Having recently come across a stash of old compilation tapes, mainly from the 90s, I thought I’d start posting details about them here on my blog from time to time along with an accompanying Spotify playlist. It’s fun to look back on these mini time capsules and see personal favourites to this day mixed together with other tunes that I may listen to more infrequently but are old friends nonetheless.
To start this off, we’re going back nearly 25 years to September 1996 (for some reason many of these tapes were dated as I was obviously conscious of their future value to historians) with “Smiley Smile Tunes”. This compilation must be named in homage to the legendary short-lived Smiley Smile club night that took place a few times at Manchester’s Night And Day Café around then, which was my first ever experience of DJing.
Music wise, it’s pretty clear that I was at the peak of my Wu-Tang led hip hop obsession around then, mixed up with my more staple indie rock diet (Pavement and Guided By Voices featuring in particular really not surprising me) plus some big beat techno to conclude both sides of the tape. Despite its myriad pleasures, Spotify doesn’t span the entire musical universe so my accompanying playlist is missing a couple of wonky pop gems from Tiger and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, but these songs live on digitally via YouTube, so these can be found underneath the main Spotify playlist below…
No Longer Teenage Fan Club 