‘It was a way to share your musical experiences’: why cassette tapes flourished, and still endure

Two new books explore the history of the tape and how it helped spread hip-hop, thrash metal and experimental music around the world one mixtape at a time

Everyone who grew up with a tape deck remembers mixtapes, or compilation tapes, as we used to call them in the UK. They remember sitting with a pile of records or CDs, assembling the perfect order, sending the right message. The narrator of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, Rob Fleming, had a set of parameters that had to be observed: “You can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs, and … oh, there are loads of rules.”

“My first girlfriend and I had a cassette,” remembers Britt Daniel, frontman of Spoon. “She’d put a song on it, then give it to me. I’d keep hold of it for a couple of days, then put a song on and give it back to her. They were all message songs – my communication skills were not top-notch, but it was very sweet.”

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