It’s like Proust with magnetic media or something. Not that I’ve read Proust obviously, I mean this is a universe in which there are 7 series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer available on DVD, how anyone finds time to read that stuff is beyond me.

This is the first type of blank tape I encountered (though mostly C60’s I think), we had a big stack of them as far back as I remember. They contained the remnants of my parents record collection which was stolen from their house in Bristol in the mid seventies. Most of the decent stuff, Beatles and Stones records etc. was on reel to reel tape which I only discovered in the mid ninetees while rifling through boxes in the atic, looking for books. These Memorex tapes had things like ‘Wings’ (I wouldn’t put it past my Dad to have held the classic Alan Partridge line to be true for at least some part of the late 70’s or early 80’s) and ‘Yes’ on them.

I don’t think I really understood what a blank tape was back then, we only had a single deck single function tape machine so recording from the radio or from other tapes or anything wasn’t possible. We did hook up the tape deck to the TV once to record the late night computer programs they used to broadcast in the early 80s, but couldn’t get it to work for some reason. Nevertheless, inspired by this I used to play audio tapes into our 48k ZX Spectrum in the hope that it would illustrate the music for me.

Attention product design fans! I’ve kept one of the cases from these tapes, it has a novel opening mechanism; the side kind of swings open like a clapper board as opposed to the standard book like opening, and as a result it’s much more robust than conventional tape boxes but doesn’t allow for paper inlays and is presumably more expensive to produce.