Country Line

I recently purchased a wonderful, chunky old Technics 630 tape deck from ebay for the very reasonable price of 20 quid plus another £10 for next day courier delivery. It had been bugging me for some time that I no longer had something to play all my old cassettes on, actually ever since I made a half arsed attempt to clear out the cupboard on the half landing where all the junk gets forgotten about. During this futile attempt to de-clutter I came across 3 wine crates full of tapes, most mine but some L's and even though we no longer had the facility to play them I just couldn't bring myself to take them to the cowp.

Since getting the tape deck rigged up I have been delving into these crates, there are loads of Essential Mixes from 1993 to about 1996, plenty of Weatherall mix tapes and a whole load of my old dance mixes which I am too scared to listen to as there is bound to be some horrendous attempts at beat mixing and more than several train crashes.

There are also loads of bootlegs everything from Crass at the ZigZag Club, through the Smiths at the Barrowlands in 84 to really badly recorded Velvet Underground ones. Most of these were purchased at Revolver record stall at the Barras at over inflated prices, as the quality of the tapes that you took home never seemed as good as the ones the shady guy with the ponytail let you hear when you were buying them.

In fact the first tape I put in the deck was a Billy Bragg bootleg from a concert at the Barras in Nov 86 which I was at. Unfortunately the deck took a serious dislike to the TDK D 120 and chewed it up, which did not bode well, however up til now that is the only thing that the machine has chewed up, thankfully.

Getting back to the point of the post, while trailing through one of the crates I found a cover simply titled 77 to 82, a rather wide time frame for a single c90 granted but every track was brilliant. This was a tape that my best mate's elder brother had put together and I had "borrowed" in order to record. This tape was my introduction to Jonathan Richman's That Summer Feeling and the track I'm going to post today. There are probably loads more tracks I first heard on this tape but these are the only that stick out. It would probably have helped if W had listed the tracks on the cover and it would be handy if the tape was actually in the cover and I could play it but it's not and I haven't had the time to search for it.

The track is called Country Mile and it was the b side of the third single More Than A Dream by The Farmer's Boys.

The Farmer's Boys were a band from Norwich who formed in 1982 and split in 1985. They released 9 singles and 2 albums in their time and are probably best known for their cover of the Cliff Richard song In The Country, no don't click away, they were actually pretty good.

The Farmer's Boys - The Country Line

I'm hoping that I come across the c90 that D did for me back in 1987 which consists of From Across the Kitchen Table over both sides of the tape as mentioned in the first post on here, as I know that I haven't thrown that out.