I may have mentioned my evil employer’s plan to make my extra-curricular activities harder to keep up with, presumably because they hate music. So the extra 90 minutes travel per day has been eating into my mp3 collection as well.

I’m not sure why but I got the notion to hear Tindersticks’ first album the other day – a classic, in case you’d forgotten. And then realised that it was a cassette – older readers may remember these. I started buying music on vinyl but when the (tape) Walkman came along I was at college, so my journeys were enlivened by a combination of whatever new albums I could afford on tape (of course I didn’t tape borrowed records since, as we now know, this was “Killing Music”) – and of the previous night’s Peel show, bathed in the reassuring FM static which, combined with tape hiss (and the lo-fi nature of much played on the show), replicated, and then some, the reassuring ‘warmth’ that vinylphiles usually cite as a reason for the use of black plastic over all other musical media.

Add to that the fact that I got my first car sometime in the 90s and my tape collection grew. Bands came and went in the time it took for CDs to arrive – my entire Pixies, Super Furry Animals, Therapy? and Husker Du collections are on tape apart from the odd 7″ single – which I’d largely stopped buying as I had less time to listen to at home but much more traveling between Glasgow and Edinburgh or wherever.

CD didn’t really kill tape off for me, cassettes players are more robust than their hi-tech counterparts even if the actual storage medium is (marginally) easier to destroy. MP3s’ convenience easily superseded CDs, but that left a massive collection of music in the spare room, largely inaccessible unless I wanted to spend days playing back the albums in real time and converting them – or repurchasing what was rightfully mine (that is how music copyright works, right? I was only making a backup…)

So to #musicfortrains – that’s the hashtag to watch out for, dear reader – a tribute to Brian Eno in a sense, though his more ambient works would be drowned out by the constant train noise (I have noise-cancelling headphones but always feel self-conscious about wearing them on public transport). Anyway, first up, is Tindersticks’ epic debut… I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to ‘scrobble’ this so that you can join me in the pleasure it – especially given that my work has a restriction on installing Spotify (or indeed anything else that’s vaguely useful) – somehow I’ll turn that to my advantage too, just now sure how just yet…

So for now, here’s a Spotify playlist for Tindersticks First Album. Enjoy!