Balfron Tapes

Balfron Tapes is one man: Lloyd Bramble, born in Poplar in 1955 to parents who came from Portland, Jamaica, and moved into Balfron Tower the year it opened. He worked the East India Dock until it shut in 1981 and never really left the view — the reach of the river, the cranes standing still, the foghorns that carried on sounding for ships that had stopped coming. He had bought a second-hand four-track from a studio clearing out in Soho, a Fender bass, a Farfisa organ and a spring reverb unit that hummed when the kettle went on, and he set them up in the front room on the twenty-sixth floor. The records he made there he called tapes, because that is what they were.

Nobody sings on a Balfron Tapes record. Nobody speaks. Lloyd's line was that the river did enough talking, and he built the music the way the docks emptied — slowly, one thing removed at a time. Foghorn On The Reach is the sound of the front-room window open at three in the morning. Blackwall Tunnel Dub is the drive under the river with the radio off. Tide Out At Limehouse is the mud, the moored barges and one melodica.

He pressed a few hundred copies of each on a label with no name and sold them from a bag at Chrisp Street market. Sound systems from Hackney to Deptford played them as the record before the last record.