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There was a time when

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the biggest anxiety in life was pressing Stop on the tape recorder before the DJ started talking.
The cassette tape and tape recorder – my entry point to the world of my own music (a Sharp mono recorder with external microphone, and a Showaddywaddy tape to be exact).

And oh how I miss winding back escaped magnetic tape with a pencil.
And I don’t think there was any part of the Motorway central reservation nor strewn with metres of tape thrown from a moving car window.

Do I miss the cassette tape?
Not a bit of it – Vinyl and later CDs was/is my medium of choice.
But I’ve still got three of those Argos Tape Library storage boxes full up in the loft

https://flashbak.com/the-cassette-tape-story-lou-ottens-keith-richards-art-and-sony-walkman-mix-tapes-439512/

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  3. Looking at those old tapes has reminded me:
    the cassette version of The Cure’s Standing On The Beach was the only way (until the CD release) you could get the B Sides (Staring At The Sea).

    and I think the cassette version of New Order’s Substance was different too (it would be, it’s Factory!) and different to the CD version.

    Loads of others had cassette-only alternatives too (but I think we covered a fair few of those before?)

  6. Not a great carrier of music but a good way of sharing tastes or recommendations using the tech of the time. There was a real art to making a good compilation tape for a mate or maybe a girl you wanted to impress. I used to have lots of those bootleg tapes of mid to late eighties stuff from Camden Market. Pretty bad sound quality mostly but not bad if recorded on the pretty fab Walkman Professional.

  9. The demise of the cassette tape must have caused some stress to aunts and grandmothers throughout the country who know that a 5 pack of TDK C90s was a safe present for the introverted, surly teenagers in the family.

  10. What were your Brands Top 5?

    Mine was:

    1. TDK
    2. Memorex
    3. Maxell
    4. Sony
    5. Matsui

    I think No. 5 was the Woolies brand that they gave a Japanese sounding name so that you didn’t think it was a Woolies brand. Different world.

    And of course the sound quality was better if the cassette was made of clear plastic.

      • BASF too. At the same time BC, while I’m sure those European multinationals made perfectly acceptable ferromagnetic tapes, I’m sticking with our plucky British retailer for the No. 5 spot. They may have been an unfashionable shop next to WH Smiths trying to pass off their products as Japanese but they were OUR Good Old British shop next to WH Smiths trying to pass off their products as Japanese, and Jacques Delors and his Eurocrats won’t take that away from us!

        • Chromium tapes were better than the ordinary ferrous ones and metal tapes were better than the chromium ones. But older or cheap recorders couldn’t use metal tapes.

    • TDK all the way for me.

      Standard stuff was recorded on a D90, special albums always on an SA-90 and I seem to recall I had a couple of the top of the range metal ones (MA ? ) which probably has Pink Floyd recorded on them !

      I used to get mine from a small shop at the top of Rusholme that sold them cheap in Manchester when I was at Uni to record the stuff I borrowed from the record library near the University.

  11. The Goon Show scripts were published sometime in the seventies. There was this renewed interest in them after an episode was shown being recorded on TV. My sister and I made tapes of ourselves reading the scripts, doing all the voices which we knew from the LPs we had bought. Tales of Mens’ Shirts and others. I used to tape LPs from the library. You could try out all the intriguing stuff that you read about, things like Coltrane, Sonny Rollins. Then there were Peel sessions of course: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division. Also friends’ records. My mate taped his brother’s Can records for me. Then I would use images cut out from magazines for covers, The Face was a good source. Cassettes were great for making you interact, get a bit creative. All I’ve got left is some pre-recorded tapes, which I was still buying into the 90s, but there’s nothing to play them on. Bowie’s Low and Talking Heads More Songs… survive still from the late seventies, despite regular playing. I played them in my bedroom at home growing up on a little Phillips machine. I must say I was quite satisfied with what I heard.

    • Friends records is a great point. I fiend of mine got me into Dylan by putting most of his 60s output on some tapes: Times Changin / Another Side (C90); Bringing / Highway (C90); Blonde (C60) and Wesley / Nashville (C90).

      In return, I gave him some Stones: Beggars / Bleed (C90); Ya Yas / Sticky (C90); Exile (C90) and Goats / Rock & Roll (C90).

      I still haven’t forgiven him for taking off Queen Jane Approximately from Highway so that it would fit on one side of a C90. The gentleman’s choice would surely have been Ballad of a Thin Man.

      • C90s were always at least 46 minutes a side in my experience. I used to use the footage counter on my tape deck… the amount of time and energy I spent eking out tapes because I couldn’t afford new ones.

        Did anybody ever use hi-speed dubbing more than once?

        • I agree with this research.
          Many a time I have sat with an A4 sheet and a stopwatch planning a perfect 45 minute side. There’s always that little bit extra that can be squeezed on.
          Hi speed dubbing? I used to dream of hi speed dubbing.

