Mix tape

For those of you under 35, this post is going to be incomprehensible, for the rest of you it is going to be a bit tragic and you are going to roll your eyes. When I was a young person (clears throat) and all of this was fields, I used to like making mix tapes of my Favourite Hits. This was in the days before iTunes (ha! iTunes was not even a twinkle in anyone's eye!) and the way I used to do this (come on, don’t tell me you didn’t do the same) was, I used to put a blank Maxell C90 tape, purchased from Woolworths, in my tape recorder, and sit on a Sunday listening to the Top 40 and pressing the record button when songs came on I liked. This meant I had a lot of Frankenstein-type tapes, which not only demonstrated execrable musical taste, but had presenters talking over the beginnings and ends of all the songs. I am still confused today if I hear a song which I remember from my mix tape and it doesn’t have someone saying ‘and new in this week! It’s those cheeky chappies from Newcastle!’ or similar over the opening chords.

Now I am going to be honest with you and say that my musical taste has never got any better despite loved ones’ sterling efforts (although Dan has had some success! Thank you Dan!) and sometimes I dig out my mix tapes (are you cringeing yet?) and I listen to them! Yes I do! I am listening to this one at the moment!

Bryan Adams AND Arnee and the Terminators! A vintage year for musical taste development! I can't remember when I made this. I hope I wasn't 23

But what I wanted to tell you was not how sad I am (you know that already) but about the Power of Google. Can you see Reviens nestling there underneath Bryan Adams? When I was young, I used to like French, and I had limited opportunities to hear it. I used to listen to French radio sometimes, wiggling the radio aerial about in my bedroom (this is not a euphemism) and trying to hear voices through the static, and once I did my pressing-record-quickly thing and out of the noise and static I captured Reviens. Reviens is a very strange song which has haunted me for years. I googled it years ago and I got nowhere. It begins ‘la boule de neige/ que tu m’avais jetée/ à Chamonix/ hiver dernier/ Je l’ai gardée.’ Which is about keeping a snowball someone threw at the narrator, who is dead and buried. Do you see? Odd. And it gets a lot stranger. Anyway I googled it again recently and, by Jove, I have got it! It is not called Reviens, it is called Adrien, and it is by Jacques Prévert (I imagine all of France probably knows this poem off by heart and it is just me who didn’t), who is actually a poet I like! Reviens! Brought under captivity! I think if you all have more modern browsers than me you can do a google translate thing - then you can see how odd it is! I am very excited, and actually I feel just like Kennedy when he captured the gerund.

I do not know about my recording, though, I have only tracked down Reviens as a poem but obviously someone sang it as well so, more googling for me. Never mind. It’s nice to have a quest, isn’t it. Anyway, I have now finished my quilt so what I need is another hopeless long-term project ;-).