Archive News
Memories of halcyon days when cassette was still the king
Date Published: 16-May-2012
There was a time when the cassette tape was king, when an entire Sunday afternoon was spent listening to Ireland’s Top Thirty and trying to be quick-fingered enough to hit the ‘record’ button just after Larry Gogan stopped talking and stop it just before he started all over again.
This was no mean feat of concentration because Larry was – and is – one of the nation’s great talkers; not for him the sound of silence during the guitar intro or the sax solo at the end. It’s probably why Larry made it onto more cassette tapes than their owners had ever intended.
Back then before iTunes, the only way to come up with a compilation of your favourite tracks – or what’s now known as a playlist – was to tune into 2FM and wait with baited breath to see if you recognised the latest hits from the first notes so you didn’t miss the start of the vocals.
We even recorded off the telly, imploring the rest of the family to stay quiet while you held your old top loading cassette recorder to the TV’s solitary speaker waiting for Dave Lee Travis or Tony Blackburn to count down to number one.
God help us – in this pre-video era, some of us even audio-taped soccer matches so that we could at least relive the commentary from FA Cup or All-Ireland Finals as we recorded the pictures with our imagination.
In the seventies, C60 and C90 tapes was every bit as big as the iPod – metaphorically, because in reality they were much bigger – with the only differences being that you had to manually spool them back to the beginning with a pencil and make sure you didn’t stretch them or allow them to unravel and clog your recorder.
Like vinyl, it looked as though they’d had their day, to be confined to some Museum of Music so that kids could come and laugh at how Jurassic we were back in the day.
But like LP’s, this may not prove to be the case because cassette tapes are making a bit of a comeback, driven largely by nostalgia for a different era – and if you have a box of blank ones gathering dust in the attic you’ll be delighted to learn that internet auction sites are currently flogging individual cassettes for over £20 a pop.
There may not be the same demand for your own collection of Boney M classics or Jimmy Magee Golden Moments, but then again……
And even if the cassette will never again reclaim its throne from the iPod or the digital download, it’s nice to think that it hasn’t gone the way of the dodo – and we might relive a little of our childhood once again.
Worldwide sales of audio tapes slumped by 60 per cent during the nineties, forcing manufacturers such as Maxell and TDK to slim down their ranges while Philips, the Dutch electronics giant which launched the first tape in 1963 at the Berlin Radio Show, ceased production altogether.
The popularity of tapes peaked in 1988 when 73 million music tapes were sold, compared to LP records which peaked at 58 million in 1975.
But now Yahoo has reported "a bump in searches" for ‘blank cassette tapes’ – up 210 per cent – and ‘music cassette tapes’ – up 110 per cent.
That should be incentive enough to have a root around down the back of the couch or tackle the deepest recesses of those drawers that haven’t been opened since the advent of colour television.
Because 40 years on from their heyday, a small fortune might still be lurking in your attic – or, if you’re still living at home and things haven’t improved from your teenage days, perhaps try under your bed first.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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