End Of An Era

There's an article in The Independent today about the end of the line for audio cassette tapes, this follows on from the decision in the last couple of years by Pentax, Nikon and Kodak not to make 35mm cameras due to the public enthusiasm for digital and thereby bringing down the curtain on two types of media that were so ubiquitous from my early teens until fairly recently.

My ceasing to use both audio cassettes and 35mm cameras was taken in only 2005 when I decided it was time to switch to digital formats for both sound and vision. Strangely enough I began using a cassette recorder/player and a camera in the same year: 1972.

I was giving a camera as a present for the school trip to France in May 1972 and a Sanyo cassette recorder for Christmas that year. My first recording from the radio was Dave Lee Travis presenting the Christmas chart on Radio 1, on Boxing Day I set the recorder up in front of the television so that I could record The Beatles Help! film, well the sound obviously, I'd have to wait another ten years to record the pictures! The great thing about that Sanyo recorder was that was well as an 'integrated microphone' - which sounded both sexy and technologically important back then, it had an external mic. that was on a long lead so you could wander around annoying your relatives.

The tape recorder came into its own recording Johnnie Walker and John Peel. I'd buy tapes in packs of 5 so I could record John Peel's show every night. When my brother also got a tape recorder I ventured into recording us both playing various instruments and singing and then double tracking. I still have several tapes from the John Peel years, my favourite is from 1978 or 1979 when he plays The Cure singing "Always jumping on someone else's train," which has this great bit where the snare drum is used too create the sound of a train. At the end of the record John Peel says, "I've got to hear that bit again, let's try it," and he gets the needle spot on and says, "blimey, I wish I had that luck on the pools, I wouldn't have to spend time talking to the likes of you." I've used that line since, when the need and opportunity have arisen.

Of course I did what every teenager did with cassette recorders, I made a tape for the love of my life in the hope that she'd love me even more if she loved my music. It wasn't much of success though, girls in their teens that I hung out with weren't really fans of The Stones, The Who and Led Zep - it was a good job punk came along!

When I went on holiday in 1978 to Brittany with my mate Dylan we had two tapes between us for the fortnight, Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells A Story and Paul McCartney and Wings Greatest Hits, we were grateful you could pick up Radio's One and Luxembourg throughout the north of France. Music magazines saw the potential of giving away free cassettes and series like the NME's World At One, which drew heavily on the influence of Andy Kershaw, brought World Music to a bigger audience, SFX which was a music magazine only available on tape was short lived but gave exposure to a lot of diverse bands such as Cabaret Voltaire and Tools You Can Trust, who would otherwise never received exposure. Free cassettes were to the eighties what flexidiscs had been to the seventies.

I suppose the end of audio cassettes was inevitable given the declining market, in the same way that DVD's have replaced video cassettes. Cars are no longer built with cassette players, stereos have a CD player and portable stereos are now called mp3 players. Although they were a bit of a nuisance in some respects cassettes were part of my growing up, although I think the last thing I actually recorded off the radio was the BBC play of Fatherland by Robert Harris about eight years ago, I don't even have the tape anymore but I still have that version of the book on my computer's hard drive.

For the past thirty five years or so, somewhere among my possessions or in the car or at the bottom of a drawer there has been a TDK or a BASF logo peering out from among the detritus but like so many things they are now condemned to the rubbish bin of history.