Old-style cassette taping still presses all the right buttons

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Somebody put a photo up on Facebook recently, a photo of an old VHS tape with details of contents on the little white sticker you could put on the side. At some stage over the tape’s lifecycle, those contents had changed from the Pope’s funeral to Harry Potter.

Proof that you can wipe out history and replace it with Harry, summing up the variety of life in one humble video cassette.

Nowadays, of course, you don’t have to wipe anything because there’s a cloud out there that can store all of life’s memories to be pulled down for viewing anywhere you like.

No more box of bulky tapes under the telly with those stickers on the side to tell you that one has the unexpurgated version of the Holy Communion and the other has George Hamilton describing Ray Houghton putting the ball in the English net in Stuttgart at the European Championships of 1988.

Equally, no more home cassettes of your favourite songs – probably stolen from Larry Gogan’s Top Thirty because we didn’t have any other source – where you tried to have the razor-sharp response to get as much of the song and as little of the DJ as possible.

To listen back to your newly constructed compilation tape, you needed a tape recorder of course; none of your ultra-light iPods with ear buds – more of a big black brick with buttons bigger than piano keys and a sound that had the quality of a recording made in a windy gap.

But that didn’t matter one whit; you only hoped that Larry didn’t start talking over Hazel O’Connor’s Will You? until after the big sax finish.

We marvelled at the evolution from cassette to CD player – but we never envisaged a world of MP3s or downloads where the audio has the quality of an orchestra and the little digital player no more obtrusive than a matchbox.

But there’s a funny thing about all fashion cycles; what once was de rigeur will eventually come round again; think flared jeans or crop-tops, beards, long hair, big shoes, waistcoats . . . and music.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.