- Vol. 05
- Chapter 09
Cassette
between the LP and the CD was the cassette, before I bought a CD player, and when they stopped putting albums out - some of them I ended up buying twice if the band was just too good for the clunky, dolby-butch sound, and anyway my hi-fi is designed for both CDs and LPs and I’ve still got my vinyl - now that it’s back in fashion Climax Blues Band albums go for £30
the cassette got tangled in the machine so you were afraid to play it, stretched into elongated chords, as if the Beatles were still messing about on four track trying to turn Echo and the Bunnymen into Sergeant Pepper, which they weren’t, of course, because John Lennon was dead, shot through the heart by someone who hadn’t got into i-players yet and probably didn’t keep hold of his vinyl
I suppose it’s ironic that when I went to see the Table Scraps (or they came to see me supporting Son of Dave) they had brought out a record exclusively on cassette tape which they thought was wonderful and the best sound you could achieve, distorted the way bass speakers do when you turn them up too loud in a pub which is hardly big enough for amplification
Cassette
anyway, the point I’m getting to, pop-pickers, is that the youngsters of today are an odd bunch wanting to go back to the medium of sound reproduction we most despised, just because Mp3 sound is slightly evened out and their young ears can tell the difference - me, I want to plonk a CD in the slot and forget I’ve got it on behind the e-mail that I’m writing
I suppose it’s something you can only expect, given the great advance in technology, that someone, perversely, will prefer the old, and as with all absurdities, turn it into an icon: blank white label, that everyman of music-style, black plastic cassette case (some cassettes came in orange and purple back in the day) a green background, no texture, like a veil over goodness
(couldn’t have been done without photoshop, you think, but don’t tell them, it’s their rebellion against progress)