Samuel’s Tape Highlights: 32 Musical People

Tonight I am happy to be able to bring you the highlights package from the first known audio recording of myself (well, there was about ten minutes of recording before that, but it was broken accidentally just after recording, and I later reenacted the song on it on this tape).

This one is called 32 Musical People as there were 32 people in the “Old Folet” family, which was an invention of mine after hearing the name Rosemary Follett (she was chief minister at the time, so her name was fairly common in local media), this family consisted of me, and the 31 toys that were in this family. This number later grew to be in excess of 40, I think it nearly reached 50 at one stage. I remember one of my aunties visiting once and I gave her a tour of “my friends” as they were known (and still are…), she got to meet every single one of them by name.

Anyway, back to the tape, the highlights package contains the following items:

• The Intro, whilst this is the second segment on the tape, it sounds like an intro, and introduces one of the main components of the tape, the radio, which was tuned at various stages to 1206AM 2CC & 1053AM 2CA, usually when I realised it was on 2CA I switched it back to 2CC. I always thought 2CC had the better music, not that there was much difference, but I do wish 2CA sounded like that today. This segment contains the tail end of a featured song from a previous musican of the week. Radio was often called “salp” (rhymes with salt) on my early tapes for some reason. (0:43)
• The segment is a song titled “Bring Bring Is Funny. (0:11)
• Then we have one of my favourite radio ads, a Magnet Mart ad which I later continued to attempt to sing. (0:54)
• Next up we have a segment involving me playing with a police car toy I had (0:45)
• Then we have me placing coins into a money box and pretending that the cents are dollars, I then made a song around it, and performed one of my regular tricks of “money boxes shaking”. You can also hear the phrase “Lets hear that” in the middle of this. This is because I was pretending that it all took place in front of a live audience, and I would stop recording, rewind the tape and listen to what just happened. (2:12)
• Then a small song, Hello Stretch Coconut Today. (0:05)
• The recording took place on cleaning day, so I recorded the vacuum cleaner’s visit to my room, a bit of it can be heard here. (0:38)
• I started a segment with a hello song which contained the name “Stretch Nepo”, which had been made up by me as I had a magnet on my blackboard which said “Stretch” and I had some alphabet magnets spelling “Open”, I reversed the word “Open”. (0:43)
• I also had a fascination with supermarket receipts, and for some reason recorded a segment where I checked the accuracy of them with a calculator, this is one such example. (0:32)
• Then I asked dad a maths question and checked that with the calculator. At that age 120-106 is a tough question. (0:28)
• This is followed by a song called “Meow” (0:30)
• Then I had the radio going while I played on my mini-piano. (1:07)
• Next up is a song called “Salp is radio music”. (0:23)
• Then we have a segment which makes use of one of those green bendy pipe things that are often sold at fairs/shows/etc. (0:26)
• And finally, The Important Song, which I think I got the name for from an ABC Kids program. (0:28)

The whole highlights package can be heard/downloaded by clicking here. ^[1]

Samuel