2. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...MIX TAPE

The absolute very first time I made a mix tape was in 1979 when I recorded my friend Rachel playing an Atari game (badly) and then decided to add what I felt sure were some of her favourite tunes to the cassette so I could present it to her as a gift. I’ve still got the tape so either 1) I liked the songs too much and decided not to give it to her or 2) She didn’t like the songs very much and decided to give it back. She went out with me for a week and chucked me on my fifteenth birthday so you’ll guess which one my money’s on.

Nowadays, it’s the press of a button on Spotify but, in the 70s/80s, compiling a 90 minute mix tape was an exercise of pyramid-building proportions. Most of the songs needed to be taped off the radio – which is why so many of my mix tapes have intros or outros by Peter Powell or the Hairy Cornflake (never trust a man who makes up his own nickname) ruining the tracks by talking over them – or off Top of the Pops by holding your tape recorder close to your Radio Rentals TV screen and trying to avoid static shock.

Creating a mix tape was an art which required patience, skill and practice. You’d sit for hours in front of the radio or TV, fingers poised over the play & record buttons, waiting for any song you vaguely liked to be aired. The process was littered with potential pitfalls: false alarms when the opening bars of what you thought was the Stranglers turned out to be Billy Ocean, cock-ups when your chubby fingers only managed to press one of the record buttons and the inevitable end-of-tape fiasco when you needed to flip the cartridge over mid-tune to start recording on the other side. This was an exercise which required such high levels of dexterity and co-ordination that Formula One racing teams should make it a mandatory requirement for the recruitment of their pit-stop engineers.

And, once you’d sacrificed several weekends putting 90 minutes of music together, there was a fair chance that your sony walkman would chew it up and render it useless at the first listen. Several of my mix tapes have sections of sellotape where I’ve had to cut out a mangled piece of tape and splice the remaining ends together. That tended to have a rather truncated effect on the songs and made lip-synching to them in front of the mirror a frustrating process – one moment you were a dandy highwayman who people were too scared to mention and the next you were da diddly qua qua.

The Top 40 countdown on Radio One every Sunday evening was a great source of mix tape tracks, presented in my time by Simon Bates on top of his week-day morning slot. I may be the only one to think that guessing the year in the 'Golden Hour' at 10:00 was far superior an entertainment slot than ‘Our Tune’ at 11:00 but I suppose that explains my complete lack of empathy and the unhealthy obsession I have with Bob Holness & Blockbusters (the game rather than Bob himself). Apart from Batesy, the other recognisable voices on my tapes belong to Tony Blackburn and Tommy Vance whose comments, recorded of course over the best parts of the songs, prove just how much Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse toned down their characters for Smashie & Nicey.

I always thought the list included Mike Read too (no, not the Eastenders bloke who presented Runaround on TV and encouraged playgrounds nationwide to kick off their games of British Bulldog with shouts of “g-g-g-g-g-go”) but I guess he was too busy climbing onto his high horse and ensuring that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were banned from the radio for telling us to relax when we wanted to come. I’m not sure if he ever turned his attention to school playground games but I wouldn’t rule him out as the one who got British Bulldog banned either.

I’ve got about 30 of these tapes up in the attic (that’s a solid 18 months of sweat and toil) and three of them can still be played in full without the sellotape clogging up the machinery. It’s so refreshing to listen to a playlist which has been generated by loving patience rather than algorithms. And how enjoyable is it to run through a compilation of songs which, with specialist programmes or stations (other than the John Peel show) yet to proliferate, are unbounded by the limits of genre or style and united only by a moment in time? 'Very' is the answer.

Oh, and there’s always the chance you’ll get to hear a priceless piece of sanctimonious and self-important bs from disc jockeys like Peter Powell. On one of my tapes, he jumps onto Mike Read's high horse to lecture Madness over their choice of ‘cardiac arrest’ as the theme of their new single before going on to play ‘I want candy’ by Bow Wow Wow (their lead singer still some months short of her 16th birthday) and proving himself the only person in the country who actually believed it was a song about sweets.

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