I Made You A Tape. Happy Casseptember!
45 years of music in 90 minutes (seemed like a good idea at the time)
So here I am, welcoming you, dear reader, to another instalment of this semi-newsletter. This one is mostly a tale about tapes. It’s also about action & inaction, starting & finishing, and predictably has taken me far longer to write up than it did to jot some bullet points in a notebook at the start of August. But, on with the tale!
Back in 2017, as the ‘My Life At 45’ 7” vinyl series was getting underway, I started thinking about making a mixtape to go with it. An actual tape, with my favourite songs from my (then) 45 years on the planet. “That’s a good idea” I thought, “you’ve still got some unused blank tapes somewhere.”
I still have all my cassettes from the ‘80s & ‘90s; pre-recorded releases from that era (and earlier), plus home taped vinyl albums, promos from my time as a plugger in the ‘90s and a bunch of newer releases from recent years too.
Tapes were the main musical currency as a teen in the ‘80s, plus you needed them to load your Speccy & C64 games, so you could never have too many blanks around. I got my first ‘Walkman’ for my 14th birthday, except it wasn’t an actual Walkman (I got one eventually tho), because it wasn’t a SONY - it was a beast of a Panasonic machine with an AM/FM radio that used 4 (FOUR! Imagine.) AA batteries and definitely did not have a volume limiter. (Speak up at the back)
So that was when I started taping stuff in earnest - the Top 40 and live concerts off the radio, compilations of old 60’s 7” singles bought at jumble sales, LPs borrowed from friends, LPs from my parents collection, and even records from the collection of a family I used to babysit for (I did ask first!) - see last month’s Howlin Wolf piece below for that particular story.
So, there was period of my life when a five pack of TDK D90s was the perfect gift, to give and to receive, and my habit of taping an album the first time you played it at home (before the inevitable pops and crackles started appearing) continued throughout my university years - by which time I’d started DJing. I couldn’t yet afford my own set of Technics 1210s, but the benefit of being Entertainments Officer for the Student Union meant I had plenty of access to decks to practice on, and record my nascent beat-matching skills on a handy tape. Those tapes, however, are not for sharing!
Plenty of people have written far more eloquently than me on the joys of ‘making a tape’, and the thought processes that might go into it, but suffice it to say if you’ve never done it, it’s not altogether different to putting together a playlist on (insert streaming service of choice). Except - you need to have the music in front of you, and a free morning / afternoon / evening (or at least 4 times the total running time) to record it all. Selection might be based on any combination of an almost endless list of variables; genre, era, style, band / artist, song titles, setting it was likely to be played in and time of year you were recording it - these would certainly get you started, but ultimately the most important factor driving your cassette curation would be who it was for…
Ultimately then, when I set out in 2017 to attempt the mixtape of my life, I decided it was a tape for me, but also a tape for you. The joy of introducing someone to a new piece of music hasn’t faded after 30+ years, nor has the excitement of presenting a well known favourite in a new or alternative setting. I sat down in front of my records with a note book, resigned myself to the fact I probably wouldn’t be done in a fortnight and started making a list.
A year later that list was over 250 tracks. I did a series of DJ gigs with Craig Charles in the autumn of 2018, and in conversation about the My Life At 45 project he asked if I’d put together a 45 year Trunk of Funk mix for his BBC 6 Music show. Having done a few of these mixes for him over the years, I was delighted to be invited to contribute again and we chatted about the form my megamix was starting to take. Additionally, we discussed whether I could actually fit 45 years into the 30 minute format that the mixes traditionally take on his Funk & Soul Show and still include the number of songs I planned to feature. Possibly not, was the eventual consensus …
Fast forward (pun intended, obvs) to late 2019 and the My Life At 45 album was complete, artwork signed off and physical copies in production, so I had a bit more brain space to dedicate to the longest running mix project I’d ever undertaken. I’d been digitising vinyl copies of various songs I wanted to use, in all their slightly worn out, cue burnt and dusty glory, and had started grouping tracks into 5-6 minute mini-mixes spanning 2,3,4 years, discovering in the process what worked together and what didn’t. Having already decided that attempting a chronologically perfect mix was a level of detail I didn’t need to subject myself to, it was nice to simply see how a dozen or so songs from 1980, ‘81, ‘82 & ‘83 (peak primary school disco era folks!) sounded together, without it needing to work like a Sunday night Top 40 chart rundown.
Once I’d settled on this approach it was simply (it wasn’t simple) a case of chipping away at these year groupings until I had all 45 years covered. Easy. Loads of the tracks underwent some pretty hardcore editing so I could squeeze an intro, a verse, a chorus and an outro into something like 50 seconds, but I worked hard to make these as sympathetic and unobtrusive as possible. Some tunes were just used as sample fodder, with a drum break or intro vocal dropped over transitions between tracks. Other songs I let stretch out in more or less their original form, so as not to end up with a barrage of quick mixes too exhausting to listen to.
With all the tracks in place, the whole mix went through a final editing stage, and a series of songs and mixed sections had to be dropped to hit the 2 x 30 minute format for the radio broadcast, but I’d always planned to put these back into the running order for the 2 x 45 minute tape. Then lockdown happened, just as I was in the final stages of preparing the radio mix, and that whole period of time was so weird and stressful, that after the 6 Music broadcasts in May 2020, I kinda mopped my brow, archived the project folders and put the records back on their shelves.
Click the image below to hear the mix as broadcast, as well as me having a little chat with Craig Charles.
Dr Rubberfunk 'My Life At 45' Trunk Of Funk - BBC 6 Music - May 2020
The mix was well received though, both by Craig and his team, and the listening public, so that was very rewarding, but then I moved house and studio and it wasn’t until my new space was up and running, with all the boxes finally unpacked, that I felt like I had the energy to revisit the 90 minute tape idea. Having gone back to it I realised I’d done most of the hard work in ‘19 & ‘20, so I made a few revisions, added back in 20 or so tracks, did some general tidying up and set about gathering some blank tapes.
I had a couple of dozen NOS tapes from the ‘90s & ‘00s that I’d never used, plus the wonderful Andy AVAV (what he doesn’t know about audio & video formats from the last 80 years isn’t worth knowing etc etc - get in touch if you’ve got old recordings you want to see/hear again!) sourced me a couple of boxes of great condition ‘used once’ tapes from the eighties and nineties. Those ‘80s red & orange ‘Made In Japan’ TDK D90s were some of the first cassettes I ever made recordings on, so they seemed perfect for this little autobiographical project, same with the later TDK types from the early ‘90s that I was so carefully recording new 12” purchases onto in my room in college halls of residence 30 years ago.
It was fun sorting out all the correct J-cards and on-body stickers for each type and era of tape, satisfying getting them all to match up and there’s bound to be at least one other person who appreciates that too. Right?
And so here we are - 45 tapes covering 45 years of music - there’s still a few left via my Bandcamp page. I hope if you’ve copped one (thanks if you have!) that you’re enjoying the selections. Does anyone want me to type out the final tracklisting?? Gimme another couple of years ….
Happy Casseptember!!
Love it! Does the long version contain any Roachford, perchance?
Really enjoyed this! especially your phoner interview bit stuck in...