My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): Select-A-B-Side and The Hibbett Archive

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I do love a good clear out - it makes fresh new space on your shelves and in your SOUL, though if taken to far it may wreak HAVOC with both.

Towards the end of 2003 I decided to sort through the massive piles of CASSETTES that lived in a box under my bed. YOUNGER READERS! The Cassette was a form of musical storage that came between Vinyl and CDs and which was, frankly, about a hundred MILLION times as PUNK as both put together. Cassettes were BRILLIANT - almost EVERY cassette PLAYER came with a built in facility to RECORD so that, unlike CDs and especially vinyl, ANYBODY could make their own. Even more so, if you bought a cassette you didn't like you could tape over it with your OWN music! Take that, so-called Phil Collins!

Thus for many happy years the demo TAPE was the common currency of ALL bands starting out. If you could get your hands on a cassette recorder with two tape decks you could write a song in the morning, record it in the afternoon and have a big pile of copies to try and FLOG at a gig that night. Even better, if you owned (or, in my case, had a FRIEND who owned) a magical four-track cassette recorder (i.e. more technology than The Beatles recorded most of their albums on) you could spend MANY happy evenings ensconced in the ATTIC making CONCEPT ALBUMS GALORE. Every time my friend left the house, and sometimes when he wasn't, I'd NAB his four-track and head for the attic - between 1991 and 1998 I recorded NINETEEN whole albums on this fantastic bit of KIT!

Unfortunately my own enthusiasm for recording my songs was not matched by other people's for LISTENING to it so, five years later, I still had about thirty spare copies of various tapes by long defunct bands (sometimes real bands, sometimes just me and a distortion pedal_ and nothing to do with them... until I had a GRATE idea. Me and The Validators were planning to put another CD EP out in the new year, and had been discussing re-recording a song from one of these many MANY old tapes. Looking upon these boxes of SPARES I hit upon a PLAN.

First of all I emailed a few old pals who'd been FORCED to listen to the old tapes and asked them to nominate their favourite songs. Three top choices emerged which I put online, and I then asked members of my mailing list to vote for their favourites. To encourage involvement I offered a PRIZE for EVERYONE who took part - a rare COLLECTORS ITEM! A slice of HISTORY! A "much sought after", highly prized CASSETTE TAPE!

It worked like a dream, and soon I had a b-side chosen for me AND a whole lot of extra space under the bed. RESULT! Unfortunately I then got a bit carried away and decided that, really, I ought to make efforts to PRESERVE this repository of ROCK HISTORY, and began setting up The Hibbett Archive.

The initial idea of The Hibbett Archive was quite a good one, I thought. I'd convert ALL the old tapes to mp3, then burn them onto CDs which I could share with the other people involved, ensuring that there'd be several copies of everything which we'd all have an interest in looking after, for the HISTORICAL RECORD. The problem was that, in addition to the 19 "albums" there were about a hundred OTHER tapes. I'd had occasional bouts of taping EVERYTHING we ever did, so along with the four-track recordings were loads and loads of GIGS and even PRACTICES which, foolishly, I decided needed to be preserved for posterity.

Even THAT might have been OK if I'd just recorded each side of each tape as a single file, but I decided I'd divide each and every cassette into its individual tracks, with an mp3 for each to allow FUTURE HISTORIANS to listen to the exact section they were interested in. Again, this was FINE for the "albums" as there were clear gaps between songs, but when it got to GIGS I'd have to sit and work out where songs ended and, occasionally, what on earth we were trying to play!

Even THAT would have been OK, if it hadn't been for the PRACTICES. OH, the PRACTICES! I finally BUCKLED when I'd just finished recording "Unknown Song (Geese?) Take 5" and was moving on to labelling the next section "Bickering Part 12: Concerning the frequency of string breakage." It's bad enough BEING in a room arguing pathetically about who breaks the most strings, but I suddenly realised it was much much MUCH worse sitting in an entirely DIFFERENT room ten years later, trying to work out how to LABEL it.

With dazzling clarity I realised that Jimmy Carter, for instance, probably DIDN'T go through all of HIS old paperwork to organise his Presidential Archive, and that actually it was probably BETTER to leave it for future historians to sort out, without the cluttering bias of personal involvement. Also, it was driving me bloody mad.

And so The Hibbett Archive remains uncompleted, though the box of tapes remains intact. Whenever I have a clear out I like to look at it, to remind myself that some things should just be left as they are.

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