Mo-Dettes - WHITE MICE - RARE VIDEO

The story of How I Came To Hear 'White Mice' By The Mo-dettes probably says far more about pre-internet underground music communities and forms of musical communication in the 1990s than it does about punk.

I first heard this song (the only song I heard by the Mo-dettes for a very long time) when it was put on a mixtape for me by Daniel, a fanzine writer from Knutsford who I briefly ran a record label with, in 1996. He had discovered it because it was on a mixtape he'd had from Vanessa, the singer in nineties twee pop band The Melons, who was old enough to have been into C86 I think, and whose music owed a lot to bands like the Mo-dettes and Girls At Our Best!

This taping of tapes from tapes received was quite common at the time. Sometimes I'd even get a mixtape off someone which contained a fourth or fifth generation bootleg of something I'd taped off Peel, which had done the rounds of four or five other people's tapes before coming back to me. I could always tell because, aside from the deterioration in sound quality, there would be the same bit of dialogue abruptly cut off at the end of the track.

'Home taping is killing music?' not at the primitive sound quality levels we were operating at it wasn't , if anything, it introduced us to bands we would  never have heard and kept us going until those bands were rediscovered by tastemakers and their back catalogues reissued for us to buy. In 1996, the chances of legitimately finding a 7" of 'White Mice' were unlikely at best.