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How many of these have you thrown away?

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For me it’s one. I had a car stolen on a business trip and faced having to drive back from Newcastle with only Radio 2 for company. I don’t recall where I bought them, but I acquired copies of “Nevermind” and Zappa’s “You Can’t Do This On Stage Anymore Volume xx”. Old Bill recovered the car (used in a robbery no less, finger print dust everywhere) but not the priceless Tommy Bolin bootlegs I’d been playing on the way up. I still have the Zappa tapes but “Nevermind” got binned once I had a cd version.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/most-valuable-cassette-tapes-80s-90s

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  1. I think I took this one of me for The Word magazine before getting rid of them. I think this is the only copy I can find now. I’d buy a brick of recordable tapes from Richer Sounds every other week, I’d scores of them now a mere handful although I have found a signed Donovan cassette (did you know he invented them?).

    View post on imgur.com

  2. I used to buy quite a lot of blank cassettes around the beginning of the ’80s, when all I had for playing music was a cheap boombox. Bought more later when I had a proper stereo but also a car that only played cassettes.

    Round about the turn of the century, I chucked out quite a few cassettes that were just too lo-fi-sounding to keep anymore. A few irreplaceable old radio recordings amongst that lot that I was sorry to part with.

    I still have a big cardboard box (the one an old video recorder came in) full of cassettes that never seem to get played any more.

    In the early ’00s I switched from cassettes to Minidiscs. Even fitted a minidisc player in my car (along with a CD changer). I re-recorded all my favourite car cassette mixes onto MDs and added a couple more. Then my car got broken into and the MD player and CD changer were nicked. The thieves left my Minidiscs behind but took the CDs that were in the changer. A couple of those were difficult to replace.

    My work van, before I retired, had Bluetooth and a USB socket, so I could play music from my phone or from a USB drive. I used those occasionally but mainly I listened to BBC Radio 4 while driving.

    I now have a car with a CD player/radio but no Bluetooth or USB. I hardly ever switch it on and when I do it’s tuned to BBC Radio 3. Haven’t played a CD in the car for well over a year.

    • In my old Land rover I have a little gizmo that plugs into the cig lighter and takes a feed from either a USB stick or a phone with a USB output. The gizmo broadcasts an FM signal that the car radio picks up and plays. Didn’t cost much, and got it from the dodgers.

      • Now that there are a lot less FM radio stations on air, these gizmos are useable. I have one sitting in my car’s glovebox but I can’t be arsed to use it. Back in the ’90s, trying to find an FM channel that was vacant was almost impossible around here, what with all the pirate stations and local commercial stations (most of which went over to DAB).
        The FM radio spectrum is now fairly sparsely-populated and the Govt. keep threatening to close it down, but DAB is in many ways inferior.

    • Two were shows that I replaced when they subsequently came out from the TB Archives – the Jai Alai and Ebbets Field shows. At the time, pre internet, I was double chuffed to have found someone with copies and gutted to lose them within weeks. The Archive releases were better quality if somewhat expensive to get hold of. They appear to command big prices now, as I assume they are long out of print.

      I still look occasionally on sites like T.U.B.E and Guitar 101 – are there any others you recommend?

      • I’m not a huge TB fan, but I have picked up a few boots of his along the way that I’ve enjoyed.

        The best place I know of at the moment (and there are undoubtedly many others who have more arcane links to suggest) is the Traders Den. You can peruse their archives of live recordings at thetradersden.org. Most are in flac format, and there is a mix of audience recordings, FM recordings and the occasional soundboard.

        I’ll DM you a link to one from there – this is actually claimed to be the original recording of a gig that subsequently ended up published by the TB Archive. See what you think.

  4. I have every cassette I’ve ever owned, I’ve actually never had any tape ever tangle and break for me. Most of them are of course recorded from the radio or taped from albums that friends had. Just a few bargain bin official album cassettes, few of them any good.

    But I actually listened a lot to a bunch of my old tapes this winter, on my mini stereo in the kitchen, and they sounded great, even through headphones.
    I still keep a few favourites on the kitchen counter alongside my favourite music to cook to (on CD).

  5. Lived in the Middle East (Saudi and Bahrain) for five-and-a-half years in the pre-CD years of the early to mid-80s.

    Heat and sand made cassettes the only practical way of collecting and hearing music. Lax copyright laws meant the latest releases were incredibly cheap and every time I returned home I took back scores of 747, Hang Ten and Billboard branded tapes.

    My sister’s attic was filled with boxes of these unplayed tapes for the next 30 years.

  6. I have nearly all my old cassettes in the loft, stored in 4 of those Argos Tape Library drawer things. Got nothing to play them on anymore – sold the tape player from the stereo about 5 years ago.
    Didn’t buy many tapes, preferring the vinyl album as my medium of choice.

  7. I owned ever owned three commercial cassettes, given to me with my beloved Panasonic boombox for Christmas in 1984. They were Led Zeppelin III, Presence and 1984: All the Hits.

    But taping music was a huge part of the ritual of being a music fan right through into the early 90s. That fresh, sealed TDK tape (chrome for especially important recordings), reverently cleaning records to enable the best transfer, carefully printing the track details on the insert, diligently popping the record-protection tabs on the cassette afterwards. My mate and I were on a race to collect all the 5-star albums from the Rolling Stone Record Guide, and would tape each other’s finds.

    I loved those days, but haven’t owned a cassette since probably the mid 90s.

    • Not forgetting the manual winding of the tape forward so as not to miss the first few nanoseconds of sound, or the crackle of the needle drop.
      But first the time planning to see if the whole album will fit, or some judicious track re-arrangement is needed, and adding contemporary singles a b sides where space allows.

  11. I have bags and bags of them all purchased in the past few years from charity shops in the hope of selling them one day for a profit. My best pick up was the time I was browsing in a store when I noticed they were putting new stock alongside the usual Max Bygraves etc I had already searched through. As soon as the bloke finished I went back for a look and saw cassettes by the likes of Sisters of Mercy, The Cure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I picked up about twenty of them for a princely $0.50c AUD each. They would have spent less than five minutes in total on the shelf.

  12. I had Licensed to Ill on cassette. Of course I did, who bought Hip Hop on vinyl? I also had Yo! Bum Rush the Show on cassette, which I thought would be worth more, it must at least be rarer.

    Cassettes illustrated the point that the most popular musical format will always be the one that offers the most convenience at the time. I went to college in the mid 80s and everybody had a radio-cassette player in their room. It was the only way you could bring your music collection with you if you didn’t own a car. Acts like Prince, the Smiths, The Cure etc would have sold twice as many cassettes as they did records.

  13. Guilty I had Licensed To Ill in my student days. Surprised not to see the NME cassettes I had all of them.

    Also had a few from a short lived cassette magazine. Anyone remember that? I remember an interview with Martin Fry singing an acapella version of poison arrow.

  15. I picked up my bloody valentine’s loveless album on cassette back in 1991, but upgraded to the CD version at some point later on. I kept most of my cassettes in a box in the loft, along with my old technics tape deck. Anyway, I happened to have a look at discogs a couple of years ago and spotted that a cassette of loveless was going for £60. “Sixty quid for a cassette I no longer play, flipping ‘eck” I thought. I went up to the loft and had a good rummage around, couldn’t find it! I must have binned it (not given away, not given to a chazzer, but chucked it in the wheelie bin) when I had a big clear out of the loft during lockdown. Absolutely gutted.

    And before anyone says “yebbut, discogs prices” here is what the UK cassette of loveless has sold for in recent years- https://www.discogs.com/sell/history/1661547
    Gutted!

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