          • Actually, the necessity to do it all in real time helped cement the music in your head. Ripping a cd can be done without even a listen. I have rather too many CDRs that contain music I am not as familiar with as I ought to be. Or would have been, listening first to know I like it, then again when taping.

  12. For those long albums or complex compilations, the C120 was available. A whole hour per side.
    Never seemed to last long though. I think it was the same amount of magnetic tape as a 90, but stretched.

    • My experience was that using a C120 cassette was always a bad move, which would end in tears …. well, not tears, exactly, but metres of tape unspooling in the inside of your cassette recorder. The tape was just too thin and weedy.
      Towards the end of the cassette era, TDK started making SA 100-minute cassettes, which were excellent quality. And also the perfect length for recording two albums.

        • I don’t miss CDRs/CDRWs…. always a bit Russian Roulette-y which device they would and wouldn’t play on. The PC? Of course. That portable CD player you’ve had since 1991? Amazingly yes. In the car? No chance. The DVD player? Only if there’s an A in the month.

    • C120s proved to be a waste of money. To fit that much length of tape in the plastic shell, the tape had to be much thinner and thus more delicate.
      The tape had a tendency to stretch and sound funny and it often got tangled up in your player’s works and was a PITA to extricate.
      I had one tangle up in the car player once and as well as the tape being wrecked, the player had to be replaced after some tiny little part in the transport mechanism got broken and it refused to work again.

  13. I actually remember rather liking the sound of tapes. I do wonder though if it was the element of escaping that appealed. Listening to tapes was always a deeply personal thing for me. I think I bought my first ‘walkman’ around 1983 ish with Christmas money. It was a Lloytron that had a radio and came with some crappy little speakers. The first cassette I had was a birthday present from my sister ‘The Age Of Plastic’ by The Buggles. Now, that would have been around 1981. Must have listened to that on an old mono radio cassette player.

    I’m rambling. We have a few old tapes upstairs, I’ll give them a listen over the weekend.

    • The invention of the Boom Box and then the Walkman were big changes in how your music could be listened to.
      Radios had been portable for some time but the choice of music was not yours to make.
      Vinyl didn’t exactly lend itself to portability, so no taking your music with you to play until the cassette came along.

  14. I remember arty postcards being a rich seam of source material for covers. A quid spent in an art gallery gift shop could yield enough raw Kandinsky to provide covers for a couple of year’s worth of Festive 50s.

  15. While no great fan of their repro quality, will always remember cassettes fondly for the way they freed us all to be masters of what we listened to and when. As noted elsewhere, they were also an excellent means of sharing music with putative GFs. Certainly sure to work better than taking a potential soulmate on a date to see Eraserhead as I one did with predictably disastrous consequences for my love life (or lack thereof).

    Cassettes were, however, a real lifesaver for me when I worked in the Middle East in the early 80s. A Big Night Out in Jeddah during my two years (one for need, one for greed) usually consisted of a trip to the supermarket to rummage through a lengthy aisle full of bootleg cassettes.

    747 tapes were the most common, although the Hang 10 brand had the most obscure artists and Billboard BASF titles were invariably the best quality. Like most expats, I took home hundreds and hundreds of the fuckers every time I came home on leave. Every single one of these tapes ended up in my sister’s attic where they sat unloved and unplayed for many, many years.

    My personal cassette odyssey had an interesting coda last summer when my 95-year old uncle died and appointed me and my sister his executors. Amongst the treasure trove of family papers and pictures I found amongst his possessions – the oldest dating back to 1905 – I came upon two ancient tape recorders, both of them now sitting here in next to me as I write.

    The two machines – one an Akai the size of a suitcase from, I would imagine, the late 50s, and the other a portable Philps recorder player from a decade or so later belonged to my seafaring uncle Paddy who died in 1999. Each bit of kit came with a small supply of opened and obviously used but unmarked tapes.

    Having now sorted out and catalogued all the family pix and papers, the only things I have left to look – or more accurately listen – through are Paddy’s three reel-to-reel and four cassette tapes.

    Am still a bit reluctant to set these curios up and press play as my doing so will both simultaneously open and close the book on my family’s life and times one last time.

    My current plan is to hold off airing the tapes until the anniversary of my uncle J’s death on mid-summer’s day. By then, restrictions will have hopefully eased sufficiently enough for my sister to fly over to Ireland from the UK and we can invite some family members along to share the moment.

