> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Tape Upstairs - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/the-tape-upstairs/ - Published: 2026-10-29T16:48:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-29T16:48:12.000Z - Description: How The Sound’s records were shaped by home tapes, lost budgets and borrowed instruments. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Essays, 2026, Post-Punk ### In 1979 the Sound played in the living room of the Borland house in Wimbledon. Upstairs, beside a four-track recorder, Adrian’s father kept the tape running. --- Those recordings were never meant for release. Bi Marshall, who played clarinet and saxophone with the group at the time, has said that the band went to the Borlands’ to listen back and judge where they had got to: Adrian’s father had the equipment, and they needed to hear what they actually sounded like. Mike Dudley, the drummer, was twenty-eight, eight years older than Adrian, and living in a squat; twenty-five years later, he would still count that four-track recording, made in somebody’s living room, among his favourite Sound records, because it sounded alive. In Dudley’s account this was the cassette the band carried around, and the one that got them signed to Korova. Marshall remembers it differently: what reached the label, he says, were the recordings made at Elephant Studios, the ones that became *Jeopardy*. The home tape did not come out until 1999, remixed by Wally Brill and released as *Propaganda*, REN CD 3 on Renascent, the label the band’s former agent Mick Griffiths had set up to reissue their back catalogue. The release date was 26 April 1999\. That morning Adrian Borland died in Wimbledon. He was forty-one. It is easy to tell Borland’s story backwards from that morning and read every lyric as a warning. The people who played with him have cautioned against reading him that way: many of the words were written with Adrian Janes, and inside the band it was sometimes no longer clear whose line was whose. There is a slower way in, and it goes through objects and rooms. Borland’s sound is recognisable within seconds, and yet almost every record he made reached the public in a form nobody had planned for: a demo released as an album because the money had run out, an expensive studio paid for by a label that did not want the record, a master thinned out by a digital machine, a final album finished by friends working from four-track tapes. Dudley remembered a rule about guitar solos which, in the history of the Sound, seems to cover a good deal more than solos: Borland would walk into the studio with an idea and walk out with half of it. ### I. A military-band clarinet, a hand-soldered keyboard Bi Marshall was studying psychology and living in Camberwell when a fellow student introduced her to a friend from Wimbledon who listened to Kraftwerk, the Stooges and early Roxy Music. At an Outsiders rehearsal Borland asked whether she played anything; the piano was too big to carry around; the clarinet would do. He asked her to bring it and add a few squeals over the last couple of numbers, when the group finished with the MC5’s “Looking at You”. The instrument wasn’t even hers. She had borrowed it from school, the last one the school had left: a metal Regent built for marching bands, which nobody else wanted and which she liked because it sounded closer to a soprano sax. When the school closed, years later, she had to give it back. Her first keyboard was built by a friend. It was little more than an electric piano, with no way of changing its tone, and so fragile that the solder joints gave way on every journey: the friend would climb into the van, an old ambulance, and resolder the contacts before the gig. The first night Marshall turned up with it, Borland told her she might as well play the whole set. She had learned the parts by heart in an afternoon and didn’t miss a note. In south London pubs the synth went wherever there was room, on a table, across the backs of two chairs, once on a stack of beer crates. Asked whether this was some kind of punk gesture, Dudley said they just didn’t have a stand. These details explain part of *Jeopardy* better than any list of influences. A keyboard whose sound cannot be shaped forces the player to work on the line, and Marshall’s descending figures on the first album are made that way: clean countermelodies, as if wind parts had been moved onto the keys, running alongside Graham Bailey’s bass. When Colvin “Max” Mayers, who had come from the Cardiacs, replaced her in 1981, he brought a broader sound, but the shape of the parts had already been set. *Jeopardy* was recorded at Elephant Studios in Wapping, east of the City, with Nick Robbins, and submitted to Korova as a demo. The band signed on 21 July 1980\. Each member was given a copy of Echo & the Bunnymen’s *Crocodiles*, the only other group on the label, and the band took this to mean they would be sent to a proper studio to redo everything with the same full sound. But Warner’s budget for that accounting period had run out, and the record came out as it was, in November 1980\. The reissue notes put the cost at around eight hundred pounds. There was no money for a cover either: the image comes from an old Russian film poster, bought for fifty pounds because, the band were told, it had just come out of copyright, and the band photographs were taken for nothing by Spencer Rowell, then a trainee shooting plates of food for cookery books, who a few years later would make a poster that sold in the millions, the shirtless man cradling a newborn