One morning in 1965, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards surfaced to find that the night before, inspired by a dream, he’d half-woken and in a stupor created the memorable riff to one of the band’s biggest hits.
“I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player,” he writes in his autobiography, Life. “I’d put a brand new tape in the previous night, and saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was Satisfaction.”
neatly frames the hyperconvenient magic of the tape cassette: as the first compact, easy-to-use way to record and play back sound, cassette recorders were a revelation, ending the faff of reel-to-reel tape on bulky machines.
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As kids in the 1970s we marvelled at our own voices on cassette, made cod radio shows and recorded mixtapes ad nauseam.
And the format’s sheer convenience went on improving, too, until it reached its apex: the . Launched in 1979, it laid the foundations for the Spotify generation.
Time for a revival
Since then, solid-state and streamed music playback on smartphones, wireless speakers and voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo finished the job of steamrollering tape that CDs started. Yet some feel there is magic left in the cassette, which saw its sales peak in 1989. And so, like vinyl before it, they are hoping to fuel a revival.
Behind this is what’s billed as the world’s last cassette manufacturer, of Springfield, Missouri. With less than a year’s supply of tapes left, and its South Korean supplier no longer making the raw tape, National Audio needed to act, not only to fuel the output of bands like which still issue their music on cassette, and occasional tapes from artists like Eminem, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber, but also a of indie bands who now want to do likewise.
So National has acquired truckloads of disused equipment once used to make those for credits cards, before chip and PIN arrived, aiming to to make its own superior quality magnetic cassette tape.
To many of us the very word “cassette” brings back angst-ridden memories of precious, painstakingly made mixtapes getting snagged in players, forcing us to tease out the tangle and wind the tape back into its housing, hoping not to stretch and ruin it. Surely it’s a welcome goodbye to all that?
Unique sound
Well, not necessarily. Music on tape has a unique, vital sound all of its own and record labels . Encoding sound as varying magnetic fields, as tape does, is bound to give a different quality than other methods, such as the deviations in a vinyl groove or digital information read by a laser on a CD.
As a former drummer, this vitality was brought home to me recently when playing back a cassette of a 1977 band rehearsal. The audio still had astonishing clarity and presence – and, to my shame, I could even hear the sizzle of a slightly cracked cymbal. So tape offers more than “nostalgia and a trendy taste for lo-fi”, as call it.
One more thing: saving the cassette could help save another old invention from the digital juggernaut: the pencil. You see, there’s nothing better for winding a tape back in to a cassette than the sharp end of a six-sided sliver of wood and graphite. So let’s hear it for the cassette: saviour of .
Read more: Ten inventions that changed the world
