Still Life With Cassettes

I was never a lover of vinyl, considering it a necessary evil if one wanted to own the music pressed on it, and so took to cassettes with enthusiasm. Although essentially lo-fi due to their dictation-machine origins, they were capable of making pretty faithful copies. I had a top-of-the-range 3-head Sony cassette deck and it was fabulous. I would record off the radio and from vinyl as pristine as I could find, or later on from CDs. I worked at the BBC Gramophone Library and was allowed "weekend listening" so this was hardly a problem. When I suffered a major burglary in the seventies, the theft of my cassette collection was the most traumatic aspect of it, as it was irreplaceable and represented many, many hours, days and weeks of accumulation.

By the time I went over to mini-discs I had built up a collection again, and although it seldom gets played these days, it does include a lot of Peel sessions and In Concert recordings unavailable commercially. A section of it is shown here, using the 'Dramatic' effect filter again.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the cassette, introduced by Philips in 1962, and is currently being celebrated on 6 Music. A friend of mine had an early cassette recorder and used to take it to gigs. I often used to see him asking a performer such as Roy Harper or Bridget St John if he could attach his plastic microphone to their mike stand. I don't remember him ever being refused. I have a very poor, but historic, recording he made when we went to see the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane at the Roundhouse.

Of course, the record companies claimed 'home taping' was killing music, whilst trying to flog their poorly duplicated and overpriced cassingles and musicassettes, vastly inferior to the ones one could make for oneself at home from a CD.

What finally almost killed home taping, of course, was the ability to download an MP3 or FLAC file of almost any piece of music onto a computer, tablet or smartphone.

L.
9.12.2012

Blip #867
Consecutive Blip #080
Day #988

Cassettes (Wikipedia page)

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Bow Wow Wow - C30, C60, C90, Go! (1980)
EMI refused to promote the cassingle of C30, C60, C90, Go! It allegedly promoted home taping as Side B was blank. I've chosen the Spanish version.
At the Gramophone Library, all singles were put into protective sleeving and the paper sleeves and any picture sleeves supplied were discarded. I used to rescue some of the picture sleeves I was interested in, and I also saved this, which has the English lyric for this Bow Wow Wow single.

One year ago: Malmesbury