baby. The result is a tight, dry record with the rhythm section pushed well forward. “I Can’t Escape Myself” opens almost empty, until the chorus lets the guitars in all at once; “Missiles”, the longest track, runs just over five minutes. Marshall, disappointed at the time, eventually came round to the view that the album had caught the energy of the live shows and that all it needed was a bit of a clean-up. The lavish version that *Crocodiles* seemed to promise was never recorded. ### II. Half of what he started with Borland played left-handed. In 1996, talking to Janes, he still remembered a night when the DJ at the venue had put on “Ziggy Stardust” after the set, Bowie’s song about a guitarist who plays with his left hand, and he had taken it as a tribute. Iggy Pop was still his avowed model, and he maintained that the Sound were closer to the spirit of the Stooges than many of the groups who copied their noise. The debt shows in the brevity. Dudley has described something that happened over and over in the rehearsal room: when it came to the solo, Borland would cut it down until about half of it was left, convinced that a few notes in the right place carried more weight. Of one demo he recalled asking the engineer whether the solo sounded like someone who wanted to kill somebody; the engineer said yes, and he kept it. Keeping time was another problem. Dudley admitted they were all terrible at it, starting with himself, and that live the flaw turned into a push: the song speeds up and the room goes with it. In the studio things only improved once they discovered the click track. The BBC sessions, wrapped up in six or eight hours, were in his view better than some of the official versions. For the first of them, recorded in September 1980 and broadcast in October, the engineer was Mott the Hoople’s former drummer Dale Griffin, who as soon as they walked in banned eating in the studio and going out for a drink at lunchtime. Marshall recorded all her keyboard parts in a single take and remembered a session with no tricks and no added effects. *From the Lions Mouth* went the other way. In 1981 Korova sent the group to Rockfield Studios in Wales with Hugh Jones, the producer of the Bunnymen’s *Heaven Up Here*. Dudley credited him with spotting the band’s strengths and pushing them forward; Borland called it their most polished record and probably their most commercial. Bailey and Dudley, decades on, found it too smooth. The packaging went upmarket too: after the fifty-pound Russian poster of *Jeopardy*, the cover reproduced a painting by the Victorian artist Briton Rivière. Sales stayed at cult level, and the label asked for more commercial songs. ![Adrian Borland](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6b/c4/6bc44280-60e0-4784-b78b-3377713d3254/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-28-alle-21.13.14-1-1.jpg) ### III. The Second Layer While the Sound were taking shape, Borland and Bailey had a side project, Second Layer. Bailey built his own rhythm generators at a time when drum machines were still a rarity, and worked with effects boxes and tape loops; Borland brought his guitar and a WASP, the small synthesiser with the flat touch-sensitive keyboard. It was hard to play, because every key had to be struck dead in the centre. For “Metal Sheet”, on the 1979 EP *Flesh as Property*, Marshall came up with a bleep like a heart monitor; Borland couldn’t manage it, so in the studio she played it herself. Stephen Budd’s first act as manager was to put up fifty pounds to release a single by the duo. These records, too, were made at Elephant Studios with Nick Robbins, and the album *World of Rubber* came out on Cherry Red in 1981. When Korova demanded a more saleable third album, the second layer came to the surface. The band’s answer was *All Fall Down*, recorded in March at the Manor, Virgin’s residential studio in Oxfordshire, and in August at Trident in London. Dudley has pointed out the irony: the label spent more on that record than on the ones before it. Bailey is also credited with drum machine programming and sound effects, and by the band’s own account they were short of songs and fell back on material that had started life with Second Layer. The album came out on 23 October 1982; a few months later the Sound no longer had a deal. Dudley saw it as the record that held both the best and the worst of the band, with the machine-driven tracks among the weakest and “Monument”, “Party of the Mind” and “We Could Go Far” among the high points. Heard today, it is the record where the two projects overlap: the songs reach for space, the mechanical pulse holds them back, and the two never quite fuse. > **The most expensive studios of their career produced their starkest album.