I emailed Martin Rhodes. Friend from the same underground Rochdale group of lovely people (sounds unlikely but it's true - there are a lot of very fun and creative people in that old mill town where I was born)

Martin runs Lisa Stansfield's studio, Gracie Land.

Can you help? It's 2 inch tape, 16 track. Yes, no problem. we can mix, you'll love it here, come down next week. wow. How completely amazingly can-do!

So I went to pic, up the tapes from Dropout. Read the info James had written. 1 inch 16 track tape. OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOO...
Called Martyn. told him. short silence, then, leave it with me!
I went home and had 3 kittens. They're still running about in the garden.

This might all sounds a bit dull but in reality it was my worst hour of the past decade or so.

When you really want something and think it's sorted out, you allow yourself to get happy. And then to realise there may not be a way out and you've thrown money at something that doesn't work, with no way of getting it back without some small claims court incident, and you've got 10 moments of live spontaneous creativity trapped in a jar that nobody can open, and that you'll have to ask everyone to come back and do it again, though you can't afford to start again, and the people responsible aren't exactly rushing to sort this situation out... well.

1 hour later, Martin called. He'd found a 1 inch tape machine.

We salute you.

We salute Steve, engineer extraordinare. I knew we were in safe hands when he said, "I haven't seen a 1 inch tape since I worked with the Hollies, in 1973?

Also, Andy Pop who stayed up until 11pm to transfer our tapes onto digital, using the only appropriate tape machine in existence north of Watford. Thank you.

Find out more about Gracie Land here.