The song was coming out of an ancient tape player next to a bedraggled old woman selling sunflower* seeds out of a cup.
In the play, an old man celebrates his 69th birthday by sorting through boxes full of ancient tape recordings, trying to reconcile his memories of events with actual notes that he has scribbled on an old ledger.
And after the bustle of the city, and its non-stop noise, the quiet of the desert and the cab is lovely - well if you discount the ancient tape of Arabic pop provided by the driver, and the happy sucking of sticky caramels as we bump along.
Amid the industrial debris, he has hung up a single suit of clothes on a hanger, made a row of crosses out of flattened Fanta cans, and surrounded himself with several ancient tape recorders, out of which come several meticulously edited, disturbing voices.
A warehouse in the Western Sydney suburb of Villawood is about to get torn down, which is nothing new except that the place is stacked from floor to ceiling with ancient tape drives, disk drives, processors, and personal computers.
If you have a new DVD recorder, you may be thinking that the time has come to get those old home movies transferred from the ancient camcorder tapes onto shiny new discs.
From the carved tablets of the Ten Commandments, to walls of stone hieroglyphs, to the boxes of ancient magnetic tapes that Krapp lugs on to his desk, there was a physical cumbersomeness to these archives that related to their human origins.
Together, they take us to Lucia's various "hives": the Job Hive, which may bear a remarkable resemblance to your local Jobcentre Plus, save for the crucial difference that it can only be reached by rowing boat; the Money Hive, which is a pawn shop, and the Video Hive, where a small bag of ancient VHS tapes is yours for £5, and a large one for £10.
Several of them urged him to "tone it down," he recalls, when they noticed the intimidating syllabus for his first class, the history of ancient philosophy, taped to the door of his office.
There were tombolas, a few stalls selling ancient Carpenters cassette tapes, and a small, dapper man in a dinner jacket, barking up an audience for his Punch and Judy show.
