News, Manchester
Beckie Garvey“It all started off with stuff I’d heard that he hadn’t that I knew he was going to love.”
The sister of Elbow frontman Guy Garvey has told how his love of music was inspired by mix tapes she made for him, beginning in the 1980s.
Beckie Garvey, who is now a 6 music producer, said he was even left in tears by one she made, which included an orchestral version of Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You.
He heard it over lunch in the Granada TV canteen in Manchester in the late 1990s, where she worked at the time, just before Elbow got signed.
She said she had been excited to see his reaction to the opening song and when she saw him cry she was thinking “result” whereas he was “looking around thinking… people from Coronation Street are over there watching me blubbing”.
Beckie was speaking about the influence her mix tapes had on her brother as the launches Mix Tape, a drama looking at two teenagers bonding over their love of music in the 1980s.
She said she made the mix tapes for Guy – from Bury, Greater Manchester – to introduce him to different music and she would set aside a day to do this.
“It was a labour of love,” she said.
“It was partly to impress him but it was mostly to educate him and share something because that sharing of music is such an emotional thing.”
Beckie said she started making mix tapes in the late 1970s and started making them for Guy in the mid 1980s, with her last cassette produced about 2000, when the minidisc arrived.
But even now she makes compilation CDs for her nephew.
Music had always been a big part of the Garvey family’s life, she said, and she used to make mix tapes for all her siblings.
She said she would “put all sorts on there – Joan Armatrading, Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Genesis”.
Home-made mix tapes recorded on blank cassettes were a way of putting a play list together long before the advent of online play lists.
“Making an online playlist is very quick and you can mess about with the order and things like that, whereas when you’re doing a mix tape most of it is in the planning and you really put time, thought and effort into it,” she added.
She said she would sometimes add speech to the mix, something which could not be done via online playlists.
She recounted one occasion where she added a clip of the “beautiful soporific voice” of actor Anthony Hopkins reciting the WB Yeats poem, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven to a mix tape for Guy.
Taken from the 1987 film, 84 Charing Cross Road, Beckie said this was the perfect complement to some “beautiful music” and she “put it on the beginning of a tape to help him sleep”.
Beckie said “Guy was a listener like me” and she knew he would succeed as soon as he started making music.
Guy Garvey is a three-time Ivor Novello song-writing award winner.