  16. The more I think about it, the more I liked tapes. As a student living away from home, people hardly ever took their turntables away with them, so tapes became a necessary method of feeding the habit. “Socking it to the man” ie getting mates to record stuff for you, really appealed to me as well, and of course I did my bit to reciprocate.
    Anyone remember the pleasure of someone taping stuff for you onto a C90, say, an album a side, and then filling up the rest of each side with related stuff, or things they thought you might like? I discovered some great stuff that way, tracks from REM’s Murmur springs to mind, added on to a recording of the Bunnymen’s Porcupine.
    Got my first Walkman in late 82 if memory serves, and loved it. Always carried a few tapes around too so that I had some choice.

  17. There was a time when you couldn’t afford to buy music so it had to be snatched out of the ether using a radio and a tape recorder. In my case this was late 70s, early 80s, a period of great singles which I will now always hear the way they were obtained, with intros missing or Steve Wright saying ‘That was-” at the end, or my brother shouting in the distance. The proper versions still sound wrong.

    There are albums I’ve never heard the last few minutes of because they run longer than a C45. I’ve never listened to more than a minute of the last track on The Joshua Tree, although to be fair that’s true of most other U2 songs as well.

  18. The TEAC reel-to-reel cassettes looked fantastic , I think I had some, or maybe I just really wanted them and now I have a false memory of owning them.
    There’s a seller on eBay making their own version of a reel-to-reel, they look pretty good.
    https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Reel-to-Reel-cassette-tape-self-made-high-quality-design-Gold-color-NEW/202858329830?_trkparms=aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20201210111314%26meid%3D4f07d042752c4e27b210a3868f839892%26pid%3D101195%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D12%26mehot%3Dpf%26sd%3D193107972999%26itm%3D202858329830%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2047675%26algv%3DSimplAMLv9PairwiseUnbiasedWeb&_trksid=p2047675.c101195.m1851

  19. I still have a bunch of cassettes from the late 80s/ early 90s when vinyl was becoming more difficult to get and seemed to be very thin /flimsy but I hadn’t yet succumbed to CDs. I think the House of Love, an Ian McCulloch solo album and Kingmaker are among them.

    I also remember making lots of compilations for the car…

    Nowhere to play them now though

  20. I’ve been listening to tapes a lot recently actually. I have a big box of them, and the Proustian rush I get from them is similar to vinyl. They are very tactile.

    I’ve found the sound quality is actually quite decent as well! A tape deck hooked up to a proper stereo has a nice full sound, plenty of bass.

    • Yes, I agree with the decent sound quality thing as well. I use to have a TEAC studio quality tape deck and it was fantastic, not much different to CD. Well, to my ears anyway, which admittedly probably aren’t the most discerning… but there was definitely a well defined and sharp bass tone, and the guitars and keyboard noises were pristeen. Wish I still had it actually, I bet it would make my old Camden Lock bootlegs sound a bit better!

      • Sound quality for stuff you recorded yourself could be good given good equipment and nice tapes, but pre-recorded releases were dubbed at high speed and generally sounded awful.

        • Somebody on here once gave a good technical explanation of why prerecorded cassettes were nearly always so shitey. That said I kind of liked their weird muffled quality when I was too young to know any better.

  21. It seems I owned the “very first cassette recorder”. this one:

    http://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/2016/08/philips-el-3302-the-very-first-cassette-player/

    Not sure how that happened, but I had one when I was about 7 or 8, my brother and I would make recordings of nonsense, also recording stuff off the radio. It felt like magic to be able to do that.

    Later when my dad could afford our first stereo (after getting compensation following an accident at work), we had a Sony Cassette deck rather than a turntable. Much more useful as my dad could record classical stuff off the radio. First Beatles albums I owned were on cassette with the tracks in the wrong order (Please Please Me and A Hard Day’s Night).

    Few years later he got a turntable mainly for me to borrow records from friends and tape them, but like others when I was away at University I had a player with me and a massive box of about, ooh … 15 tapes.

  22. I have a biggish cardboard box (the one my old long-gone video recorder came in) full of cassettes from my pre-CD days.
    I threw out dozens of badly-deteriorated tapes a few house moves back. Mostly stuff I recorded off the radio in the mid-’80s. Should have avoided Currys own-brand tapes and paid more for better ones.

    • Same here – found a big box of cassettes while clearing out the loft recently. I thought they’d all gone to the tip with the VHS tapes a few years ago, so I was interested to see what I’d kept. Some live gig tapes of my last band, some stuff taped from the Peel show in the late ‘70s, some Radio 2 documentaries and concerts (Steely Dan, Stones, Bowie, the usual suspects). The pre-recorded tapes I found were mostly BBC dramas and comedies – ISIHAC specials from Humph’s golden period, Goon shows, dramas (Tinker Tailor… and Smileys People, with Bernard Hepton as Smiley), PG Wodehouse…and the Radio 1 interview with John & Yoko, recorded days before the shooting – very interesting as it includes some snippets of off-air chat which I don’t think were broadcast.

