Do Easy - The Twelfth Metal Tape (1983) C60

Another one which wasn't much good I'm afraid; and with hindsight I continue to notice themes which weren't so obvious at the time. If The Sixth Metal Tape was my media album - as proposed in a previous blog entry - and The Ninth Metal Tape was a concept album about sexuality and fear of molestation, if you squint a bit, then this was the theatrical album. I was at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education retaking the 'O' levels I'd been too thick to obtain at school, plus some new subjects such as drama. My drama class split into two groups towards the end of the academic year, and each one wrote and produced its own play as part of our course work. The other group came up with a play called Everybody is Someone - or something of the sort titled so as to more or less give away both the entire story and the conclusion towards which it frogmarched its audience at gunpoint before anyone had even sat down; and my bunch came up with the similarly understated Victory For Who?, because if you really want to understand the horror of war, who better to ask than a self-involved teenager?

Anyway, we wrote this thing and put it on for an audience and I did the sound, which allowed me access to the college sound room and a lovely TEAC reel-to-reel on which I could make echo effects. With the exception of Song this tape comprises an audio recording of our performance, sound effects material I cobbled together for the same, and stuff derived from my pissing about with the TEAC. One of them is named after a painting by Adolf Hitler, which is really playful and subversive blah blah blah...

Victory For Who? was produced and performed by Helen Barnard, Addi Harris, Mark Langston, Stella Gill, Richard Jones, and myself, and the download includes a transcription of the script as a PDF - which you should be able to read on a Kindle if you feel so inclined - mainly because the audio recording is impossible to follow. I'm no longer in touch with any of the other five and I have no idea what happened to any of them, but I figured that if any of them should Google either the play or any of the names involved, being able to read the thing should at least compensate for the sound quality, possibly. Keep in mind however that we were all about seventeen, so if you're reading this as some massive theatre producer on the look out for the next Waiting For Godot, don't get your hopes up.

Download the tape, inlay card and eBook by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - South African Power Corporation
2 - Song
3 - Don't Trust Anyone
4 - In the Ruins of Becelaere
5 - Warfare
6 - Your Wife...
7 - Victory For Who? (live audio recording 17/5/83)
8 - Tortion

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