AS A CONSOLATION FOR its obsolescence, any discarded technological object becomes more interesting to look at in the months after you have stopped using it every day. While it was working, I never spent much time examining the contours and scale of my first generation iPod, but now it seems big, sturdy and handsome compared to the little scrote of a thing I use to hear music these days. Maybe it's the machine-world equivalent of lines adding character to a face, writes John Butler
The same goes for my first ever mobile phone (a brick of a thing issued by a company called Esat digiphone - remember them?), and for a cassette-playing Walkman I found a while back. Characterful-faced singer Tony Bennett recently lamented the disappearance of these in an interview in which he wondered whether MP3 players are any improvement. His gist was that they spend hundreds of years getting to the stage where you can rewind your piece of music to just the spot you wanted. And then they go and get rid of that feature.
The humble cassette tape has come to acquire a strange kind of beauty, in my mind anyway. I found a box of old tapes in an attic, dusted it off and picked out one at random, Depeche Mode The Singles '81-'85,in its chunky plastic case. In my hand, the heft of plastic feels solemn to me. Everything is now sent through the air in the form of digital files, a miraculous process which gives no hint as to how music is recorded, but with the little spools of tape that you can see through the clear plastic letter box in the middle of an audio cassette, you can sense the mechanics of music production. You can visualise larger spools being cut and pasted by hirsute, stoned engineers in a studio somewhere, then that master spool cloned in miniature form and reproduced hundreds of thousands of times over, in a factory, by workers who are no longer thus employed.
I have no cassette player any more, so I unfolded the thick white inlay card to read some of the production credits; a nebbish act which dragged me back to the hunched examination of hundreds of cassettes just like this in my younger days. For example, Just Can't Get Enough, recorded at Black Wing, July 1981. Highest chart position, 13. Engineer, Eric Radcliffe, last single with Vince Clarke. I know these facts already, or at least I once knew them. After geeking all over this inlay sleeve, I considered framing it and hanging the box on a wall somewhere, before reminding myself that such behaviour is best left to characters in a Nick Hornby comic novel about how sad men are. I put the cassette back into the box and put the box back in its rightful place, in the attic.
And then I took the box out again. You see, for a long time, I used to fill the anti re-recording holes at the top of shop-bought cassettes with tissue, then sellotape over these holes and re-record new music over tapes that I owned and no longer liked, and in some cases, tapes of my sisters' that they had forgotten all about. I have about 30 such bootlegs in this little box, each with a handwritten track listing of my new band on the turned-inside-out inlay card. For example, Chart Hits '81 has been scrubbed and replaced with The Singular Adventures of the Style Council. Some Harry Connick Junior cassette has made way for 3 Feet High and Risingby De La Soul. Bucks Fizz's debut cassette Are You Ready has been Tipp-Exed into oblivion and replaced with a crude hand-drawn logo of The Doors' LA Woman. And the Grease soundtrack never stood a chance, really. Public Enemy's Yo! Bum Rush the Show obliterates one side, Give Me Convenience or Give Me Deathby the Dead Kennedys the other. Peeling away these stickers, scraping off the white-out with a nail . . . this is archaeology, this is great!
One wet weekend in a caravan in Rosslare, I dismantled my cassette copy of Led Zeppelin IV and painstakingly reassembled it with the reels swapped, in order to play the song backwards - hoping to encourage some form of visitation which might fend off the quite frankly satanic levels of boredom my friends and I were enduring in the caravan park. Holding the tape in my hand now, I recall that the Prince of Darkness never appeared to us, but this prince of dork-ness didn't really mind the no-show. He killed a few more hours switching the reels back and re-sealing the tape, and then it was probably time for bed. I refuse to disclose my age at the time of this vignette's occurrence, but it was over 16 and uncomfortably close to 20.
And Hunting High and Lowby A-ha! (exclamation mark all mine). I remember thinking that all this synth-based Norwegian trio had to do to emulate the great achievements of The Beatles was to keep putting out singles of any standard, such was their Midas touch. And how upset I was when my Walkman containing this tape fell out of my stone-washed denim jacket pocket and was crushed by the rear wheel of my Raleigh Pulsar on my way to swimming in Glenalbyn. I got over it eventually, but I haven't fogotten. Nor have I ever managed to shoehorn as many 1980s references into one sentence as I did just there.
And there it is. The last cassette I ever bought. Goodbye Jumboby World Party. I remember wearing out the tape on the song Put the Message in the Box, a great tune subsequently murdered by artists too mediocre to mention, although any of them reading this can refer to my thoughts on the abilities of A-ha by way of consolation. " Put the message in a box/ Put the box into the car/ Drive the car around the world/ Until you get heard". Sounds like an elegy for the cassette tape itself.