Your cassette pet

There are so many reasons not to like cassettes.  How many times did something go awry and a horrible spinning/whipping sound replaced your favourite track? - you’d press ‘eject’ and find miles of thin brown tape spewing out like intestines from its plastic casing.  

Or you’d left your tapes on the dashboard of your Ford Fiesta, within reach of an absent-minded grope for them with the other hand on the wheel and your eyes on the roundabout, only to find that the previous week’s heatwave had rendered them all into some strange, melted work of art. This abstract sculpture of plastic and magnetic polymer had also now stuck permanently to the inside of your car.

Then there were the inlay cards.  Some kind souls on the product design team at TDK / Sony / Maxell / Dindy (or whoever) had thought this one through and allowed plenty of neat lines on which to write out the full details of our track-listings.  But, the lines were 4cm wide with 3mm space in between.  It wasn't easy...

One of few cassettes I still have - circa 1977

Still, I have such fond memories of recording on cassette.  As a schoolgirl without enough pocket money to spend much on records,  it was the only way I could get to hear many songs more than once.  I’d tune in to John Peel, desperate to hear a session from Wire or Siouxsie & the Banshees for instance, but because it was a week night and everyone else had already gone to bed I had to keep the volume right down.  Between 10pm and midnight I could record Peel's musical choices with my ear pressed up against the speakers, straining to hear - and then play them, loudly, at last, when I got home from school the next day.  Late at night in the half-light of a table lamp, I’d be on standby with two fingers at the ready on the heavy, clunky record and play keys, or to let the pause button on and off between songs.  I remember one fateful night when I somehow ended up getting it the wrong way round, like missing one step in a dance routine and staying out of synch for the entire duration; I was releasing the pause button when I thought I was pressing it, and ended up with all of John Peel’s dulcet-toned introductions and comments (so there were plenty of 'this one fades in slowly’s) but absolutely NO music…

Best of all, perhaps, was the chance to make compilation tapes for special people.  Every tape had character, maybe even a bit of covert meaning, and a great deal of thought, care and, sometimes, passion went into the compiling of them.  It still does with CDRs to a point, and with these at least we can make our own fancy colour covers (and tracklistings that are actually legible) with technology that we could only dream of once, but there was definitely something about the handmade-ness of a taped comp that was so endearing.  The handwriting of the person who made it for you was somehow comforting and extremely personal, or if you were making it for someone else you might deliberate over your (miniature) calligraphy like it was a love letter - which in some cases, perhaps, it was.  Sometimes you even heard the needle in the groove of a 45rpm or - if the tape’s creator wasn’t quite spot on with the timings - the sound of it alighting on, or lifting off, the vinyl.  It was like you were there.

There are many reasons not to like cassettes, but in a way there are just as many reasons to have loved them too.