‘They were my musical hand-holders’
Kelly Rose Bradford, 47, writer, west London
Sitting on my bedroom floor, surrounded by dozens of discarded cassette cases and inlay cards, I frantically pressed the pause button of my twincassette ‘boom box’, as I put together yet another mix tape.
The process required deep concentration – hitting the button at just the right moment to stop recording, then fastforwarding or rewinding another tape to locate the next track to add.
It was 1988, I was 15 and a misfit. A goth with bright red hair and long black skirts. I was permanently plugged in to my personal stereo, and moved to the clatter of half a dozen tape cases rattling in my school bag. I had more curated mixes, recorded on Woolworth’s blank cassettes, than I had proper albums. One for every occasion; the gloomy ride to school, revision, heartbreak, any car journey involving my parents…
Mix tapes got me through my teenage years in a way that just listening to a normal album or the radio couldn’t. Having all my favourite bands’ top tracks, recorded by theme or emotion or mood in one place, reached me in a way nothing else could.
Now, as a 47-year-old single mum to an 18-year-old son (who has only ever listened to music on shuffle), mix tapes still have an important role in my life, even though they’re in the form of YouTube playlists, rather than plastic rectangles that need their yards of innards regularly reeling in with a pencil.
I’ve painstakingly recreated my old tapes, and alongside the heavy thump of nostalgia they deliver to the pit of my stomach, they’re still the musical hand-holders and soundtrack to the best – and worst – bits of my life.