Press Rewind and Start Again I Wanna Play That Scene When We First Met Lyrics
F ifty years ago this month at a radio exhibition in Berlin, a iii-inch-past-4-inch product was unveiled. Half a century on, it doesn't look like much. But information technology was cheap, portable, like shooting fish in a barrel to copy, and these simple, functional qualities held magic within them. They also helped the cassette revolutionise music for the masses, and shaped how music is used socially, creatively and psychologically.
CDs and downloads may have long superseded the apprehensive C90, and its obsolescence seemed assured when Sony stopped manufacturing the Walkman in 2010. But against the odds, the cassette has whirred into fabulous life again, and on 7 September, an international outcome will celebrate its resurgence. At 25 venues in the United kingdom and 50 others worldwide, Cassette Store Day will showcase the growing tendency for cassette-only releases, with large labels such as Polydor and Domino getting in on the human activity, alongside piddling DIY startups.
For a format that was last the industry leader 22 years ago, information technology's not an inconsiderable accomplishment. There is still something in those spools that captures the imagination, a tangible, human connectedness around tape that makes us want to press play…
one The compact cassette is unveiled – and revolutionises the anthology marketplace
Tape for sound storage was first showcased at the Berlin Radio Bear witness in 1935, on the reel-to-reel Magnetophon machine, only information technology would take some other 3 decades for the stereo compact cassette to arrive. Dutch manufacturer Philips got there first in 1963, alongside the first bombardment-powered lightweight cassette thespian.
Albums on cassette arrived in the Usa in 1966, with Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt and Johnny Mathis among the offset artists on tape; the United kingdom followed suit in 1967. Intriguingly, cassettes also fabricated the anthology a more pregnant format. Equally it was harder to select tracks on cassette than on record, listening to an album serially, without skipping, became ingrained in music civilisation. Cassettes likewise allowed more time for the anthology than vinyl. The standard LP length was 45 minutes in total; meaty cassettes immune up to 45 minutes per side.
2 Portable music arrives – and starts changing our brains
The Walkman is normally credited as the production that made people carry their music around with them. Still, Philips was marketing the portable nature of its EL3301T cassette decks as early equally 1966. They also had speakers, long before boomboxes and mobile phones pushed sounds out in public.
The arrival of the in-motorcar cassette deck in the early 1970s is as well oft forgotten, turning every motorcar journey into a sound-and-vision motion-picture show. In-machine decks were as well the first machines to have an "auto-reverse" function, assuasive listeners to savour music on a loop without taking their eyes off the road. (The terminal car to have a cassette deck was manufactured relatively recently – the 2010 Lexus SC430 convertible.)
Raymond Macdonald, Professor of Music Psychology at Edinburgh University, believes that portable cassettes changed the very way we thought about ourselves. "Earlier going out and travelling with our music, we could now brand psychological choices. How do I feel right now? How practise I desire to feel in five minutes? What kind of music is going to help me reach these goals? And if I'm on the train, who will overhear what I'm playing?"
This was a new psychological phenomenon, which became fifty-fifty more important with the advent of the compilation tape. "The cassette suddenly became a representation of your whole personality, a tool to brand someone else feel the emotions that you experience. Information technology as well helped people create new narratives out of the music they liked, and past extension, of their lives. The cassette taught people a new kind of cocky-medicated therapy."
3 The hole-and-corner tape market takes off (and makes some musicians coin)
As blank tapes got cheaper to buy, musicians could tape themselves more easily, without the demand of a characterization to help them. This helped DIY genres such as post-punk, which had an active mail-order civilization, and it likewise flourished in hip-hop, where it proved lucrative for some.
In the late 70s, Grandmaster Wink would charge a dollar a minute for customised "political party tapes" for richer fans. He would shout out the buyer'due south name every bit part of his raps, and also requite mixtapes to cab drivers who did "agree calls" – driving high-end clients around New York, without a destination, simply to listen to music. In 2007, Flash told MTV that he used to make "a couple k dollars a month, easy, just doing this" – $6,000 in today'due south coin.
Major labels in the UK also capitalised on the absurd cachet of the cassette. In 1980, Bow Wow Wow were signed to EMI, and had a pocket-size hit with the kickoff ever cassette single, C30 C60 C90 Become. Information technology featured the lines: "So I don't buy records in your shop/ Now I tape them all." In 1981, Island launched its curt-lived One Plus One range, featuring a complete anthology on side i, and the aforementioned album once again on side ii – but crucially without copy protection, assuasive fans to record over the music. Albums in the range included John Martyn's Solid Air and U2's Boy, and the inserts read: "Ane side what yous similar. One side whatsoever yous similar."
