CMT Europe, 1993-1998 - a tribute

Country music. You either love it or hate it. I love it. And if I had to pick a particular favourite era, it would have to be the early 1990s. If the names Alan Jackson, Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, George Strait or Bobbie Cryner have you overcome with a wave of nostalgia, read on.

Back in January of this year, I was clearing out my spare bedroom when I found a box of old VHS cassettes. Most of them were films long-replaced with DVD or Blu-Ray copies. Some were recordings of David Attenborough wildlife documentaries, also replaced with DVDs. But four (all stored together) caught my eye. "CMT Europe" volumes 1-4.

I never had satellite TV until 2000 (I took the plunge and had Sky Digital installed as the terrestrial reception where I lived was pretty awful - nowadays I just have Freesat). But I had friends who did. More to the point, I was at boarding school in the early 90s, and we had Sky on the residential side. For perhaps obvious reasons, the Sky box was located in the staff office with an RF feed going to the TV downstairs in the lounge.

After much persuasion, I managed to convince the powers-that-be to let me have Channel 41 on until 4pm. For 15-year-old me, this was the holy grail of music. CMT Europe, which ran from midnight until 4pm on Sky channel 41, at which point it switched to Discovery Channel. (For many years I had a slight resentment towards the Discovery Channel for this reason!)  After even more persuasion, I convinced residential staff to let me bring my expensive hi-fi VHS deck (a Ferguson Videostar 3V43, if anyone's wondering) into the office, plug it directly into the box and start recording CMT. In LP mode. 6-8 hours of CMT, with hi-fi stereo sound. I did this about 4 times, and ended up with two E180 and two E240 VHS videos, all recorded in LP.

Of course, at the time, they got played to death. However, with the demise of VHS, they got chucked in a box along with all my other carefully indexed VHS recordings, until I rediscovered them earlier this year.

So, problem one was finding a working player. I have two. I still have the 3V43, but when I tried it on a recording that didn't matter, it ate the tape. Ok, new belts needed, they've obviously perished. I'd changed the belts in this before (there's only two, it's a direct drive capstan motor so there's a belt for the spindles and a belt for the loading mechanism). Last time it cost me £3.95 for a belt kit, but that was over 20 years ago. This time? Well, I tracked down a belt kit, which now costs £10, albeit with free postage.

In the meantime, whilst waiting for the belts to be delivered, I tried the other VHS machine. This is a Philips VR1000, bought new in 2002. It's a re-badged JVC model HR-S7600. NICAM Hi-fi stereo, S-VHS, digital noise reduction, digital timebase corrector, etc etc. Basically released at the high point of VHS technology when people were still using them, just before Sky+ and recordable DVDs became a thing.

Being a lot newer than the 3V43, the VR1000 worked perfectly despite having been stored for several years. Unlike the 3V43 it had been used within the last 10 years to transfer some VHS recordings to DVD. The built-in timebase corrector makes it particularly good for this task, and the picture quality in SP mode is pretty decent. About equal to the 3V43 (which was made in 1985) but at a fraction the price. However in LP mode the picture left something to be desired.

A few days later, the belt kit for the 3V43 arrived, so I opened it up and changed both belts. Put in an old VHS cassette and gave it a test run. Perfect. Now I'm ready to try out my precious CMT videos.

In goes the first one. Thread up, a few seconds of black screen (I always used to record 30 seconds of blank screen at the top of a VHS cassette rather than starting the recording right at the beginning), then the recording starts. And considering this was made in LP mode, the picture was surprisingly good. Most of the quality issues actually came from Sky's Videocrypt system, not from the VHS recording.

At this point in time I wasn't planning to transfer the recordings to DVD (that will come later), but wanted to go through all the recordings and make a list of all the songs. I'd managed to acquire many of them on CD over the years, but there were a lot I'd forgotten. Indeed for a few weeks after I'd finished this task, my Amazon Marketplace order history went a little bit mad as I filled in the blanks!

In the end there were something like 28 hours of recordings to go through, and I ended up with a pretty lengthly track listing. Of course, having rediscovered many songs and artists I'd forgotten about (Jim Witter, Jesse Hunter, Ronna Reeves to name but three), as I said above I ended up going a little bit mad on Amazon Marketplace, along with Discogs, trying to find some of these long-lost albums. Mention also has to be made of the library, who, by pure chance, were clearing out some old CDs (3 for £2) to make way for new stock. One of the discs in this clearout was Emmylou Harris' "Cowgirl's Prayer", which was on the wanted list. That was a pretty lucky find as I couldn't find it for sale on either Amazon or Discogs.

I'd also discovered that I'd torrented three Tish Hinojosa FLAC albums a while back, including "Culture Swing", tracks from which were on the list.

Eventually I got to the stage where I had something like 90% of the songs from the videos, with probably about a dozen missing. Naturally I compiled a playlist in Squeezeserver, and let it just run. After removing all duplicates I was left with 169 tracks with a running time of over 9 and a half hours.

A few songs in, and what struck me the most was the sheer variety of music that was played back then. These VHS recordings were nearly 30 years old, and most of the music on them was current at the time. I've put up a screenshot of the beginning of that playlist; readers may want to have a look for some of these songs on Spotify or Youtube just to hear the contrast.

Compare that with modern "country" music, where everything uses the same tired 4-chord progression (C-G-Am-F, or transposed to whatever key) over the same plodding monotonous sampled drum loop, with the same tired auto-tuned lyrics about "goin' downtown in my pickup truck, gonna get a hot girl, gonna have a hot f..." (yeah, ok, so I just made that up, but it's not actually that far from reality). Where did it all go wrong? There are still a few good songs by some decent artists coming out, eg Sierra Ferrell or Joshua Hedley, but they don't often get played on the radio, and I'd only heard of them by pure chance.

CMT Europe went off the air in the summer of 1998, before Sky Digital launched. There was a campaign to bring it back for a long time, but given the state of country music now, I honestly don't think it would be a success. The American CMT channel doesn't even play music videos any more, it's just re-runs of the Dukes Of Hazzard. For a while there was a "new country" radio channel on Sky which in fairness was pretty good, but now even that's gone. Absolute Radio have launched "Absolute Country Radio", which does a 90s programme, but transmits on DAB at 64Kbit in mono! So realistically there's no way of hearing 'new' music any more.

I've had this playlist running for a few days now, since putting it together. I can quite honestly say I'd never get tired of it. 90s country? Gets me every time. Ain't that right Shania?