Lee Jordan – Midlands Web Developer Web Development, Photography, Media Production, Social Media Collaboration and Marketing
Quite an interesting series of blog posts and tweets have popped up in my circle of contacts, pondering the notion that media was social long before social networking, Spotify and Blip.fm or social playlists came about. What are we talking about? Mixtapes! For me they weren’t just audio and were a way of spending time with my dad, wooing the love of my life, creating drivetime playlists for the Dolomite car my mom had inherrited, but where was the content coming from? In the early days; radio!
A few links to blogs and tweets!
- The Epic Mixtape
- Follow @epicmixtape
- @SarahLay has been hashtagging #mixtape
- Dan Slee on Mix Tapes
- Steph Jennings on Mix CD’s
These wonders of engineering and contents therein, became our personal status updates, a way of expressing taste, music snobbery, capturing a moment or soundtracking a part of your life.
Soundtracks Make or Break Movies!
Of course if we are thinking about movies, the ultimate must be High Fidelity, but may I present Elizabethtown as an awesome mixtape film too? It’s essentially a love story, but laced with a journey that is soundtracked by the most amazing selection of music I’ve heard in a film in a long time. The film actually formed part of a roadtrip I took to Sheffield for a friends birthday, we got a private screening of Elizabethtown in a small cinema and I’ve since taken the soundtrack along with me on an inspiring visit to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The last part of the film where Kirsten Dunst’s character creates a “map home” where to stop, what to visit, and the music provided on Mix CD’s is genius! Music brings meaning and encapsulates a moment in time, all recordable on a mixtape or Mix CD!
Cameron Crowe, explains Elizabethtown is a mixtape movie!
“It’s an opportunity to program your own radio station – Cameron Crowe”
The recordable, easily portable and universal medium of a C60, with its little dinky window, notched with “time remaining” indicators revolutionised the way we listened to and shared the experience of listening to music. We were masters of our own compilations, we made our own A lists, we ran our own personal radio stations! Later things got upgraded to a C90, for extra space and if you were serious about your quality, well nothing says it better than a clear D90! Be it a TDK, a Memorex, a Scotch or in shear desperation to record the NEW entries on the Top 40 off Radio One as was the case with me aged 10; wedging a bit of folded paper in the slot! Without piracy, if none of this was possible, I wouldn’t have had the rich education in music I was lucky to have grown up with.
It’s this that grounded me in an electic mix of musical tastes that carries on today!
If you couldn’t find the right words in your love letter, and if you were 10 that was hard enough, you could find the best chosen words in your song writters, they’d tell it like you couldn’t. We have Mix CD’s now, I’ve received such CD’s from pen pals, close friends and virtual strangers. Some artists, like Frou Frou, I would never have found if it were not for the personalised “I think you’ll like this” nuggets of connections across the ether. But where did it all begin for me?
Re-record Not Fade Away?
I spent hours in front of my various tape decks! Looking at the notch in the old C60′s my dad had given to me to record on, trying to figure out if Bohemian Rhapsody would fit on the end (of course not). I would of course listen to what my dad recorded before recording over what was there and I admit to fast forwarding so I didn’t delete a classic. It’s this that grounded me in an electic mix of musical tastes that carries on today.
That along with dad’s hobby of recording every single episode of TOTP (and others like Musik Laden), and dubbing off the tracks he wanted onto a new LP tape to archive, this is perhaps why I turned out to be such an obsessive over the playlist and so widely listened! We’d spend entire weekends cataloging and dubbing my dad’s obsessive collection of rare musical footage. Stopping only to see the football results on Grandstand. He’d be able to look up VHS-16 “TOTP Vol 13″, 6h:32m and tell you that’s where you’d find Lilly The Pink! Followed by 99 Red Balloons, IN GERMAN and then again in English at 7h:12m and then again at a New Years Eve broadcast. We always had two VHS machines for dubbing, he moved onto video and left me to play with the audio tapes he no longer found a use for, even before I was a teen!
My dad moved on to video and left mixtapes for me to play. He’d be able to look up VHS-16 “TOTP Vol 13″, 6h:32m and tell you that’s where you’d find Lilly The Pink! Of course we’d get to sing along too, much to the annoyance of my mom who wanted the TV back!
Mixtapes recorded off Radio Caroline
There were so many tapes knocking about, sometimes with Radio Luxemburg recordings, sometimes simply labeled “Caroline Three”, I didn’t know what Radio Caroline was back then. I rarely heard Radio Luxemburg live although I’d try the Longwave, and often couldn’t make head nor tail of the presenters, but my dad had recorded whole shows, with English songs. I actually used to make “sky scrapers” out of these tapes! Some of them were covered in swarf (Oil and water contamination from factory life), so these tapes had smells and personalities.
It’s Broke? Get Me My Pencil!
Let me just spend some time on the tech here, most people go right in for the content, but the technology of a mixtape was just as amazing, and in the 80′s nothing worked, you had to fix it. Imagine trying to fix facebook? You couldn’t.