The Dead Kennedys also adopted this idea on their belatedly-1981 EP, In God Nosotros Trust, Inc. Printed on the bare B-side was the message: "Abode taping is killing record industry profits! Nosotros left this side blank and so you can assistance."
4 Music magazines find new life, on cassette
In Nov 1981, SFX Cassette became the first music magazine to exist not on paper, but tape. Young advertising executive Hugh Salmon ready it up with NME journalist Max Bell, and it broke the mould in several ways. For case, Salmon begged the Performing Rights Order to let SFX to feature 20- to thirty-second extracts of pop songs in every event – predating the iTunes song-excerpt model past a few decades. "I recall disarming them that a prune would tempt someone into ownership information technology, only wouldn't be satisfying enough to satisfy them totally," says Salmon. "Back then, information technology seemed like a radical argument."
SFX Cassette also grabbed incredible scoops, including ane from Paul McCartney, Salmon says. "I remember ane of McCartney'south people just ringing Max, and Max going white, starting to milk shake." A fan of the magazine, McCartney wanted to speak to SFX near his reaction to the death of John Lennon – the very showtime time he had done then. The enterprising Salmon ran the interview over 2 problems.
The tape magazine closed in 1982 because of production costs, but cassettes thrived instead as give-aways on magazine covers. Compilations curated by journalists attracted extra readers for magazines such every bit Melody Maker and Select. In 1986, NME'southward C86 compilation featuring new bands on British indie labels also had a peculiarly long shelf life, propelling the rising of indie in the belatedly 1980s, and featuring an opening runway past Fundamental Scream.
5 Cassettes help music spread in the eastern bloc
Music was heavily censored in fe curtain countries in the 1980s, just an underground cassette culture in Poland helped music to travel. In Poland, rock music wasn't banned as information technology was in other communist countries, but record releases were extremely rare. "Only a few bands were able to release things," remembers Wojtek Kozielski, who ran the RED tapes label in Wrocław in due south-westward Poland in the tardily 1980s. "And patently, lyrics had to be approved by censors. Also, angrier, younger groups were never allowed to record in studios, and could simply occasionally play festivals and small student clubs."
Merely when they did, the audience members brought their cassette recorders with them. A tape-swapping culture grew, on plain tapes, without artwork or track lists. Often, these recordings were taped over albums officially sanctioned by the government – mostly pop hits past Polish middle-of-the-road artists such as Krzysztof Krawczyk or Jerzy Połomski. Music fans used to tape over language lessons on cassettes too – a applied necessity when bare tapes were hard to buy, simply too a pointed act of resistance.
Shortly, bands from the USSR, E Federal republic of germany and Czechoslovakia were also being heard in Poland. Labels similar Kozielski's likewise started releasing recordings by supportive artists from other countries, such as Holland'due south the Ex, and the UK's Chumbawamba. "There was even a plan to release a compilation tape of songs rejected by censors," Kozielski recalls. "Just this never saw the lite of solar day considering of one very happy reason: the ballot in 1989, the beginning contained government since the state of war, and the end of censorship."
vi Alan Saccharide helps terminate the 'Home Taping Is Killing Music' campaign
He may be amend known at present for firing corporate wannabes on his BBC TV show, but Alan Sugar was a big player in the 1980s cassette marketplace. Having seen Abrupt's twin-cassette deck – which immune 1 cassette to be copied directly on to another – Sugar decided to develop ane for the mass market. At this time, the BPI was running its famous Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign, following concerns that cassettes would help the infringement of copyright and a decline in anthology sales. Sugar'southward twin-deck launch in 1987 was accompanied by an advert that said that copying was illegal, simply CBS Songs however took his company, Amstrad, to courtroom. They lost. The House of Lords ruled that "the accused conferred the power to copy merely did non grant the right to re-create, therefore did not authorise the infringement" – ie manufacturers were not liable for the actions of their customers.
seven The live bootleg blast
London'southward Camden Lock Market was once total of stalls selling bootleg cassette recordings of gigs, a scene replicated, on a smaller calibration, upward and downwardly the country. Some had inlays featuring band photos photocopied on to brightly coloured carte, and many were made past a notorious bootlegger called Big Al.
A one-time colleague, Ian Macdonald, remembers him on Smiths fansite Smithstorrents.co.great britain. "He was into bootlegging in a big way. He had farms of tape dubbing equipment, expensive industrial strength machines." Big Al had standards in other means as well. "If a Springsteen show finished at 11pm on Friday, Al could and would accept 100 copies of it on sale the next morn in Camden and on Portobello Road."
