seduce me, this would be the point where their eyebrows would shoot up in horrified surprise. 

This is about as relentlessly uncool as you could get. However, I know exactly why this is here. It's another song that, for me, evokes the grime and heat of Summer days. It's something about the grunginess of the guitar part and the gloopy keyboard pads - it all feels like heat and the smell of sun burning tarmac. 

And there's all the lyrics about how hot it is. It's probably that too.

U2 - Fire

I really am hitting a theme here. And that theme is 'songs that make me feel like a lizard, basking in the toasty sunshine on baking hot flagstones'. 

Great production on this song. U2 used to be so good at working with space and sonic dynamics. There's a real sense of being in a time and place, in their early stuff.

However. The Mixtape Inspector is likely to get out her notebook at this point and make some pretty serious remarks about have two songs by the same band in such close proximity. Yes, she'll say, they might well be from different albums. But I think you'll find the rules are clear, and now I have to slap you in your gormless face. 

Take on Me - Aha

Whoah! Looks like the Mixtape Inspector is going to have to put away her stupid notebook, because here comes the greatest get-out-of-jail card ever. It's only the astonishing pop genius of Take on Me!

Long term readers may remember that, in 1994, I had a subscription to 'Britannia Music' - an organisation which sent you CDs through the post on a seemingly daily basis. Unless you remembered to post them a letter saying 'Please don't', which you never ever did.

Well it all worked out OK, because one time they sent me the best of Aha  - "Headlines and Deadlines" if I remember rightly. What on earth does that even mean? Maybe I've misremembered. I didn't think I loved Aha. I knew I liked them well enough, as they'd been a ubiquitous presence through my teen years - but I didn't know if they were the kind of band I wanted to actually listen to by choice.

Well thank God for Britannia music and their mafia like insistence of sending me music whether I liked it or not. This is one of the best pop songs ever, and it brings me immense pleasure every time I hear it. Perfectly constructed and brimming with impossibly cool hooks and flourishes. 

Mind you, have you heard the demo? It's called 'Lesson One' and it's total bobbins. Go listen to it on YouTube - it's hilariously bad. At one point Morten starts shrieking, as if he's realised how awful it all sounds. 

Just goes to show that, as Ernest Hemingway once said, "The first draft of everything is shit."

Afternoons & Coffeespoons - Crash test Dummies

The second single from the writers of the fun and popular "Mmm Mmm Mmm". And it's not as good, is it? 

Nice chorus, though. Which I will now find myself singing for the rest of the day. 

No Man's Land - Billy Joel

Hey everyone! It's Billy Joel again. You may remember him from the last mixtape, where I developed a weird and inexplicable obsession with his late 80s/early 90s output. 

Well here we are again. This is well produced mid-tempo pop which does nothing to disgrace itself, but it's not what you'd call 'Classic Joel'. 

On the last tape, this kind of thing fit in quite well. But on this much breezier, happier collection, it feels a little staid. 

Coconut - Harry Nilsson

This is one of those 'oh no, the tape is going to run out' tracks. When I only had a minute or so left I tended to fill it with something that I considered 'lesser' than the other songs. 

I'm clearly a little scared of this song, as it is quirky and unusual and doesn't behave like a proper, sensible song, like what Ultravox would make. This reluctance, on my part, to be properly playful, is one of the things I'm finding interesting about going back through these tapes. You'll be unsurprised to find that I tucked my T-shirts into my jeans at this point. 

The Sun Always Shines on TV - Aha

Another fantastic song by one of the best bands ever. This was one of their first singles, so I was already very familiar with it from the mid 80s. But it belongs just as much to these hot months, a decade later, as we settled into our new home and everything seemed positive and full of opportunity. 

It's an incredibly confident piece of work, isn't it, for an early single by a band no-one had heard of?  There's over a minute of slow build up before we're into proper 'pop' territory, and we're a third of the way through the song before the first verse kicks in.

But then. Oh, it's all so gorgeous. Really exciting and big and bold and with one of the best, most singable choruses ever.

Little Green Bag - George Baker Selection

This, of course, is inspired by our household's continued obsession with Reservoir Dogs. The movie had been out for years, but was still doing the rounds at the cinemas. I have a feeling it was banned for release on VHS, probably in case continued exposure to the film caused us all to start murdering each other and, worse, swearing. 

I believe we went to see it at the local awful cinema in Wakefield centre. The screen was about as big as my TV is now, and the picture quality was abysmal. But we loved it, and listened to the soundtrack constantly. As did everyone else at this point in the 90s. An interesting example of feeling counter-cultural while doing exactly what everyone else was doing.

Cornflake Girl - Tori Amos

I've mentioned my obsession with this song in earlier blogs, so I won't dwell. Suffice to say, I was delighted that I was finally able to buy this album, after hearing the song so many times on the radio. 

