My Mess O Peel Shows, wot to do?

[Stuart McHugh]

Tom Roche said:

>Years ago MartinW would tape some for me, at some expense to me
>because of Air Mail. All those have been saved.
>
>Then a very good friend at CNN Atlanta got transferred to the CNN
>London bureau about 1990 or so. As we both had other mutual friends
>at CNN here, she would send to me (by way of the CNN friends) the odd
>NME or MM via CNN's huge daily inter-office courier sack -- freeing
>both of us from overseas postage.
>
>I got an idea. I would go to the discount warehouse and buy 30-50
>blank 90min cassettes at a time, give them to pals to put in the bag
>to London, she would then record Peel show after Peel show, and
>courier them back. This went on, semi-monthly, for 10+ years. So I
>have hundreds and hundreds of shows.

I had no idea Tom had been doing this. I'd been doing largely the 
same thing, though only for 4 or 5 years (in the early 90s). Our 
company was headquartered in Seattle and some of the guys there ran 
record labels (Steve Mack of That Petrol Emotion once said that Bill 
Gates was indirectly supporting much of the grunge underground, 
though we didn't work for Microsoft!).

My American colleagues also had a keen interest in Peel shows, as you 
might expect, so in return for  their sending me promos of their new 
releases and the like I started putting Peel tapes in the 
inter-office  mail, along with copies of NME and local zines. (Peel 
was, I think, on in the middle of the night at this point, so I was 
taping the shows anyway, to listen to on the way to work).

I eventually persuaded the guys to forward the tapes onto others 
throughout the USA, as word had spread a little and some other people 
(on a mailing list) were keen to hear stuff. One of the tapes even 
led to AC Acoustics getting a US record release via the Butthole 
Surfers label.

Sadly, with maybe 15 links on the 'chain' these always seemed to get 
broken somewhere and emails would arrive enquiring as to the 
whereabouts of that month's package. I always imagine a PO box being 
opened in years to come and hundreds of tapes spilling out.

Stuart
-- 

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