Blog: Let The Archiving Commence

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I started work on The Hibbett Archives over the weekend... it was a NOSTALGIFYING experience. I made up a list of tapes and materials I had in the drawer first, and came up with about 60 or so sets of stuff to get through - some of these are single songs, stuck on a single tape (like "Belle and SATAN", my contribution to a Belle & Sebastian tribute that never happened), whilst others are PACKED 90 minute recordings of whole evenings of stuff. It's DAUNTING.

Digging through all this stuff, I came across the "Perky Mixes" tape. This was something I did whilst REALLY bored one year (I think it was over the Christmas/New Year period). I decided to make up and record AT LEAST on tape a day, and appear to have done so for a good couple of weeks - there's about 20 songs on this tape, a couple of which turned into Voon songs, whilst the last few formed the start of "What's So Bad About Being A Grown-Up" (the first one of my tapes that was any good, really). Apart from that, though, what's left is a whole "album" that's mostly not too bad, which nobody has ever heard!

Crikey. What's that noise? Can it be ROCK HISTORIANS beating a path to my door?

I found it all quite exciting anyway, it was STRANGE to listen to all this stuff that I hadn't listened to for about five years, and that nobody else has EVER heard - that is, until the Drink In My Glass came in and said "Wow! What's all this? Is this YOU?!?" and seemed to think it was Quite Good. I was a bit shocked, as the REASON I'd never played them to anyone was because I'd made it all up as I went along, so the words didn't actually MEAN anything and the music was done for a LARF ... well, except for a song called "Not Everything", which popped up near the end and took my by surprise by being Rather Lovely.

After THAT I began PROPERLY - the first main block of stuff is going to be tapes of The Casbah, a comedy club I ran (over TEN YEARS AGO - ARGH!) and co-hosted. I'm doing this first so's I can give a copy to my former co-host Simon From Voon, in return for him doing the Voon Anthology for me which gave me the idea in the first place. If doing "Perky Mixes" was STRANGE, then doing this one was a TRIP BEYOND REALITY, as I heard a Youthful Hibbett telling jokes (and often dying on his arse), and found that nearly all the bands who played between the comedy bits, who at the time I'd thought were REALLY GOOD, were actually NOT that great after all. Except, that is, for my friend Chris, whose sounded surprisingly FRESH and MODERN, and of course VOON.

It's all extremely strange - we had a FOLK singer on at one stage, who did a song that was BLATANTLY ripping off Bob Dylan, although I had NO IDEA of this at the time, and who sang pretty rotten late '80's DIATRIBES about men being a "different species" to women. Hearing the audience LARF in AMAZEMENT at such an idea was pretty weird, and I kept thinking I'd heard references to everyday things (like BUFFY, or the interweb) which I couldn't have possibly heard because they didn't exist then.

It FREAKED me out - it's probably a good idea to start with these bits though, as they're the earliest things I have, thus cutting down the possibility of getting FURTHER FREAKED in the FUTURE!

posted 19/1/2004 by MJ Hibbett

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