  23. The blank tapes were cheap too – music industry lobbying to increase the pricing was batted back because blank tapes were used to produce talking newspapers for the blind.

    I actually recorded one of these when I worked on Hospital Radio. Two of us went through a few newspapers and read out the main stories verbatim. That was the strict instructions – no chatter, no music – just read the news. The usual people who did it were unavailable and we were brought in urgently to help. No money changed hands – all voluntary.

    As the two hour show developed it became more relaxed and we picked up on amusing items particularly about local issues. A podcast, if you will, in 1987. The humour was gentle, like in Call My Bluff or 80s Countdown because we knew the audience was largely OAPs. We played the number 1 record of that week (about a minute of it) and discussed it – Mel & Kim’s Respectable, it was.

    Bloke who ran the thing was appalled and gave me the biggest bollocking I think I have ever received in my life. Yes, I did stray from the brief a bit but after an hour of reading newspaper items verbatim I was losing the will to live.

  25. I once recorded a Sammy Hagar live album on one side of a C90 with Black and White by the Stranglers on the other (I know, get me and my eclectic tastes.) Somehow the tape became twisted so that half way through Nice n Sleazy, all of a sudden Sammy was saying…”Bill Church on bass, the electric church…”

  26. Many thanks to Rigid Digit for starting this thread. It has brought back many happy memories.

    Apart from the obvious ability to make mix tapes etc, and listen to them alone or with friends wherever, there was also the chance to record live music. I remember well smuggling a Philips tape recorder into the Colston Hall (or whatever it might be called now) in Bristol underneath my standard issue RAF greatcoat complete with loon pant/cheesecloth shirt combo to record Curved Air and others in concert. The results were just a murky unlistenable mess and got sort of listened to just the once before the tape was used for something else.

    Next memory is of me and friend (both of us studying physics and maths at A level now and again) experimenting with overdubbing and re-overdubbing badly-played twanging guitars, vocals, percussion (biscuit tins probably) via two cassette recorders. We decided to call ourselves Electromotive Force and probably put more effort into that name than we ever did into our studies or playing abilities. It all came to a shuddering halt the first time we heard Tubular Bells (recorded from John Peel’s radio programme on a cassette player of course) and decided that multi-tracking was best left to those with a modicum of ability.

    My last positive memory of cassette tapes – and as already alluded to above – is buying loads of genuine and bootleg ones in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s at ridiculously low prices before the CD era kicked off in the Middle East. They certainly introduced me to loads of stuff I would not have bothered with or could afford at UK prices and I am grateful for that (hearing The Stone Roses for the first time being a good example).

    So yes, a great invention for its time and one that gave many like me a lot of pleasure. Indeed, tucked away somewhere I still have a Sony Walkman cassette thingy that still works. I don’t know what I’m going to use it for though as I ditched all my tapes many, many years ago.

        • For about 18 months the Stereos were probably my favourite group. The first two albums were touched with genius. I’m glad they got big with Connected but it wasn’t such an interesting record. Classic “I liked them before they were popular” snobbery maybe, but their Andy Kershaw session in early 1989 was tremendous.

      • Yebbut we had something the others didn’t have: well-honed indolence and total incompetence. All the same, do you think I am owed some royalties or the like for coming up with the name first (not that anybody else knew about us apart from the two us and my mate’s mum who thought we were at least doing something to keep ourselves occupied instead of just hanging around scratching our arses)?

  27. “Home Taping Is Killing Music” warned many albums and singles in the 80s.
    Nah – it certainly didn’t. In fact at had the opposite effect of increasing sales I expect.
    Taping stuff from the Library or your mates collection would likely result in the taper forking out hard cash for the physical product at some point.
    Even YouTube or Spotify can result in physical purchase in a sort of “try before you buy” method.
    And the mix tape – a device used by like minded friends to boost the profits at Our Price.
    And it’s still happening in this corner of the internet with the Afterword CD Swap
    (or as it’s now known “3 CDs have arrived in my letterbox. Looks like I’m trawling Amazon again”)

  28. 1. Back in the cassette era, I made hundreds of compilation cassettes (which now tend to be known as “mix tapes”, I see) either for myself or for friends. One of our cars is from 1999, and still has a cassette player in it. I love playing the old cassettes, and sometimes, when some obscure track comes up, I think “what on earth is this?”.

    2. When the computer-with-CD-drives era came along, I thought ‘Great’! I’ll be able to make compilation CDs in exactly the same way, and it’ll be a lot quicker than the old laborious process of recording every track painstakingly onto a cassette. But somehow … I never did make many mix-CDs. I don’t know why. Somehow, the process of lovingly compiling and recording the collection, and writing up all the song titles on the inlay card, just wasn’t as much fun with a CD drive. The magic wasn’t there. Strange…

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