This is the type of tape on to which my uncle recorded us a Eurithmics album and a Phil Collins album before we went out to Papua New Guinea. Around this time I was given my first tape deck and some pre-recorded tapes, A-Ha - Scoundrel Days and Bangles - A Diffrent Light, my sister got Queen - A Kind Of Magic and my mum got Paul Simon - Graceland. The player itself was a cheap plastic white thing from Boots, (it’s strange to think Boots used to brand stereos and sell computer games (The first time I played on a Super Nintendo was in Boots in Macclesfield (F-Zero, didn’t think it was great to be honest though the latest iteration is one of my favourite Game Cube Games), hold on I’m getting ahead of myself time to close these brackets and get back to the scheduled meandering reminiscence)). This was all in preparation for moving to PNG where they didn’t have any TV at the time (they do now) so we needed some tapes to make sure we didn’t have to spend all our time talking to each other and doing things outside.
The first thing I recorded with my tape deck was the Flash Gordon sound track. This was achieved by putting the stereo infront of the speakers turning the volume up and holding our dogs mouth shut until each song was over. The quality wasn’t great.
And then nick talbot said:
Before I had a four track recorder I made primitive multitrack recordings by recording onto this kind of casette, then playing it loud in front of another stereo casette recorder with a built in microphone whilst playing an instrument quite close to it as well. This allowed me to overlay another part onto the original recording. This would continue back and forth until all the parts were down. The results were of very, very poor sound quality. This is an excellent way of determining whether a band ‘has songs’. If the songs can shine through the quagmire of hissing shit noise then they can be said to be ‘proper songs’ in the Noel Gallagher sense of ’something your postman could whistle’.
If this is all it takes to render a ‘proper song’ it is surely fair to demand all bands who think they have ‘proper songs’ to be restricted to this method of recording.
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