The past is a foreign country

The past is a foreign country right enough. Especially your own.

I was listening to the very wonderful Shade Tree earlier today. The mention of Göteborg did it. It made me realise that it had been so long since I had listened to many of the great groups and artists that I put on those gorgeous hand-made 3” CDRs under the guise of the ‘i wish i was unpopular’ label. And Shade Tree were the first.

I could not quite remember when I first heard Shade Tree but was sure I must have written about it. Well, it took me a time machine to find it, but I finally did. Here’s what I wrote:

Friday, October 10, 2003

Fuck! This is GREAT! A CD that comes packed in a sleeve of blue watercolour splodges (kind of like that Windy and Carl 10”, cant remember the songs, it was blue vinyl), all the way from Sweden, along with a note saying ‘Dear Mr Fitchett, I’m sure the competition for your stereo time must be fierce. But we try anyway….’ And ‘maybe it would be better if we screamed more. If we sounded angry, cocky, hostile, upset or just driven by the turbo-angst known to make old male Swedish critics exclaim: This band is for real!’

Well, this band is for real too. They’re called Shade Tree and these four songs are glorious fragile country folk, all sweetly strummed guitars and two voices mingling like Emmylou and Gram, or maybe more accurately Gene and Carla. Yeah, that good.

I hope Shade Tree never start screaming. They sound too perfect the way they do right now. Pure, this must be, it has to be… 

Damn, now I REALLY want to start a record label.

posted by duke harringay at 7:39 PM

And the time machine? Well, I knew I started this blog on TypePad back in November of 2003 but before that I had an original Blogger site hosted on my own Tangents.co.uk server. My own archives of that were lost long ago, but thankfully (?) a digital copy is stored here. It is so strange to glance back into one’s digital past, and several things stand out: 1. there are no videos! 2. posts were long. Like, um, ‘articles’. Do people still write ‘articles’? On blogs? Which brings me to point 3. if I could go back and give myself some advice it would be to edit, dammit. Edit!

So, whilst I fight the temptation to revisit that past in any great depth I cannot resist the urge to re-post that music. It deserves to be heard.

Comments

[rob]

Well, it doesn't sound dated at all - and deserves to be heard.It's ok to go back! Thanks for this Alistair.

[Carl]

Dear Alistair,
Thanks for letting me see those words "in print" once again. They meant so much to me at the time, and well, yes I'm touched once again. Glad you're still listening!

Thanks,

Carl, Shade Tree