Reel Life Experiences

We were a generation engaged in criminality , those of us who were brought up in the 1970's, and all thanks to the phenomena of the Compact Cassette.

We spent hours and hours with our portable cassette recorders stealing away music in complete and utter disregard but more likely ignorance of the damage we were inflicting on the industry. How many millions of pounds of royalties were denied to struggling and not so struggling musicians and composers by our illegal activity with a magnetic tape sound recording format?

In many ways the making of recordings was a bit seedy and clandestine, but all the more exciting for it. Crude it was also. The whole house had to be silent if the tape recorder was carefully placed close to a stereo speaker of our parents' music system. The microphone could cope with a low volume output but also picked up the background noise of the washing machine in the kitchen, the doorbell, younger brothers and their toppling lego structures, sisters' hairdryers and even the odd low fly past of a Vulcan bomber or McDonnell Douglas Phantom.

The overall quality was therefore scratchy, hissy and boomy but possession of a recording was a very valuable thing for anyone interested in music and amongst their peer group. Unfortunately my first recordings were of TV theme tunes rather than pop songs. A very stubborn memory is of sitting on the riverbank fishing whilst listening to the borrowed (without permission) family portable cassette player, a posh vinly covered Sony, playing the theme music from 'Bless This House'. In a careless moment the equipment slipped and fell into the river and for a few brief moments I heard the music bubbling and gurgling for attention until too far submerged for the sound waves to penetrate. Retrieved from the riverbed using a landing net the Sony was smuggled home and carefully dismantled before being exposed to the warm air output of a hair dryer. Miraculously it worked and did so for many subsequent years.

The main problem with the actual compact cassettes was their fragility. The outer casing was squashable and in an easily fractured plastic. The tape was prone to snapping. It was possible to do a sellotape splicing repair to re-join the severed ends but only if the shell of the cassette had screw fixings.Very, very tiny fittings.  It was a very tricky operation as splitting the case could allow the miniature spools, felt head, linings and the actual tape to spill out like guts. A successful repair and re-assembly allowed the cassette to continue in use but with a short, silent spot in any music when it reached the patched section.

The actual quality of compact cassettes was very diverse. As teenagers we could argue for hours over whether TDK were better than Maxell or if Scotch ruled because they had the best TV advert, the one with the skeleton. A C60 cassette, therefore 30 minutes each side or a C90 were the most popular and what better Christmas present was there for a youngster than an economy pack of ten shrink wrapped blank tapes. Our family seemed to have a floating pool of cassettes for use so if anyone wanted to prevent over-recording it was necessary to snap off the write protect tab on the narrow top edge. As soon as it was common knowledge that a sliver of sellotape could restore the recording function at the loss of any favourite music nothing was safe ever again. We were a family living on the edge of our nerves, with any trust between members gone.

The dreaded sudden silence of an interrupted song usually meant that the tape was being incessantly chewed by the machine. Worst case was a crimped and squashed brown mash of tape which had to be extracted by a slow pulling process. Many roadside verges were soon festooned with the full contents of  compact cassettes, caught amongst the vegetation and trailing in the breeze. I was told, but did not attempt to validate, that a C90 cassette was actually, unravelled, about 433 feet long.

The compact cassette was a major part of my youth. It persisted in commonplace use from the 1970's and right through until the late 1990's. In many ways it had represented a major technological leap forward to provide a resource for the mass population from the earlier 8 track cartridge and the elitist reel to reel equipment. What was to follow in the form of CD's , mini discs and beyond only served to confine the tape to the category of a museum piece. The ultimate insult was the proposal by the Oxford English Dictionary to remove any reference to 'Cassette Tape' from its 2011 edition.