Coincidence

When L and I first got together about seventeen years ago we compared things that we both liked. Films that we'd seen became an almost comical complementary pattern, with one or two exceptions. And while we did have some music in common, there was just as much we didn't share. We looked through each other's music, much of which was still on cassette, from an era when that was the most portable way to take your music with you to college or when travelling, without having to worry about a record turntable and those big vinyl discs. And while the present generation get much of their music from file sharing back then our music sharing was more personal as friends copied their music collections to share with each other. The joys of the twin deck ghetto blaster. And unlike the commercially produced version, which replicated the two sides of the vinyl version on the two sides of the tape, if you used C90 tapes there was plenty of room for both sides of an record on one side of a tape. Sometimes the two sides would have both disks from a double album, or else a couple of albums from the same artist, but other times you's end up with unlikely bedfellows. Which is where the coincidence comes in. L and I found that we had both got Tin Drum by Japan and Upstairs at Eric's by Yazoo on the same cassette, and in the same order. Perhaps not that big a coincidence, as Tin Drum was released in 1981 and Upstairs at Eric's in 1982. Still my tape was from college, probably 1982/83, while L's (as you can see from her more rigorous documentation regime) was recorded in April 1985. Perhaps they were just a pair of commonly owned albums that didn't quite fit with anything else. Still it seemed like a happy coincidence when we discovered it.