One of my favourite programmes on BBC 6Music is Now Playing hosted by the lovely Tom Robinson.
Each week a playlist is curated on a given theme by the listeners on the fly (a little bit like Club 30-80 but to be fair, they were doing it first!). This week’s theme was “Escape” and listeners were asked to send in requests along with stories about where those individual songs take them to too. We went around Bratislava with Stereolab, trekking in Thailand, chilling out on a beach with Tricky and down to the sea with Morcheeba.
The show made me think of the old compilation tapes I used to make ages ago for my friend Gabby under the moniker of The Whelk Collection. One of these compilations in particular came to mind as being particularly evocative of a particular time and place, TWC 11 Tales from Two Cities from November 1996. I had actually attempted to capture the essence of the music I was listening to in two cities I had spent a significant amount of time in, namely Vienna and Sunderland.
I had spent six months in Vienna in 1993 with my partner who was on sabbatical/research leave at the time and the following year, after returning home I spent most of the next 12 months in Sunderland and travelling back and forth from Newcastle, studying for an MSc in Computing. In both places I had spent a long time on public transport listening to tapes on my trusty (bright red) Walkman and Tales from Two Cities is the result. It’s an interesting collection of songs across genres from Trip Hop to Classical to Alternative to pure pop and ALL the tracks take me back almost thirty years!
Club 30-80 