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.