Tommy CAPE

PLEASE REWIND — The Lost Tapes, 1985 —

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Please Rewind album cover: Tommy Cape with a mullet and aviator glasses, in a white blazer, holding a cassette in front of a neon sunset and palm trees.

MUSIC

STORY

From the wind-scoured headlands of Finland's west coast, Tommy Cape makes songs for the space between the tape heads — three minutes of neon built in a bedroom studio with the curtains drawn against the midnight sun.

A single synth, a borrowed DX7, a drum machine paid off in instalments, and a wall of reel-to-reel humming through the night like a second heartbeat. The result is pure mid-80s Euro-disco: glossy on the surface, aching underneath, a lone voice lifted by a choir of its own ghosts.

They say he recorded the whole thing between the last ferry and the first light, and that the tape hiss is the sea outside the window. Nobody has confirmed this. We'd like to believe it.

He does not tour. He does not give interviews. There are only a few photographs — at home, bent over the DX7 on a small stage, singing in front of a band, writing a song alone in his room — and in each one he seems somewhere else, already hearing the next song, as if it is better than this one.

Press play. Play it twice. Then please — be kind, and rewind.