Total Big - Rehearsals 11 & 12 (1986) C90

Carl on vocals, Chris on drums, and me on guitar; all at Hollytree House, Otham, Kent, Nothing Like A Dame through to Is That Why? were bashed out on Saturday the 5th of April, 1986, and the rest were on Saturday the 12th of the same month. I found the picture on the internet and it seemed to fit the music. 

This is the two-hundredth Total Big rehearsal tape which I've digitised and posted here for free, so I only have another fifty or sixty to go. If you enjoyed the first two-hundred tapes you will almost certainly enjoy this one too; but if you didn't, then this probably won't be the one to change your mind. As is probably obvious by now, most of this is done for the sake of my own amusement. Last time I went back to my mother's house in the Land of Fred West and Benedict Cumberbatch and also some other people, but mainly those two guys, I filled a suitcase with every cassette from my mammoth collection to feature myself in some capacity, plus a few other faves such as the work of We Be Echo when I realised I had room. On returning to the Land of Johnny Cash and Andy Griffith I didst vow to digitise every single tape I had brought back from England, so unfortunately that means a lot of Total Big, because we recorded every single rehearsal. Sorry.

Actually, I'm not even remotely sorry. I'm listening to this one right now as I'm writing this and it's fucking great.

I only have another three Total Big cassettes left to digitise, although apparently Chris still has a few tapes of which I don't have copies; but never mind. I'll post that rare tape Lustmord did with the Rubettes next week.

Download all thirty-four amazing tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Nothing Like a Dame
2 - He Writes the Songs
3 - Rock Sandwich
4 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
5 - Are You My Mother?
6 - Call It What You Want
7 - Louie Louie
8 - Sister Ray
9 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
10 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
11 - Hail Fellow Well Met
12 - Cold Sore Herpes B
13 - Nervous Wreck
14 - Madonna
15 - Do It Again
16 - I Want It
17 - Is That Why?
18 - Louie Louie
19 - Sister Ray
20 - Hey Joe
21 - Are You My Mother?
22 - He Writes the Songs
23 - Rock Sandwich
24 - Call It What You Want
25 - Hail Fellow Well Met
26 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
27 - Cold Sore Herpes B
28 - Oh Yeah!
29 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
30 - Some Kind of Place For Us
31 - Prettiest Thing
32 - Rock Commando
33 - Tee Total Big
34 - Children of the Revolution


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The Dovers - Water Pistol Filled with Beer (1991) C90

This is what rock and roll used to look like, you autotuned assholes.

Here's another Dovers tape, and definitely one of the better ones. All of this stuff was recorded on various portastudios. The first eleven tracks were recorded at Carl's flat in Bermondsey over a long, hot weekend in the late eighties, as I've written on the inlay card. He Writes the Songs through to Do the Frug were apparently recorded at John Jasper's house in Chatham on his portastudio around the same time. The rest were recorded at Carl's flat from winter to spring 1991. The aforementioned inlay card was too boring to be scanned and is thus absent from the download. As I may have mentioned before, whilst these tracks transfer to my own iTunes in the right order, they'll probably download in alphabetical order for you, depending on what you use and how you listen to them, if you listen to them, so I'd advice rearranging them in the correct sequence shown below, not least because a couple of them segue into each other. I'm primarily digitising this shit for my own entertainment, so I'm not going to give them titles like A9 Work That Body! because it offends my pedantic sensibilities. If that's annoying, screw you because it's not like I'm charging anything, unlike Radiohead and Oasis, and what you get is about a million times better than Radiohead or Oasis, so great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine.

Some of these tracks also appear on the album that never was. The versions on The World of the Dovers are probably mixed a little better, but there's probably not much in it. Carl, as pictured above, handled most of the vocal stylings and programming, and I played guitar and can usually be heard giggling in the background. I'm not sure about the photo, as I think that's Carl from when he was in a group called Churchill's Shoe, possibly, which was before we met.

Download tracks.

Burn to a plurality of CDRs.

Slap in car stereo and drive down to Camber Sands and eat ice creams on a hot day.

Job fucking done.

You're welcome. 

Download the twenty-five tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The End
2 - Eggs, Beans & Mayonnaise
3 - Blue Moon of Kansas
4 - The Insect
5 - Sentimental Fool
6 - You Were Better When You Were Crap
7 - After a Particularly Uplifting Sermon...
8 - I Am Mr. Bennett
9 - Work That Body!
10 - When the Power Falls
11 - Fly in the Ointment
12 - He Writes the Songs
13 - Worm
14 - Sentimental Fool
15 - Beat Me Black & Blue
16 - Do the Frug
17 - Make My Flesh Crawl
18 - Do You Use Your Brain?
19 - Everybody's Got to Change
20 - Horrible Glam Thing
21 - Surfing On My Mind
22 - State of Pigs
23 - Vale of Tears
24 - John Piss-take
25 - Business Biscuits etc.


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