Thanks again for the help.

The monitoring bit worked when I turned up the volume on the channel from 0..! D'oh! I did end up popping it through a guitar amp for the evening and it was fine - we weren't playing very loud and neither the controls on the PA amp monitor output nor on the guitar amp needed to high at all to allow us to hear. I will need to experiment in the future for what we will do.

I'll try experimenting with the position of the pick up as it is one I screw across the hole. Thanks for the tip.

I've put a very short and small (250kb) mp3 here which demonstrates what a horribly crappy noise has come out on tape. I think it sounded better than that through the speakers but it does sound grim to me! I'd be interested to know if that is the sort of sound I should expect.

Apart from getting my foot tangled in a cable and pulling over and bouncing my guitar off the floor (I have a nice recording of that), forgetting to plug in a mic in the second half, taping over the first part of what I had recorded by turning over the tape rather than putting a new one in, not turning everything up loud enough in the first half... there were remarkably few problems given that I didn't really know what I was doing!