Cassette Tapes, Taping The Charts And Walkmans

Sunday teatime, finger hovering over record and play, and the DJ talking over the intro every single week.

That was the whole system.

Taping the charts

• The Radio 1 chart show on a Sunday, counting down, with a blank tape ready.
• Two buttons pressed together - record and play - and the pause button as your only editing tool.
• The DJ talking over the intro, and over the outro, and sometimes into the next song.
• Getting a clean recording of a song you loved and treating it like a small victory.
• The Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign, which was on the inner sleeve of half the records in the house.
• Recording the top 40 every week and taping over the ones that dropped out.
• Listening back and hearing your mum shout something from the kitchen, permanently preserved.

The mixtape

• Made for someone specific, in an order that meant something, which was the point.
• Writing the track list on the paper insert in tiny handwriting.
• The agony of a song that was thirty seconds too long for the end of the side.
• C60, C90 and C120 - the C90 being the standard, and the C120 snapping because the tape was too thin.
• TDK and Maxell, and the argument about which was better.
• Chrome versus ferric, which almost nobody understood and everyone had a view on.
• A mixtape took ninety minutes to make in real time. That was the gift.

The practical misery

• The tape being chewed by the machine, and pulling out yards of it with your fingers.
• Winding it back in with a pencil or a biro, which worked perfectly.
• Fast forwarding to find a track and never landing in the right place.
• Auto-reverse, when it arrived, feeling like magic.
• The click and thunk at the end of a side.
• Tape hiss, and Dolby noise reduction that everyone left on or off at random.
• Labelling it, then taping over it and not relabelling it.

The Walkman and after

• The Sony Walkman from 1979, which invented private listening in public.
• Batteries, which ran out and slowed the tape down so the music sagged.
• The foam headphone covers that always came off.
• The Discman, which skipped if you so much as walked.
• Anti-skip buffering, which helped slightly.
• MiniDisc, which was excellent and lost.
• The iPod in 2001, which ended all of it, and the phrase 'a thousand songs in your pocket'.

Shop cards

How to write it so it lands

• A hexagonal pencil fits the spool exactly.
• A mixtape took ninety real minutes. That was the gift.
• The DJ talked over the intro every single week.

Where to shop next

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Frequently asked questions

Why did people tape the charts off the radio?

Because buying every single you liked was unaffordable, and there was no other way to hear a specific song on demand. The chart show was the one time a week almost everything you wanted got played.

What was Home Taping Is Killing Music?

A record industry campaign from the early eighties, with a cassette-and-crossbones logo, printed on record sleeves. It did not work.

Why did you use a pencil with a cassette?

A hexagonal pencil fits the spool hub exactly, so you could wind chewed tape back in, or rewind without using battery power.

What's the difference between C60 and C90?

Total running time - 60 or 90 minutes across both sides. C120 existed but the tape was so thin it jammed and stretched, which is why nobody trusted them.