In the markets and junk shops of London UK in the late eighties/early nineties, you could sometimes find strange cassette tapes in garish red sleeves featuring The Velvet Underground (or any other artist under the sun) (and also a few sleeves were other colours).
The age of the reel-to-reel tape was over, CDs were just gaining popularity and the internet wasn’t even a dream, so we made do with cassettes.
This site is about tapes of The Velvet Underground, or tapes that made that promise; there were concerts, soundtracks, unreleased songs, interviews, anything and everything that could be pinned on the Velvets. And the focus of this site is the tapes themselves, although sometimes the music gets a mention.
Some of the tapes were true dudes, others were real duds and some were actually blank. There was no way of knowing until you shut the tapedeck door, pressed play and settled back with whatever made life bearable.
With grateful thanks to Olivier Landemaine for The Velvet Underground Web Page and many thanks also to the folk in its Credits section. I also quite like The Velvet Forum and would like to thank all its guardians and contributors.
For general information and musings about tapes of this nature, see The Afterword forum and One That Got Away (and be sure to follow the Camden Crawl link).
It's not really a blog, just a snapshot from history. I haven't updated it for years and have no intention of doing so now. Its mistakes and typos will remain as they stand until web rot sets in and it slowly disappears down the digital drain.
The last update was the addition of the Lester Bangs article - viewtopic.php?p=179153#p=179153. I never got round to contacting Tyler Wilcox after he tweeted the link to his many followers, so this note is now a belated "thank you Tyler".
Can't find a button to post an edit. So here's a new comment.
Recalled some stuff after further reading.
The wordpress page links to two websites with some stuff on bootleg cassettes.
One of them, The Afterword, I read the first comment by Baron Harkonnen mentioning the cassette's price of £5 and that "record dealers were the robber barons of the `80`s".
A lot of the bootleg cassette sellers were of the baron ilk as well. But not all of them. Not Ian/Eddie. A few others I have memories of as well. I knew many of the good guys well as I had personal contacts in other countries and would do swaps with them. Then use those swaps to do swaps with sellers in London. That's how I knew Ian/Eddie. Some of these guys just loved music. Most of the cassette sellers sold them at C60 £3, C90 £4.
A lot/most of the bootleg vinyl sellers were barons. But I knew a couple who, again, just loved music.
Which brings me to the other link One That Got Away. It talks about Big Al's cassettes. I got to know him in early 1983. Never liked him. He might of liked some music but I'd never come across a cassette dealer up until then who took it so seriously as a business. All cassettes £5. First time I'd seen what we called at the time fluorescent coloured sleeves. With a rating as well!
Al would turn up at markets/record fairs with a woman. I know her name but feel it best to not say it. I never understood what exactly their relationship was. What did put a big smile on my face though is I knew a bootleg vinyl seller well, again no names, who was having an affair with her.
Big Al (Alex) gets a mention in Clinton Heylin's book Bootleg The Rise And Fall Of The Secret Recording Industry.
