TAPE Me Back To The Future: MADE For Tape — the start of yet another new series…

Time for a new series here. Occasional posts celebrating the music best heard on cassette tape (for various reasons)

Well, why not eh. Another new series of occasional posts here. I’ve got the one about CDs, the one about LPs (though that is for paying subs only), so I need the one about tapes…

And I need the one about tapes, because, as you’ll probably already know, I got a new (old) tape deck:

I’d tentatively dipped a toe back in the tape waters earlier with the acquisition of a novelty-Walkman, and a few new and old tapes bought on a whim:

And that gave me the name for this here segment, this new series. A friend and I were talking about how some things were just “Made for tape” — but I couldn’t quite call it that, because the Halloween Kills soundtrack album, technically, was not created for the cassette tape era, it just happens to sound pretty banging in that way. But something like John Farnham’s Whispering Jack. That’s A TAPE. Or early Mariah Carey. That’s A TAPE. I mean, of course, the era, the production allowing for that format. But also, the bottled nostalgia of it. I had Whispering Jack on vinyl and pretty much never listened to it. When I played it on tape it was like greeting an old friend. I might get the first couple of Mariah Carey albums on CD, sure, but I’m really happy to have the one with Vision of Love on cassette. Because that’s how I best remember it.

So I’m going: TAPE Me Back To The Future…and then subtitle: MADE For Tape.

So, TAPE Me Back will appear in these pages soon…and, as always, I’ll be happy to extend to suggestions from the floor, and/or guest posts. I’m also gratefully able to accept donations of unwanted cassettes, he says, somewhat cheekily ;)