5. Reel-to-reel tape
The reel-to-real audio tape. Like a cassette for giants and lanky fuckers
I don't actually know of any one who ever owned a reel-to-reel recorder apart from my dad in the 1970s, and my mum made him throw it out when I was only an ankle-biter. My own memories of the format stem solely from a slightly more recent time, the mid-to-late 1990s, when I was involved with college radio and my programme controller-slash-bezzie mate Lee used to record our station's ads, jingles and promos on a great cumbersome, two-spool jobbie. Oh the fun times we used to have devising little skits for our shows, and quite often the outtakes were funnier than the finished products. When I first started on the college station in 1997, I wondered why Lee was using such a behemoth of a machine, but when you listen to the reel-to-reel's audio, there is a fantastically warm, clear sound that was arguably unsurpassed in the analogue age. My dad would have owned the smaller, "home" recorder, despite his machine being binned he for some reason held on to the smaller yet still unattractive reel-to-reel tapes for years afterwards and I would often wonder exactly what was on them.
I have no idea if many people still record and/or play audio on reel-to-reel anymore; as everything is digital and computerised now, I assume probably not, aside from some aging, bearded analogue aficionados, and possibly Dave Lee Travis.
4. 8-Track Cartridge
A Phil Collins album on 8-track. The only way this picture could be more 1980s would be if Don Johnson was holding this in one hand and a Hulk Hogan ice-cream bar in the other
Just for the record, I have never owned an 8-track player or any cartridges (officially known as Stereo 8). I don't know anybody who has. I just like the idea of my music being on a cartridge rather than a scratched disc or a chewed tape or compressed into a file on my laptop. Perhaps it stems from the fact that the Nintendo 64 is probably my favourite games console of all-time, and their cartridges were thick, chunky, durable and just lovely. That's the great thing about cartridges, unlike CDs and cassettes, you have to basically stamp on one with a Dr. Marten's boot to damage it.
In reality though, the 8-track wasn't as ideal as you might think. Basically a mini reel-to-reel tape housed in plastic, with no ability to record, only play, and the innards apparantly didn't last the duration if you hammered your No Jacket Required Stereo 8 like teenage girls do their Twilight Saga DVDs. But the 8-track still merits a spot on this list, simply for being a cartridge, and I love cartridges. Also, one of my dreams would come true if I could ever travel in a car that still has it's original 8-track player.
3. Flexi disc
Crush On You by The Jets, a flexi-disc I got free with Look-in Magazine in the late '80s. In my pre-pubescent state, I really did think it the greatest free gift of all time
I thought about entering the legendary vinyl record in this countdown, but really vinyl has never really gone away properly. Like massive 1970s unit-shifter and kiddie-fiddler Gary Glitter, LPs cannot be found on the High Street and are either unbeknown or embarrassingly ignored by today's youth, but hunt around properly and you will find what you're looking for (and admit it, you're after that rare 7-inch pressing of Do You Wanna Touch Me after you saw Gywneth Paltrow belt it out with reckless pride on Glee). But what of the LP's special-needs cousin, the flexi disc? Like a 7-inch single in need of Viagra, the floppy, bendy circles seemed an amusing trifle, a novelty, but before CDs took off properly, flexis were a cheap way for record companies to give people free gifts via magazines, fan clubs and so forth.
Whilst you can still often find even new-release music on vinyl online, and if you're really lucky, a Mantovani compilation long-player in a charity shop bargain bin worth at least 25 pence, flexi discs are somewhat harder to come across, given their stigma of being inexpensive and therefore disposable. Indeed, they were the record player equivalent of that C90 audio cassette you recorded over and over so often you had to throw it away and buy a new 5-pack before it completyely knackered your tape deck. Except you couldn't even record on a flexi, let alone have a half-decent game of Frisbee with it. That's why it will always be the slightly retarded relation to the vinyl record, but I had to include it in this list because they remind me of exciting free magazine gifts when I was 8 years old, and even back then, I thought the wobbly thin things were rather charming and, in their own way, pretty bloody cool.
