It appears that when Mike demolished his garden shed and unearthed the lost tapes, he found not one  or two, not even three fragile, unlabeled remnants of history but 12. Yup, twelve old fashioned reel to reel tapes. All we need to do now is find a way to extract the garbage from the rubbish so to speak.

The project has yet to begin as Justin is touring Cornwall at the moment tracing his family’s Arthurian roots, work will commence with a vengance on his return.

After splashing the cash and acquiring the magnificent Akai, dear old Mike spent weeks fiddling with an infinite combination of connections and settings in order to get the machine to play back anything in it’s correct form, a frustrating time after the euphoria!

Bearing Mike’s problems in solving this, it is to be expected that it will be rather a long while before ‘Gotta get to Work’, ‘Rupert Bear Boogie’ and ‘Just Spazzing You’ among a myriad of other delights are to be launched on this site!

However the news should have all Pants fans rejoicing, as the immortal Rock Carnaby said on hearing this momentous news…

Skid,

Thats real good news for us and our immediate circle,  but, it is also great news for the world as a whole. Critics may think I am attaching more importance to these tapes than they deserve, but I am of the opinion that following their restoration to the rightful owners, the sum total of the world's cultural riches has increased by at least 2.55%. 

This is, and I do not exaggerate, an event of an Elgin Marbles-style significance and I fully expect Melvin Bragg to be contacting you in the not too distant future regarding  a special edition of  the Southbank Show which will feature a reformed DPB discussing the importance of the lost tapes, commenting on the actual music therein and having a mass debate on how the world of Rock  would have been affected had anyone actually heard this music when it was first laid down in the late sixties.

Well done Steve for tracking down the tapes. It must have been a Herculean task, akin to the time when the blues researcher Alan Lomax spent more than 5 years searching for the legendary blues singer Blind Willie McTampon before finally locating him living on a farm in Alabama, where he was persuaded  to re-record his 1921 smash hit "My Sausage Lickin' Baby"  for the U.S.Library of Congress.

Yes to alcohol next week