Taped From Somebody's Brother

Back in the mists of time, before the interweb and all of this streaming malarkey, it was really rather difficult to find new music that wasn't played on Top of the Pops.

One of the joys of life then, was finding a seam of music that you could mine and most importantly of all, get 'taped' and then spend time sat-sitting and listening to treasure-like-musical-wonders on your Walkman.

Well, until the batteries ran out.

Needless to say, we all created networks of friends of friends and if home taping was killing music, it didn't feel like it. In fact most of the music I borrowed then, I am still paying to buy and listen to now, so perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing.

Of course there were downsides, sometimes you never knew who the songs were by and other times quality control wasn't the best. In fact, an ex girlfriend of mine taped me Sergeant Pepper's from her dad's well-played original vinyl. It was in mono, so only came out of the left headphone, but I loved it and played it to death.

In fact it was only years later when I had spent ages learning to play George Harrison's eight minute sitar solo in Within You Without You that I realised that it wasn't actually that long, and she just hadn't noticed that the record had stuck in one place, and the final flourish that I was assuming was some kind of grunge Stylophone explosion of creativity, was in fact her knocking the needle so that the song moved on.

In truth, the 'proper' version still doesn't sound right to me even now.

But getting a tape of a band you hadn't heard before was magic, and it has always struck me that music and poetry work, and are shared, in much the same ways, and so that was the prompt that drove the work in this anthology. We asked poets to introduce a favourite, and perhaps obscure, poet, artist, musician, song, poem or painting to the world, as a recommendation, in the form of a poem. We wanted them to write a poem that gives somebody a piece of gold that you think will stay with them forever.

This wee anthology found many such nuggets and includes work from: