What the tape remembered

It came out of a box of kitchen things, which is how most of these turn up — never an attic, never labelled usefully.

The box cost four dollars. The reel had MON written on the flange in biro and nothing else on it anywhere.

The box was bought for four dollars, mostly for the box. The reel inside had a handwritten label with a date and two initials, and it sat on a shelf for eleven months before anybody had access to a machine that could play it.

What is on it is a complete alternate mix of a nine-track album that came out in 1995 — different in ways that are small individually and enormous cumulatively. The vocal is two decibels down almost throughout. The drums are drier. Three of the nine songs have a whole part that does not exist on the released version: a second guitar on track two, an organ on track five, and on track seven a spoken passage in the last ninety seconds that nobody involved could account for at all.

The transfer was done in an afternoon on a borrowed machine, at half speed and then corrected, because nobody wanted to run a thirty-year-old acetate-backed tape at speed more than once.

I recognised the room before I recognised the songs. Then about four bars in I thought, that is the desk we used, and then I had to sit down.

That is one of the two people who made it, hearing it for the first time in thirty-one years. He had no memory of the mix existing, which is not unusual — a mix from that period is one of eight or ten passes, most of which were never meant to survive the week.

Why it was never released turns out to be nothing more interesting than a lease.

The studio's lease ran out in November 1994. The band had booked three more days and did not get them, and the mix on this reel is the state everything was in when the room closed. The album was finished four months later somewhere else, with a different engineer, and the different engineer brought the vocal up and took the organ off, which was a completely reasonable decision and is why the released version sold what it sold.

The reel is now with the person who owns it, in a bag, in a cupboard, at the correct humidity. It has been transferred twice. Neither transfer has been released and neither is likely to be, because the rights sit with three parties and one of them is an estate.