The bootlegger would go upwardly the front of the gigs with a WM-D6C machine – a 1980s Sony recording Walkman model, with Dolby C noise reduction – and put his head in the stacks, Macdonald recalls. However, Large Al disappeared from the business after a BPI raid on Camden Lock in 1987, in which "4,605 tapes with an estimated street value of more £twenty,000" were seized, co-ordinate to Music Week reports at the time. The live bootleg trade, still, carried on, admitting murkily, for the next decade.
8 The cassingle has its final hurrah
Between 1985 and 1992, cassette was the most popular format in the UK, before a pocket-size silver disc started ruining the political party. The Britpop boom provided a last hurrah for the humble cassingle, a format dying in popularity every bit CD sales grew. Brian Cannon of the blueprint company Microdot made one notable cassingle curio: the cassette version of Oasis's Cigarettes and Alcohol, made up to look, and open up, like a bundle of 20 cigarettes.
"It was an idea from the Creation marketing department, I retrieve," says Cannon now, "although I'g sure Noel [Gallagher] would say it was his! At that place was then much money in the industry at the time, nosotros could try anything with blueprint." Cannon was given a template, and the rest was up to him – although the concluding product courted controversy at the time. "Nosotros were told nosotros were glamorising smoking," Cannon remembers. "As if a 16-year-old boy would start ownership cigarettes off the dorsum of a single in a cardboard box!"
Another notable Britpop detail was the cassingle version of Elastica's Waking Up, designed by Jon Anonymous: made upward like a packet of cards, with a spade cut out of the front end, it had a ring member trading card inside.
9 The cult of the cassette returns, in fuzzy sound
In 2010, the same twelvemonth that Sony stopped producing the Walkman, the Wall Street Periodical published a piece about a new genre, chillwave. Chillwave was essentially fuzzily-recorded, 80s-inspired pop; music that sounded like it was recorded on to, and meant to exist played on, tape.
Ernest Greene of Washed Out was i of its earliest practitioners, releasing his first EP, 2009'south High Times, on to customised cassette. He told the Wall Street Journal how this human activity was a reaction towards anonymised culture. "The absurd thing virtually cassettes is that they are made by paw and each one sounds slightly different, so it makes for a more personal experience," he said.
These feelings persist amid other immature musicians. Hardcore punk revivalists Loom are releasing a limited-edition album on cassette this month, featuring covers of 80s bands such every bit Jesus Cadger and Bad Brains. "The quality of cassettes lends them to the music nosotros make," says singer Tarik Badwan (blood brother of singer Faris from the Horrors). "But y'all've got to look after cassettes as well. Information technology takes more care to make a cassette, do the artwork, store it and keep information technology. You don't forget well-nigh it similar music on your figurer."
He thinks younger music fans are peckish a deeper relationship with the way music sounds as well. "People are fed up with things being shiny and polished, or fake-raw – through-the-effects-desk-raw. People want to hear things that are rough and more real."
10 The rising of the cassette labels – and Cassette Store Day
Cassette Store Day co-founder DJ Jen Long expected the upshot to be a i-off celebration at London's Rough Merchandise East shop – not an international operation running in shops in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, the Usa, Scandinavia and Argentine republic, involving more than xxx major and independent labels. "We're in shock," she says. She began her own cassette label, Kissability, in 2011, but says she knows why cassettes still entreatment over other formats. "CDs experience similar a thing you buy at a prove to get your songs on to your computer. They're a center homo. MP3s don't feel as exciting to me as putting out a physical product either – y'all're not waiting for them to arrive at your door, or giving them to a band for the commencement time, putting them in your record deck, hearing it play." The sound as well has a certain appeal - Bobby Gillespie is quoted on the Cassette Shop Twenty-four hours website praising tapes' 'warm and fat' quality, and their 'unique bottom end'.
Tapes are too much cheaper to put out than vinyl, adds Long, and in a tough economic climate, this means that cassette labels can take more risks. (With vinyl production, labels also have to make at least 250 copies; with tapes, release volumes can be small, and more exclusive.)
Long's not the only i doing this either. While sales figures are nonetheless miniscule, hundreds of new cassette labels accept begun over the past few years; her favourites include Suplex, Reeks of Attempt and Sexbeat, which is releasing a Cassette Store Day exclusive by Polaris music prize winners Fucked Up. Limited-edition cassette releases by bigger artists are on auction too. The Flaming Lips are releasing their recent anthology on record for the occasion, while Haim are rereleasing their debut EP,Forever.
There is nostalgia in the mix as well, Long admits, although she's quick to quash any criticism of the revival beingness a hipster fad. "We're putting out bands that we love. We're celebrating music that we beloved! It's about doing something that makes economic sense, that makes us all happy. Tapes involve effort, y'all know? They always have."
Cassette Store Day is on Saturday 7 September
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/30/cassette-store-day-music-tapes
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