Cluttered Like My Head

Our first tape is a C90 in a rather special clamshell type box, emblazoned with "Limited Edition" blurb, bragging about the "Unique Design" and which for some reason I have given the title "Really Very Good Songs". What delights could this tape possibly hold?  Unfortunately, I think I must have had the idea of making a killer mixtape and then got bored pretty quickly. The first side is a bit of a hotchpotch, which somehow manages to find space for two live tracks by All About Eve. The second side saw me just recording some tracks from some of my favourite EPs at the time. There's a couple of tracks by Ride, followed by a couple from the Pixies, and a few from the Primitives before the revelation that these tracks were probably recorded over Act's "Laughter, Tears and Rage", the remains of which survive to close out Side B.  An early lesson in hype - it's a good reminder of the sort of thing that I was listening to at the start of the ...

 n the 80s and the 90s, my cassette deck was glued to my side and my headphones to my head. I'd walk to school, or I'd do my paper round, or I'd go to town, and I'd be in my own little self-contained world listening to those cassettes. As time went by, technology moved on, and the tape deck gave way to the minidisc, to the ipod, to the smartphone. When you've got a musical library at the tip of your fingers, who would want to listen to a cassette anyway? Well - over the past few years, I've bought a few tapes from smaller labels. Because people have historically been able to make tapes themselves rather than sending them off to manufacturing plants, there's a DIY ethos to tapes that has somehow held true and, although tape sales are tiny and we're not going to get a cassette revival to challenge that experienced by vinyl, I'm happy that this plucky little format is still holding it's own.  But, for years, I've not had anything to play those t...