2. MiniDisc
Don't let the appearance of it being like a CD encased in cheap plastic fool you, the MiniDisc was great
Ah, the MiniDisc. It never really stood a chance, did it? Reaching it's modest heights around the late 1990s, in a kind-of transitional period where audio cassettes were on their way out but MP3s and CD burning from one's PC was still very much in it's infancy. The MiniDisc basically did everything the humble tape did, but digitally, meaning easy editing, deleting, re-recording that lost none of it's quality over time. MiniDisc albums were also starting to be released around that time, mainly by Sony who invented the thing, and it was widely predicted by experts that the MD would one day equal and surpass the Compact Disc as the world's most popular audio format. Despite Sony producing MD recorders (which resembled a futuristic Walkman), hi-fis with MD playback (I had one for a couple of years and loved it) and releases from the likes of Celine Dion that resembled fatter cassette albums, the day of world domination never came.
The speedy advent of home PCs and the internet in the early 2000s inevitably meant greater strides for CD burning and soon after, MP3 players such as the iPod, meant that the MiniDisc never stood a proper chance with the everyday consumer, though I'm told for many years afterwards they were (and perhaps still are) the format of choice for radio producers. Indeed, the last MD recorder was discontinued only last year. If the MD could have taken off five or so years earlier, we'd all probably still be buying them now, and have MD car stereos and such shit. Compact Discs couldn't be recorded onto by us plebs up until about 12, 13 years ago, and the MiniDisc never got scratched to fuck like CDs do, either.
1. Audio cassette
I never liked C60's, How the hell could you get the best tracks from the Radio One Top 40 into only an hour? C90 FTW
It is possibly the most imperfect format of all-time, yet it evokes warm feelings of nostalgia in me as I remember its sheer ease-of-use. The audio cassette was nothing other than essential for avid music fans in the days before affordable home computing. What couldn't you do with an audio tape? Borrow your mate's new Oasis album and make a simple dub of it, safe in the ignorance that the Gallagher brothers weren't going to get shit until around the year 2000. Rewind (see what I did there?) a few years back from then, and do what most of the country was doing between 4 and 7pm on a Sunday, recording all your favourite singles off the Radio 1 UK Top 40 countdown show, making sure to pause the tape as precisely as possible whenever Bruno Brookes or Mark Goodier started talking, and so you wouldn't have on your weekly compilations any utter shit from the likes of Chris DeBurgh. The original Sony Walkman was, for my money, so much better and more attractive than the Discman that followed it, and there was no need for that "anti-shock system" that had to be installed in all portable CD players when it was realised that without it, they were just shit when out on a brisk walk. Another cassette-based device that I personally had a ton of fun with was the Talkboy, a glorified, over-sized dictaphone made famous by Macaulay Culkin in the 1992 film Home Alone 2: Lost In New York. Though the Talkboy's only true gimmick was a piss-poor slow motion voice changer switch that just made the device sound like it was running low on battery power, for adolescent shits 'n' giggles at school and home, the Talkboy was possibly the best toy I ever had, and certainly the one I got most use out of in my childhood.
Everybody of a certain age knows of the disadvantages of the audio tape: cheap ones got chewed up in your deck too easily, a rubbish deck would do the chewing to even a better standard of cassette, the analogue dubbings were never as good and clear as you'd hope, and we all experienced the pain in the arsehole that was recording a brilliant song off the radio but missing half of it due to the tape running out. But there is just something about the cassette and it's sheer simple brilliance; anyone from a small child to an old aged pensioner could work one instantly. It genuinely saddens me that kids today don't even recognise a picture of a cassette. So I shall end this blog and cheer myself up with the thoughts of pratical jokers back in the day sellotaping up the hole in a tape album borrowed from the library to record juvenile crap or possibly even flatulence over it and thus confound the next library-goer to borrow the tape. Come on, own up, I know you did it, you shits!
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