Neil Clark

Five decades ago, the car cassette bought bespoke music to our roads. Now, in a surprising fastforward, the humble tape has returned

THE year 1970 was a vintage one for music lovers. There were some fantastic hit records released including Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, Question from the Moody Blues and The Long And Winding Road by the Beatles.

In August the legendary Isle of Wight Pop Festival attracted an estimated 600,000 hippies who cavorted in foam while acts including Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell played.

But perhaps the best innovation of the year was the emergence of the first car cassette player in Britain – the Philips model N2602, released 50 years ago next month. A month later, in October, came the release by Decca of the first Dolby Sound tapes.

Thus began the golden era of cassettes and for the first time we could take our music around with us while we were travelling as well as record and make our own compilations.

Now we’ve moved way beyond cassettes and even CDs to iTunes and music on our smartphones. The humble cassette seems quaint.

But none of these hitech advances quite match the thrill that cassettes gave us back in the day. They enabled anyone to build up their own personal sound archive.

I suspect I’m not alone in having a huge collection of them, dating way back to the 1970s. An uncle brought me back a Hitachi radiorecorder from a work trip to Hong Kong. So

I began to make recordings of my favourite songs from the radio. I’d wait for the likes of “Diddy” David Hamilton, John Dunn or Terry Wogan to play a track I liked on Radio 2, then press with great enthusiasm the magic “record and play” buttons. Sometimes my pressing was too enthusiastic, and the buttons remained stuck down… but the recorder still somehow managed to last several years.

It’s fascinating to listen to these old tapes now. They remind me that a much wider range of music used to be played on the main radio stations than today. One of my Agfa C60 tapes from January 1979, for example, starts with Gonna Get Along Without Ya

Now by Viola Wills and is followed by If by Tom Jones, Benny Hill’s Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) comedy and the rendition by the Stanley Black Orchestra of the Warsaw

Concerto. An eclectic mix indeed: while on my Sony CHF60 marked “Music recorded Jan-March 1984” I have the Storm interlude from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, Ravel’s Bolero played by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Radio Ga Ga by Queen.That’s the thing about DIY tapes. They’re so fabulously varied.

The coming of the car cassette player was a great boost to the tape market. I remember the

ALL YOUR OWN WORK: Fans could compile tapes mixing Queen and Tom Jones and play them in the car – or later, on their Sony Walkman

excitement when my dad received his new company car in 1979. Although he worked for Rolls-Royce we didn’t get one of them, alas, but he did get a British Leyland Princess with brown nylon seats, a vinyl roof and – most important of all – a state-of-the-art cassette player.

Each year before we went on summer holiday came the vital decision of which cassettes to bring with us, and to this day certain tracks remind me of family holidays in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

When we went caravanning in Dorset we took James Last’s Last The Whole Night Long and must have played his wonderful arrangement of Night Fever at least 100 times that week.When we drove to Cornwall in 1982, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Come On Eileen was continually being rewound to the start. Even now I can never listen to that song without thinking of Carlyon Bay and St Ives.

My ultimate track had to be Roxy Music’s More Than This. There was something about the ethereal quality of Bryan Ferry’s voice and the orchestration that made playing it in the car so special. If you’re in a convertible, heading to the coast on a gloriously day with that on the cassette, it doesn’t get much better. True, cassettes had their technological downsides. With all that rewinding and forwarding, sometimes the tape got loose and needed tightening with a pencil or Biro. But I can testify that if kept well they have great quality and can still be enjoyed half a century later. They also had more character than CDs and in an age of bland uniformity there’s nothing more individual than a cassette you’ve compiled yourself.

LISTENING back to old tapes, I found that on one from the early 1980s, the music stops and I’d taped a heated debate on pacifism between Tory MP Douglas Hogg and the Leftwing Methodist preacher Lord Donald Soper, recorded from the Simon Bates show on Radio One.

Hogg asks Soper what good his pacifism would have done against Hitler, to which Soper replies that Hitler only came to power because of the consequences of the First World War. Then the music starts again. You don’t get those kind of thought-provoking interruptions on CDs, do you? One of my favourite taped moments is the DJ John Dunn interviewing the late

Christopher Lee. Lee told how his car broke down at night in Italy and he went to a nearby house to ask for help. The people there had just been watching a Dracula film starring Lee and were terrified when he appeared at the door.

The Sony Walkman gave tapes a huge boost when they came on to the market in the early 1980s, and meant that we didn’t even have to be in a car to hear our cassettes outside our own homes.

FIFTY million Walkman units were sold in the first 10 years and the peak year for cassette sales was 1989 when 83 million were sold.

Then there was a long decline. But there’s good news: in the last couple of years we’ve seen something of a tape revival. Cassettes, following on from typewriters and vinyl records, are the latest retro item to make a comeback.

Last summer technology magazine Wired reported that 35,000 cassettes had been bought in the UK in the first half of 2019, compared to 18,000 in the same period in 2018. Among top artists who released work on cassettes last year were Robbie Williams, Madonna, Bryan Adams, and Coldplay.

Sales of vintage cassette players have also been on the rise, with one British maker, GPO Retro, reporting a three-fold increase.

Will car manufacturers start to turn back the clock, too? The last car to be fitted with an in-dash cassette player was the Lexus SC430 in 2010.

Bringing the tape option back in new models would be a great way to celebrate this summer’s 50th anniversary of the first car player, and would also give me a chance to play some of my 40-year-old compilations on the road once again. Bryan Ferry, James Last and Benny Hill – you may yet be back in business.