Thinking back to teenage memories of tape recorder days

Date Published: {J}

Long before the land of iTunes and the internet, resourceful teenagers still had their own way of coming up with music playlists – only we used to call them cassette tapes.

And compiling your personal playlist involved listening for hours to the radio in the hope that they’d play something from Thin Lizzy or Hazel O’Connor or whoever tickled your fancy. If you’d just fallen for someone, it was happy music all the way – but break-up music was even better.

Of course the orthodox way was to buy records or tapes and help line the pockets of millionaire superstars with your pocket money – but even if you wanted to play by the copyright rules, there wasn’t much of an outlet for record shops in Oughterard.

Galway had Star Records and Zhivago, but our few pennies were spent on Shoot! or Goal or Roy of the Rovers – we didn’t have money left for Elton John.

So you bought blank cassettes; your C60 or C90 gave you an hour or hour and a half of the songs that mattered – normally minus the start and/or finish with a few words or exclamations from Larry Gogan thrown in because you weren’t fast enough with the record button.

You could have gone for the C120 tape of course to give you two hours of your favourite music, punctuated with those words of wisdom from Larry or Dave Fanning or Gerry Ryan or even Marty Whelan that you just weren’t competent enough to erase.

Editing wasn’t a skill in your toolbox, so you were left with whatever went out between the time you pressed record and the time you hit stop. Larry in particular was a divil for talking over the intro, and you could forget all about capturing the guitar or sax solo at the finish.

And bear in mind we’re going back to an era when the radio and tape recorder were separate machines, so you had to told the recorder – a front loading black box of the sort that would probably have survived an air crash – over the radio to record your music in surround sound medium wave static.

The arrival of the radio/cassette recorder was right up there with the invention of the wheel until iTunes came along; suddenly you had one device that facilitated the pirating of hit singles with just the flick of a single finger.

That’s presuming, of course, that you had the price of a boogie box in the first place. But at least, like an iPad, it was something you could aspire to.

Of course audio cassette could also record television – minus the pictures of course – and many the Top of the Pops classic could be replayed at leisure later.

So too could sports events if you could anticipate the moments of drama.

I remember recording FA Cup finals off the television; like every other house we only had one TV in the house so it meant nobody could make a sound for the duration or they’d be forever engrained in the fabric of a Frank Stapleton equaliser.

Of course the end for audio recordings from the television happened with the arrival of video – although once again that was a slow process for most homes given the prohibitive price of these devices.

It’s hard to believe even now that a video recorder back in the eighties was several times more expensive than your state-of-the-art DVD or digital TV recorder would be today.

Back in the sands of time, one can recall the battle between VHS and Betamax for the video recorder market – ultimately those who plumped for Betamax were left with the electrical equivalent of the dinosaur.

They were so big and bulky – and inevitably top loading – that they never fitted in any old telly unit; so the DVD player, by virtue of its size, shape and perhaps because its price merited prominent display anyway, was normally on top of the telly or delicately balanced on a shaky shelf.

To those who know only a world of integration, where radio, television, music and internet are all intertwined, it might seem like the dark ages when we were thrilled with a variety of clunky electronic boxes that were as compatible as Paisley and the Pope.

And of course in many ways, it was – but those teenage memories of tape recorder days are like an old familiar blanket, remembering a time when it took effort to get your music into some sort of sequence, as opposed to clicking Genius on iTunes and letting some computer do it for you.

And iTunes has never mastered how to include snatches of Larry Gogan.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.