Currys to dump the cassette tape as downloading soars
08.05.07
The end of the road for the cassette
We've all got them.
They lurk clogged with dust, either in the backs of cupboards and drawers or stored under our beds in battered college trunks, along with old exam papers, love letters, barely remembered essays and all the memorabilia of our younger selves.
I'm talking about audio cassettes, that innovation of the mid Sixties which made it possible for the first time to rerecord favourite tracks from our albums and take the music with us wherever we went.
Overnight, car journeys became the greatest concerts we ever heard.
It seemed the most brilliant invention ever. Up to two hours of music of one's own choice, in the order one wanted it, crammed into a little plastic container.
How many millions of hours must have been spent in bedrooms the world over, struggling with what seemed like life and death decisions about which tracks to choose?
Neil Young's Heart Of Gold or the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter? Bruce Springsteen's Hungry Heart or Dire Straits' Romeo And Juliet? The Smiths or Talking Heads?
And do you remember the despair when your cassette machine malfunctioned and chewed up your tape?
Well, soon such memories, cherished or lamented, will be consigned to history.
Yesterday, the giant electrical chain Currys announced that it has stopped stocking cassettes. Only 100,000 were sold in the UK last year, compared with 83 million in 1989.
Even worse may be the news that from Christmas they won't be selling any more hi-fi systems with tape decks either.
Apparently, hardly anyone wants to buy them now. They've been overtaken by the digital world.
So even if you've saved all your cassettes, and it's believed that there may be 500 million still around, you may have nothing to play them on.
Sometimes, I think progress can be very cruel.
Today, portable music is everywhere. On trains and buses we watch young people unconsciously moving their knees or feet as, with a wire plugged into their ears, they listen to their MP3 players or mobile phones.
But 40-odd years ago, the only way to re-record your music was to own a hideously expensive and massively heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder, the microphone of which you stood up alongside your Dansette record player.
It was, at best, an inexact process, the sound of a passing car in the street being frequently found as an unwanted and unexpected accompaniment to your treasured tracks when you played them back.
Then, in 1963, Philips introduced the "compact cassette" in Europe and a year later in America. They came in different formats usually dictated by the length of recording time, C30, C60 and C120 being the most popular.
Amazingly, Philips did not charge royalties on its design, so it quickly became universally accepted.
At its peak, in the mid-1980s, pre-recorded cassettes sold an amazing 900 million copies a year, more than half of all music sales across the world.
And that's not allowing for that most precious of all commodities — the blank cassette.
With the advent of the tape and its player, the forerunner of the Sony Walkman of the Seventies, the modern musical nerd was born.
Indeed, has there ever been a musically sentient boy in the Western world who hasn't at some time compiled cassettes (or later burned CDs) of his favourites records?
I doubt it. And don't think I'm being sexist. As Nick Hornby dramatised in his novel High Fidelity, compiling records and listing them is overwhelmingly a boys' preoccupation.
Some boys, it's been said, put together favourite tracks for the ever-hopeful purposes of seduction.
Well, maybe a bit of fake orgasm from Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby might occasionally have hastened the doffing of the odd knicker. Who knows?
But it always seemed to me that by far the greater purpose of the compilation cassette or CD was as a definition of its maker.
You want to know about me? You can almost hear the boy asking. I'll send you a tape or disc of my favourite records.
The cassette also managed to turn an entire generation of previously law-abiding people into thieves, for no one ever took the slightest bit of notice of the fact that we were infringing someone's copyright by making recordings from our records.
But it never felt like theft. We were just sharing something we loved.
Now I have to admit to something else. Stuffed in boxes in my study are hundreds of interviews on cassette of some very, very famous people.
Because, in my case, not only was the humble cassette my way of copying my favourite music, it was also the secret of my success.
When I arrived in Fleet Street in 1967, I had one huge disadvantage. I just couldn't learn shorthand.
But timing is everything. With almighty good fortune, which almost looks like divine intervention, the cassette recorder had not long been invented.
With virtually my first pay cheque I bought one. No one else I knew owned one. I taped every interview I ever did from then on.
At the time, I was known for getting great quotes. I didn't get them. My cassette player did.
Unfortunately, cassettes, then in their infancy, were expensive, so for a year the same ones got re-used.
Thus, an interview with Jimi Hendrix was wiped to record Mick Jagger, while George Best was wiped for Charlie Watts.
Then, as I began to earn a little more money, I began to realise that the words of some of these people might be of more than a moment's interest and I stopped wiping the tapes.
Every interview now got its own cassette, sometimes more than one.