A wonderful, breezy, ramshackle explosion of wonder that fills me with delight even as I'm listening to it now. And I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a deep, dark, sexual pull to the music which made me want all manner of things that I couldn't have. 

One of which was, of course, "Tori Amos as my girlfriend please."

Gloria - U2

Hmm. Not a song I have massive love for, though I can see why it's popular. I guess I must have bought the parent album - October - at around this time and thus I was mining it for songs which a) had a nice melody and b) were good to listen to with a beer on a hot afternoon. 

I've Been Losing You - Aha

More Aha! Clearly they were the big hit of the Summer for me. This is a song that I have liked more and more as time has gone by. Less obviously poppy than it's friends earlier on the tape, and I suspect it had less impact on the charts. 

But the melodies in the verse and chorus are sublime, and this is among their best work, in my opinion. I particularly like "There in the mirror stands half a man, I thought no-one could break".

Make Me Smile (Come up and See Me) - Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel

This feels very much of a piece with the Tom Petty / Traveling Wilburys stuff from earlier. There's a light, trippy, acoustic feel to a lot of this mixtape which reflects the ambience of this Summer. I suppose University was well and truly behind us and we were starting to loosen up a bit. I did like my degree, but there were ways in which it limited me as much as liberated me. When you think too much about things, your brain can kind of seize up, I think.

Anyway. Great song. I always flinch a little at the pauses near the end, because I have a hardwired memory of trying to make my covers band, 'The Groovy Thing', play this, and they Simply. Could. Not. Count. Time.

Love is All Around - Wet Wet Wet

Now this is starting to look like I'm deliberately trying to make a compilation to reflect popular tastes in the 90s. Well, it would do if there wasn't that 'Fish' track earlier.

This did really seem to soundtrack the entire year, which makes sense as it was in the charts for something like a million weeks. It's a nice enough song which has been tarnished somewhat by its ubiquity. I remember us all being big fans of the film, which probably helps explain this song's inclusion here. Nowadays 'Four Weddings' feels like the epitome of upper middle class unadventurous film-making. Unfairly, I think, and at the time it was quite amazing to have a British film with this kind of energy, and its attitudes were fresh and unconventional. 

This also became, at the time, the unofficial soundtrack for a new romance between two of my friends. A relationship which went through many ups and downs but did pretty well in the end, to the extent that I ended up playing this song at their wedding reception. 

Depending on You - Tom Petty

The partner, in many ways, to "Feel A Whole Lot Better", from near the beginning of the playlist. What I'm doing here is creating a subconscious echo in the listener's mind, suggesting a circular structure to the whole mixtape - a kind of self reflexive pattern that folds back on itself as it draws to its end. 

Either that or I'm getting near the end of the tape and I've run out of ideas. It might be that.

Take it Back - Pink Floyd

Along with 'Under the Pink', this was the album we played on that amazing, warm July evening, sat outside our old house playing chess and meeting alluring German girls. 

I imagine it was a big deal, Pink Floyd releasing their comeback album 'The Division Bell' back in '94. I didn't have much opinion on them, having been too young to really know about their work, except by reputation. I did know that they occupied a similar place, musically, to Marillion, so I was pretty interested in hearing what they had to offer. 

I liked the album a lot, and played it endlessly over the following months. This particular song is quite unadventurous in retrospect - a fairly trad structure with a guitar riff heavily indebted to U2. But the texture is fantastic, and it served well as the background to cheap beer, foolish conversation and the dying warmth of the day.

Shadows and Tall Trees - U2

One thing I'm really enjoying about revisiting these tapes is remembering why I love certain bands. Here's another reason to love U2, despite their subsequent crimes in the name of mediocrity. 

Before they became obsessed with stadiums, and the need for songs to blast everyone into a state of euphoria about half way through, they could write drifting, wandering pieces like this. This clatters and echoes like empty streets. It builds and swells, sure, and you can hear how they would develop their love for big rousing choruses... but the song also drops, sometimes, to nearly nothing, and leaves spaces for little shafts of sun to drift through. 

I Call Your Name - Aha

Absolutely not my favourite Aha song by a long way, but I liked the way it began and - you guessed it - the tape ran out after about 50 seconds, so that was pretty much all you got. 

Overall I've very much enjoyed revisiting this mixtape. I'd still listen to 90% of this now. It's the sound of long evenings, store brand lager and days that were significantly more simple. I don't miss it, exactly, but I'm glad I recorded some fragments of what it all meant, here in this collection of tracks.

If you've enjoyed this, why not go back in time to Easter 1994, and see what I was listening to then.

Or, you could always go forward in time to the next tape, in September 1994. Spoiler alert - it's worse.