** ### IV. In front of an audience After 1983 the Sound played less and less in Britain outside London. There were still the Netherlands and Belgium, where audiences had never gone away, and Dutch radio recorded the group five years running, from the Paradiso in Amsterdam in 1981 to the Vrije Vloer in Utrecht in 1985; in between came the No Nukes festival in Utrecht on 9 April 1982, the gig the band considered their best ever. Renascent released the recordings on five discs in 2006, and they are the fullest record of what the Sound became in front of an audience, not least the way the songs stretched out. “Missiles”, just over five and a half minutes on *Jeopardy*, ran to almost eight at a concert broadcast by the BBC in June 1985. The Marquee on Wardour Street was their other home. Over two nights in August 1985 the band recorded *In the Hothouse*there, the only live album released while they were still together. Dudley described the place as a stinking hole with a dressing room best avoided, but also as the right place to play big songs in a small space; listening back to the first side of the record, he could hear himself speeding up and slowing down. Soon afterwards Statik, the independent label that had taken them on after Warner, went under. From the mid-eighties Borland began to show signs of an illness that would later be diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder. *Thunder Up*, released by Play It Again Sam in 1987, was again recorded at Elephant with Robbins, and the band thought it their best album. Dudley stood by all of it except the sound: Robbins had transferred the master onto one of the first digital machines and the record was pressed from that copy. Dudley thought it sounded horrible. It is also the only Sound studio album left out of the Renascent reissues, because the rights stayed with the Belgian label. A few months later, at De Boerderij in Zoetermeer, Borland stopped playing halfway through “Winning”, put the guitar down and walked off stage. It was the Sound’s last concert. RECORDS ON THE TRACE / 01 01 02 03 04 05 1979 · TOR 003 · TORTCH RECORDS The Sound · *Physical World* All three songs are Borland's: "Cold Beat" on the A-side, "Physical World" and "Unwritten Law" on the B-side. According to collectors' discographies, it was recorded in September 1979 but didn't reach the shops until January 1980\. The vinyl was pressed in France, and the run-out grooves are etched with two mirror-image messages: "You're watching us" on the A-side, "We're watching you" on the B-side. 1981 · B RED 14 · CHERRY RED Second Layer · *World of Rubber* Released in November 1981, it has nine tracks credited to Adrian Borland and Graham Bailey, the two members of Second Layer. The run-outs of the UK pressing read "A Lean Ham Slice" and "A Porky Prime Cut", the second being the tag George Peckham put on his lacquer cuts. It was reissued in 2023 by the reissue label 1972, remastered by the original engineer, Nick Robbins, with sleeve notes by Graham Bailey. 1984 · STAB 1 · STATIK RECORDS The Sound · *Shock of Daylight* A six-track mini-album, recorded and mixed in Studio 3 at the Townhouse and produced by Pat Collier. The horns were arranged and played by Sarah and Tim Smith of Cardiacs. "Winter" was recorded separately: vocals and guitar at Crow Studios, bass and drums at Elephant. In the United States the record came out on A&M. 1985 · STAT LP 24 · STATIK RECORDS The Sound · *Heads and Hearts* Recorded at the Townhouse in November 1984, produced by Wally Brill and engineered by Gavin MacKillop, Richard Manwaring and Simon Smart. Ian Nelson of Fiat Lux plays saxophone on "Whirlpool", "Under You" and "Love Is Not a Ghost"; the sleeve is by 23 Envelope, the partnership of Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson. On the Dutch Megadisc pressing the A-side label misprints the title as *Head and Hearts*. 2004 · REN CD 8 · RENASCENT The Sound · *The BBC Recordings* Two CDs, half an hour of sessions and an hour of live recordings, released under licence from the BBC. Both the Mike Read and John Peel sessions were recorded in Studio 4 at Maida Vale, the concerts at the Paris Theatre in London. The credits list Bi Marshall alongside Ian Nelson, who played saxophone at the 1985 shows. ### V. Who keeps the tapes In 1988 Borland moved to the Netherlands. The solo records that followed tell the same story as the band’s, on ever tighter budgets. *Alexandria*, released on Play It Again Sam in 1989 with Mayers on keyboards and Robbins at the desk, was the last of his albums to use such a large line-up, strings and timpani included. It sold about ten thousand copies on the Continent and around a thousand in England. *Beautiful Ammunition*, recorded in 1994 at Survival Studios in Acton, is built from acoustic guitar, synthesiser and the odd drum machine. Borland said he liked its simplicity; two years later he told Janes that electric guitars should have gone on top of the acoustics, and that one song, “Baby Moon”, had been sitting in a drawer since 1993 because he didn’t want to waste it on a lo-fi production. The song finally appeared in 1997 on *5:00 AM*, co-produced by Tim Smith of Cardiacs. It’s hard not to think that even on his own Borland kept setting songs aside for the record he might one day be able to afford. Work on the last album began at Premises Studios in London early in 1999; in about a fortnight Borland laid down guide vocals and guitars. After his death the guitarist Pat Rowles and the engineer Pete Barraclough, with the consent of Borland’s parents, pieced together *Harmony & Destruction* from Wally Brill’s recordings and Rowles’s four-track demos. Released in 2002, it ends the story on a four-track, the way it began in a Wimbledon living room. Bob Borland, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, and Win Borland, an English teacher, had put out the Outsiders’ records on the family label, Raw Edge, and later helped pay for their son’s solo records. In 2004 Dudley pointed out that, with two members dead and Bailey living in the United States, the job of keeping the Sound’s history had fallen to him and Adrian’s father. Among the credits on *Propaganda*, next to his credit for the recording, there is one more line: the cover photograph is by Bob Borland. --- [Adrian Borland & The Sound](https://www.adrianborlandthesound.com/discography?ref=hwaelmag.com) --- Last revised: October 2026 ---