I was blessed to grow up, being given things that were no longer wanted by other people, either because they didn’t work, or they got the upgrade! I didn’t get any bit of tech first hand, I didn’t buy media tech even when I had pocket money, I always inherited it, or fixed something. I loved it, give me a tape deck or Walkman that had its drive belt snapped and rip it apart, I had the small screwdrivers, I’d find the exact size elastic band to get those reels spooling again, sometimes at the wrong speed. I knew how it all worked, how the record/playback head changed the direction of iron filings in the tape. Get me the pencil, we’ll fix this C60 AND just because it’s snapped, it doesn’t mean to say I can’t cellotape it back together and listen to the gems or the shite that await me here!
If the tape got twisted so it played backwards, it was time to retire that C60 and give it a funeral by way of taking it out into the street, pulling it apart wrapping it around the lamposts, and bombing at it on the BMX :)
Content, Content, Content!
I’d sit up at night listening on my gradad’s very ace but very heavy Sony Walkman, listening to recordings of Radio Luxembourg. A tape labled “Our Tunes” was stories on Radio One, of people writing in letters to describe how a song was to be dedicated to that special person, a sort of this is your life in audio and the song played in full at the end. One after the other and I sobbed to a fair few, the whole tape full of “our tunes”. None of this I ever heard live and was able to playback for a long time!
Some of the tapes contained nothing but recordings of “Our Tune” dedications one after the other, some even were whole shows recorded off Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline!
You and Me FM
Of course we can see where this is leading, by the mid 1990′s both me and my sister had CD players and I was spending my pocket money on very expensive CD’s, in the range of £17. My sister actually had a Mini Disc recorder which I skiped over in favour of my mixtapes, until the MP3 came along. I had hooked up both CD players to the Mini Disc Recorder and a mic through a very basic mixing desk that my dad actually had brought for video useage and we had our very own radio station, which she presented and I chose the music for! This was shortly before I had got involved with our College radio station, but the tracks I chose were already very eclectic.
By the time I was 16 or so, I was making mixes for a friend at college, and she the same. We’d foresake listening to the radio on our independant bus journey’s into and out of Walsall in favour of these mixes we created for each other. We’d discuss the merits of the songs on the secondary bus we’d catch to campus as to which one’s we might tracklist on the college radio station, she being station manager, me being the person to press play and fade the mics. After college, I’d walk her to Bradford Place, sometimes poping into Sundown Records, to browse and wait with her, leaving only when her bus turned up. Sometimes we’d forsake the bus and just walk, listening to the tapes on my bus back home and arriving home after a perfectly soundtracked journey.
Music added something unspoken to our friendship and we would quote lyrics, in place of our own missing words; If you fall I’ll catch you, I’ll be waiting, time after time.
Even now I find deep connections with my friends through Mix CD’s, be it a show of musical coolness or otherwise! Plus I couldn’t live without music on any journey now! Motown has to be the order f the day for crusing in the middle lane on the Motorway for example.
I found myself blessed to be in media Nirvana around that time; I had been taken on to work with the Sunday team at BBC Radio WM. I was becoming a regular as part of the team on a Sunday show and had got a couple of audio news reports broadcast, from quarter inch “Reel to Reel” tapes that I edited at Pebble Mill. I even handled the sacred “it’s a goal cart”, again a magnetic tape, used to inform local listeners there has been a goal in a crucial football match!
Going back through some photos of when I was a kid, you’ll see exactly where my interest in Radio, music and playlists came from and just why my musical taste is so wide and varied.
Have we lost the art?
If the Mixtape or Mix CD is an art have we lost our skills in the digital age, or are there tools there that can recreate what we once had? Or is the hiss of a well worn tape, not recreateable? A group of people are keeping it alive, recording one side of tape and passing it on for the other side to be filled!
Often I find digital playlists even harder than mixtapes, but equally there’s something you can’t do digitally which is get in the flow. Sometimes the best mixtapes are organic, you think of the next track while the current one is playing which influences the next. Now you can do that digitally but the endless ability to rearrange the order and the no limits 140 odd playlist, can detract from that organic process. Playlists should rise and fall, but equally a common story should emerge through them. There should be a mix of styles, but equally some of the best mixes can be narrow in genre to let’s say Motown and Soul!
So there we have it, a life long obession with music, bourne out of the ability to record onto a thin magnetic tape that is finite in length, but infinite in possibilty and expression, that’s why I love music, that’s why I love mixtapes, Mix CD’s and custom playlists, why leave it to shuffle?!
Posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010
That’s a great, great post, Lee.
Thinking about it, music is hugely powerful. It can also capture a time and a space brilliantly. At a time when I was younger music was a way of articulating something I struggled to in polite conversation.
It’s why people felt so sad when John Peel died. It may have been years since they last listened. But they felt the excitement of hovering over the pause button at 11 o’ clock at night waiting for a new ‘B’ side by The Smiths…
That’s made me so proud and the “memorex” will not fade away super.
Dad xxx
Great Post Lee. Keep up the good work:))
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