Today's Memory Tape is all about welcoming in the new millenium, dancing way past the point where you should have stopped and trying to find friends without using mobile phones. Imagine that? Here's listener Tim Meadowcroft to tell us all:
"I'm old enough to have boxes of tapes (and remember taping them to the outside of a girlfriend's windows late at night so her dad wouldn't catch me), but I found a CD I burnt (how quaint) in 2000 that you may enjoy for Memory Tapes.
We'd moved down, newly-wed, to London from Cambridge a couple of years earlier as part of a plan to move back to Australia, figuring 18 months in the capital without our best friends would be a good way to detach from England, and make Melbourne seem so much friendlier. We'd come over virtually penniless from Australia 10 years earlier, and having thrived in Cambridge, had that 30ish feeling of being top-of-your-game, knowing all your past in sharp focus and being in complete control of your present (what fools).
What we hadn't planned on happening was falling in love with the whole London experience - my wife getting a job at Abbey Road Studios should have been a warning signal, I mean how bad was Zone 2 child-free life going to be in those early dot-com (New Labour) technology-revolution-on-the-horizon days.
So as we found ourselves reluctantly enjoying the freedom of being no more than 30 minutes walk or a short bus ride from the heart of London, any time of the day or night, with Camden Lock being our Sunday morning stroll to shake off a hangover, and with Australia looking less and less attractive, we entered 2000 full of early-30s zest and that mix of fin-de-siecle fears and hopes for the new millennium that was so prevalent then, but is hard to explain today (unless you were there).
Hence even the "down" songs on the CD are not really down, but tacit declarations of cool control, playing dark moods with a cocky langour, but hey, we were all doing it then....So this was a very conscious "now music", nothing from earlier times or retro, nothing too obscure or strange enough to ruin the mood, just the mood-of-now. Something to play in the car in a trip north to say "we're London, this is the year 2000"... when they make a period drama ("Our friends down south") of the era, I like to think this'll be the soundtrack...
And so nearly 15 years later, well, it's still a blast to listen to. We're out in the suburbs, we do the school run, we're not exactly burnt out but neither are we maintaining the trajectory we thought looked so easy back then.
Where this CD struts, we quietly blend in. Where it looked to have the crowd in the palm of its hand, we're happy to just see everyone having a good time. Where it boasted about its achievements, we keep a couple of amusing stories in reserve if called for.
But it's a great set of memories, of 3 AM black cab rides home, of trying to meet up with friends in Soho before everyone had mobile phones, of getting a kiss from Paul McCartney (the wife!!) and the wrong side of Feargal Sharkey (me!!) and laughing them all off, of childless days and dancing until the morning....
I hope some of that vibe resonates with you and your listeners.. here goes...
Shaolin Satellite -Thievery Corp
Everything in its Right Place - Radiohead
Angel - Massive Attack
Get Off - Dandy Warhols
Blue Skies - LongPigs
Lost Art of Keeping a Secret - Queens of the Stone Age
Bring My Family Back - Faithless
Hell is Round the Corner - Tricky
The Whisperers - the The
Go to the Bank - James
Barrel of a Gun - Depeche Mode
My Favourite Game - The Cardigans
Breathe - Prodigy
Woke up this morning - Alabama 3
Big Calm - Morcheeba