And I've been stuck with them ever since — 500 or so cassettes of interviews with people such as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Keith Richards, Ringo Starr, James Baldwin, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Tom Stoppard...
I've got Dusty Springfield teasing me into asking her if she liked girls, Enoch Powell talking about the love poems he wrote as a student, John Lennon saying good and bad things about Paul McCartney, and Marc Bolan telling me he could fly.
Of course, none of these cassettes ever gets played, and unless I keep my cassette player serviced, they never will, as its going to be hard to find a new player soon.
And now, I suppose, I'll have to join the digital age if I'm going to do any more interviews. Which will be a shame, because, although hardly anyone else might use them, I like cassettes.
In fact, the last interview I did a few weeks ago was on cassette. The subject was Pete Best, the Beatle who was sacked before the band became famous. It might be fitting if he was my last interview on tape.
I don't suppose many tears will be shed for the passing of the cassette. There are so many cleverer ways of collecting music now, and with far better sound reproduction. Downloading on to an iPod is easy and pretty well instantaneous.
But real loving hours of work were devoted to compiling a cassette to give someone. Wasn't that at least half the joy of it?
Anyone need any blanks?....or VHS tapes too?....Or some old 8 Tracks?.....those were the days huh?
8th May 2007 11:06 AM
Saint Sway
it seems as if the purpose of this writers story wasnt to break the "scoop" that cassette tapes have fallen by the wayside, but to name drop everyone he interviewed in the 70s.
8th May 2007 11:43 AM
CraigP
I like casettes.
I still record LIVE music on multi-track.
8th May 2007 11:46 AM
mojoman
damn i havent played a cassette in months. it sounded so shitty..........
8th May 2007 11:52 AM
Highwire Rob
I only have a cassette player in my '94 Olds Ciera!
Before I got the car, I gave all my cassettes away
Does anyone want to sell me Tattoo You cassette on the cheap?
8th May 2007 12:18 PM
Dan
I think the most surprising thing is that 100,000 blanks were sold recently. I have thousands of the things and just found a deck at a garage sale in perfect condition for $10. I guess I better get cracking on transferring everything that's transferrable.
8th May 2007 12:46 PM
oldkr
i like tapes to but with a $3 cable and audacity you can transfer them to digital easily, i never clean them up when i do it, i like all that hissing and crunching
OLDKR
8th May 2007 01:05 PM
Starbuck
my first copy of exile was on a cassette. got it from columbia house record club in the tenth grade for only one cent! do you believe that shit!
that tape also remains the only tape i've ever owned that i listened to it so much it wore out.
i am proud of that fact. i put it on resumes when applying for new jobs. it makes me undeniably "hip".
8th May 2007 01:40 PM
Dan
Last time I counted, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 boxes of tapes. Really only masters and first gens a friend taped are worth transferring.
8th May 2007 02:00 PM
Poplar
oh man .. this article really hit home for me.
i also owned exile on cassette, as well as some girls - wore their asses out ... and the "copy" of my brother's Hot Rocks (proudly took that one to the UK in the early 90's). Tapes also brought me my first Stones bootlegs (Overload, Handsome Girls, etc.) And then the biggie: ALL THOSE PHISH SHOWS. holy hell, i DO have boxes of them under my bed. god ... so sad.
8th May 2007 04:03 PM
Honky Tonk Man
Unless there are some incredibly young posters here, I think cassettes would have played a huge role in most of our lives. They certainly did for me in the beginning. Whether it was recording the top 40 off of Radio 1 or purchasing Hot Rocks, there is no doubting that this old format was essential in my discovering of music. I specifically remember sitting in our back room taping my dad’s vinyl of Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).
8th May 2007 04:19 PM
pdog
8th May 2007 04:23 PM
pdog
Gone but not forgotten
8th May 2007 04:30 PM
_Boomy_
8th May 2007 04:35 PM
pdog
8th May 2007 04:36 PM
Joey
8th May 2007 04:37 PM
pdog
Joey!
8th May 2007 04:37 PM
pdog
joey.
8th May 2007 04:52 PM
Joey
quote:pdog wrote:
joey.
************* SIGH ***********************
8th May 2007 04:56 PM
pdog
Whatever!!!
Oh yeah...
Joey!
8th May 2007 05:03 PM
Fiji Joe
Japanese chicks dig mp3s
8th May 2007 05:15 PM
glencar
A well-written article, for once. I see Ten Motels had NOTHING to do with it!
8th May 2007 05:50 PM
Joey
" A well-written article, for once. I see Ten Motels had NOTHING to do with it!"
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