C30, C60, C90, Go! – Or The Art Of The Mixtape
Given lastnight/this morning’s incredible football match against France and England, I considered writing something about that, but the connection to HiFi just wouldn’t come, and I’d already written much of the following, anyway.
I was having a look at Facebook the other day when I came across a post we’d shared on the HiFi PiG page about the Pink Floyd edition of the We Are Rewind cassette player. If you’ve not seen them, they’re a modern cassette player with Bluetooth and rechargeable batteries, but styled in a way that looks like the Sony Walkmans of my teens. Whether you think they’re a brilliant idea or an exercise in nostalgia depends entirely on your point of view, but that wasn’t really what caught my attention. What did catch my attention was a comment underneath the post from Linette that read: “Ah, the art of the mix tape.” And as if by magic, I was back in my bedroom in Barnsley with a pile of records, my Amstrad tower system, and making a mixtape.
Choosing the music was only the start of it all, but it was an important starting point. The order mattered just as much as the music. You didn’t simply whack twenty songs onto a C90 and hope for the best. The opening track had to grab the recipient immediately. You wanted the last track to leave them with something to remember. And the stuff in between had to flow properly to take the listener on a bit of a journey – and that journey depended on what the “intention” of the mixtape was for – you get my drift here, I’m sure. It was playlist creation before I’d ever heard the word playlist.
Obviously, all of this was done with a total disregard for those “Home Taping Is Killing Music” logos that got plastered across the inner sleeves of every record you bought back then. Thinking back, it all seems a bit naive. The music industry genuinely believed the tape recorder represented an existential threat. A fly in the ointment of their money-making gravy train. Little did they know what was coming over the next few decades, with Napster and the like allowing folk to illegally share their music across the world.
I digress.
Once the recording was finished, there was the sleeve design to think about. You’d carefully write out the track listing on the little insert thing, trying your hardest to fit everything in without your handwriting becoming completely illegible – my handwriting is appalling and always has been. Sometimes you’d decorate the spine with little drawings or lettering that reflected whatever was on the tape. If it was a compilation for a mate, you wanted it to look as though you’d made an effort because, well, you had made an effort. The cover was as much a part of the gift as the actual music was. It wasn’t just a tape full of songs. It was several hours of intention wrapped up in a little plastic box, particularly if it was for a member of the opposite sex. Thinking back, I must have made dozens of them.
Some were for friends. Some were for potential girlfriends – I’m not sure that these tapes ever got me anywhere on that front. Others were just because I’d discovered some new bands and wanted someone else to hear them. Looking back, they were likely as much a reflection of me as they were of the person I was making them for. Every track had been chosen for a reason, even if that reason now escapes me. There was real intention and meaning in them.
I also remember that we didn’t limit ourselves to copying other people’s music. Like loads of teenagers with more enthusiasm than talent, my mates and I decided we’d have a go at this music lark ourselves. I remember recording our own masterpiece, which was, if memory serves me correctly, ACDC’s She’s Got the Jack, albeit with lyrics that had undergone a fairly dramatic rewrite. We thought it was hilarious. My mum was somewhat less impressed when she discovered the tape and listened to it. It turns out there are some things mothers simply aren’t supposed to hear. Thinking back, it was a bit horrible, to be honest. It never reached the intended target, thankfully!
A few years later, when I started DJing, the tape recorder took on another role. I’d record all my sets, partly to hear how I’d done in the mix, partly because friends wanted copies, and partly because, at the time, that’s simply what DJs did. If I’d done a marathon set (I’d often play for six or seven hours at parties), I’d end up with a little pile of tapes that found their way into the hands of other people. Somewhere, there are probably still a few of them sitting in lofts or the backs of cupboards, quietly waiting to be rediscovered. I recall walking into a club in Edinburgh (The Vaults) at a night called Sativa where I found out that the organisers would have tapes of our radio show sent up to them from Sunderland – I ended up playing the club a few times and at least one of them was legendary, if not for the music I played. I only have one tape left. It’s a recording of a radio show that my mate Maz and I presented many years ago – The Midnight Train To Doomsville. Another friend recorded it off the radio for us and, through several house moves and countless clear-outs, it’s survived when pretty much everything else has disappeared. Now and again I stumble across it in my desk drawer and can’t quite bring myself to throw it away. It’s a tiny time capsule from a version of me that barely exists any more. As I say, the tape was made by another friend and is of a specific show we posthumously called “The Big Space Show”; essentially, Maz and I dropped acid and played BBC special effects records and the occasional actual tune for two hours on a radio station that was Sony Radio Station Of The Year in the early 90s. It was a thing of folklore; it really was, and I have no idea how we got away with it!
These days I still spend a couple of hours most evenings DJing, but I never record my sets, and I don’t really know why. Storage certainly isn’t an issue, and I could probably record every mix I ever play and still not fill a hard drive. Perhaps that’s exactly the problem – when something becomes effortless, it somehow becomes less important and less meaningful.
The same goes for playlists, for me. Qobuz, Spotify and all the other streaming services make creating playlists ridiculously easy. Drag a few tracks around, give it a name and you’re done. We’ve created playlists for audio shows because they’re genuinely useful in that context, but I rarely make them for myself. They don’t seem to scratch the same itch as a tape did. Maybe it’s because there was something deliberate and ritualistic about making a mixtape. Recording one in real time meant committing yourself to it 100% to the task in hand – you couldn’t just drag Track Seven above Track Three because you changed your mind. Looking back, it all sounds terribly inconvenient, but perhaps that’s precisely why it meant something. I’ve written before that the rituals surrounding music are almost as important as the music itself. Putting a record on, lowering the stylus, cleaning an LP before it plays or even simply sitting down with the intention of listening rather than just hearing some tunes. Making a mixtape was another one of those musical ritualsm ad I kind of miss it.
It wasn’t really about the tape at all, really. It was about the thought that went into it. It was about saying, “I heard these songs, and they made me think of you.” It was about introducing someone to music they’d never heard before, or, in hindsight, capturing a particular moment in your own life before it disappeared into the past.
I doubt I’ll ever make a mixtape again, but never say never. The world has moved on and, for the most part, so have I, though I’m not sure some would agree with that latter point. But now and again, all it takes is someone mentioning “the art of the mixtape” in a Facebook comment, and suddenly I’m thirteen again, staring at a pile of records with my finger hovering over the pause button on the gloriously rubbish Amstrad Tower system.
Stu
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Afterthought – I went looking for the tape I mentioned in the drawer of my desk for the main photograph for this piece, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find was a tape box labelled “Roughneck Sounds (my band) Hartlepool Ritz”, but the actual tape says “Wear Off The Wall 1990”, a recording of one of our very early radio shows that I ought to get uploaded at some point,
