And He Descended Into Muso Hell

Naturally somebody mentioning Microdisney means that I immediately have to wrap my lugs around some of their music.

I've been listening to 'The Clock Comes Down The Stairs' in recent weeks but as it was 'The Crooked Mile' that first got me into the band - was it seeing the 'Town To Town' video on The Tube that caught my eye? - I thought I'd check it out again. It really does stand the test of time, and I remember how I went through the album on cassette (twice). That's an indication of how much I listened to it at the time.

That was part of the problem with cassettes: their tendency to chew up on you at the most inopportune moments. I seem to remember the same happening with Orange Juice's 'In A Nutshell' cassette and a Cure best of.

Of course, the other problem with cassettes was the lack of information on the box. It' wasn't like a piece of vinyl where you would pore over the album sleeve notes whilst listening to the album or nowadays with a wiki or discog page for every conceivable album at your finger tips.. With a cassette, you'd be lucky to get a picture of the band and the tracklisting.

That's why I'm a bit embarrassed to finally discover 21 years after the fact that Lenny Kaye produced the 'Crooked Mile'. How was I to know that the bloke whose been Patti Smith's closest musical collaborator for nigh on 30 years and the guy who helped put together the Nuggets compilation was twiddling the knobs on the album? If I'd been asked to hazard a guess on who was the producer of the album, only working on the clue that it was a major American musician from the seventies, I would have guessed that the album was produced by Walter Becker during a lost weekend.

21 years too late but, with the new information to hand, Kara might look kindly on Microdisney from now on.