Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Both sides of a C90

Will these start going up in value?So apparently the cassette tape is dead (good old Currys, whenever you need a bit of press rather than do something with your prices, just kill something off - bards). Back when I was doing my O'Levels, like most kids I used to tape tunes off John Peel and worked to a 6:1 ratio. That is, he played one decent chill-out Orb or hardcore techno tune for every six African guitar, thrash Extreme Noise Terror or unlistenable The Fall track. Anyhoo, I used to "mix" these compilation cassettes with Dads two tape decks through an old Radio Shack mixer (incidentally, whatever happened to Tandy?) and back onto my old Sony ghetto blaster (with very cool 'detachable' speakers). Ok, there was no speed altering beat mixing as such, but it was good fun at the time. One night when my Nanna was over staying (Christmas I think), I was up in my room playing with tapes and she came in, and proceeded to grab an old second-hand Shure mic I had. She then sang some first world war ballad old school pub singer stylee over the top of the mix I was making. I was killing myself laughing at the time, but the mash-up actually worked well, her singing this old Irish lament over the top of my ambient techno instrumental nonsense. Years later when she died, I remembered about the tape and went through the box in my dads garage which had all my old stuff. Couldn't find it. Went up the loft and went through boxes of my old 2000 AD comics, Shoot and Zzap64, but no tape of my Nanna singing over the top of The Orb. I broke my heart up there, and to this day I would give away my whole music collection just to hear it one more time.

3 Comments:

Blogger Ian said...

Nice story. My memory of tapes is copying games, holding down the tape deck when loading to get copies to work. The good old days of Amstrad CPC 464. Bliss.

Head over Heels and Mercenary are two of my all time favourite games from the old beast.

5/08/2007 07:36:00 pm  
Blogger dietbruboy said...

Did you ever have one of these for footering with your tape heads? Those were the days!

5/08/2007 10:17:00 pm  
Blogger Unknown said...

M8, coming through Dubai recently I was amazed that you could get cass-ingles from the Duty Free. Also the Cassette tape is living quite well and has a pretty good shelf life in Australia. New cars are so expensive that people are still driving around in their 1970's / 1980's cars - tapes galore. Better still I listen to Triple J (look for the station on t'internet) and to my amazement last week in the mix - Planet Rock followed very closely by I Know you got soul. Africa Bambatta and Eric B & Rakim - Hip Hop Old Skool Tastic.

5/09/2007 07:33:00 am  

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