At some point in the early 1970s my mother was taking an adult education class, I think an O Level course in English Literature. The house acquired various books of poetry, as well as a weighty single bound volume of the complete works of Shakespeare. It also, oddly, acquired a large and heavy grey box, a reel-to-reel tape recorder. My mother would record herself reading the poetry, presumably so she could study it more easily than simply referring to the printed work in the books.

Anyway, pre-teen me was utterly fascinated by this machine. Together with my younger sister, we would be allowed to play around with it. We would record ourselves, larking about, making silly and rude noises, and play them back to much hilarity. Better still, we discovered the machine could play back at different speeds. Imagine!

My journey had begun. I discovered a fascination for making sound, recording sound, playing with sound. My parents had a reasonable hifi, safely lodged in our posh front room. My mother’s brothers were both into music and audio, and one had constructed some decent speakers for the otherwise simple setup. The hifi consisted of a turntable and a tuner amplifier, not exactly audiophile territory, but a definite cut above your Dansette.

Considering my parents were never what you might call of the hippy persuasion, the fact they owned copies of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma may come as a surprise. Thinking back, though, those records feature numerous sequences of ambient real world sound recordings – Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, anyone? – and best of all they were in stereo. Someone invisibly chasing a buzzing insect around the front room lives with me to this day!

Back to that big old reel-to-reel. After a bout of nostalgia, something that seems to happen to me more regularly as I get older, I tried to recall the make of the machine. A fragment of memory whispered “Stella”, so I hit the search engines.

And there it was. A huge sense memory of the smell, sound, weight, and warmth of the machine hit me as soon as I saw a photo of it. The Stella ST 459, hewn from solid rock in Austria. This was the machine my sister and I larked about with. Sadly, I have no contemporary photos of the actual machine.

The old machine, although it was built like a tank, was not in the best of health. The rewind mechanism had failed, so you had to wind the reel back by hand. If you went too quickly, the other unbraked reel ran away, and cascades of tape would fall everywhere. The speaker circuit would occasionally cut out, cured by a precisely aimed thump on the front deck.

This was the machine upon which I learned to edit and splice tape. At first I made an edit block from cardboard, then spent some of my birthday gift tokens on a proper metal block. I tried to find cables with the right sorts of connectors so I could record directly from a record player or other tape machine, instead of keeping really quiet and using the microphone placed in front of another machine’s speaker!

The 459 was resolutely mono, though apparently it could play back pre-recorded stereo tapes with a certain adaptor. It did, though sport twin tracks. A sound could be recorded on one, the tape wound back, and a new sound recorded on the other. Both could be played back simultaneously. You couldn’t hear, or monitor to use the technical jargon, the first track while recording the second, so some deft use of the tape counter and wax pencil, not to mention careful settings of recording levels, was needed. With some ingenuity, the doubled sound could be played out and recorded to another machine, then back to one of the twin tracks, and another sound added. Laborious, and horribly poor audio quality. But it was all I had, and I made the best of it.

Happy, happy days.

As I hit my teens I discovered people like Kenny Everett and Jeremy Beadle on my transistor radio, and later the incomprehensibly mad sonic world of Michael Bentine. Enthralled by their imagination and skill, not to mention the music they played, I decided I really wanted to be a music radio disc jockey. Spoiler alert: despite my best efforts, it was not to be, though I still like to daydream occasionally. Browsing the record departments to spend my gift tokens, I discovered an LP produced by the BBC. It contained sound effects. I had to own it. I still do, along with another twenty-odd vinyl discs from the same label. Imaginary worlds could now be conjured in my bedroom simply by mixing sound effects – but, that would need better equipment to do the job properly.

That, then, is how my personal journey into sound begins. Next time, as the 1980s sashay into view, I’ll recount how I kept trying to improve the equipment I used, despite lacking money!