New Pollokshaws Cadillac show, featuring 40-year-old tape…

Listen to the new Pollokshaws Cadillac show by clicking here. Full playlist at the end of this wee essay.

The latest Pollokshaws Cadillac show, episode 7, goes a wee bit wibbly wobbly courtesy of a few cassettes from my collection. Things unavailable in any other format.

Most are 40 years old, or thereabouts, and actually, they’ve survived remarkably well. Judge for yourself with very early recordings from The Big Dish, Ricky Ross, Deacon Blue and Debbie Scott

It’s become a daft hipster thing, the analogue glory of the cassette: Something so inherently inefficient, running in inches not centimetres per second, on eight-of-an-inch magnetic tape, in a plastic housing that rattles and is prone to breakage. But the modern longing for imperfection and physical possession is hard to satisfy.

Invented by Phillips and brought to the market in 1963, the cassette succeeded the 8-track cartridge as viable in-car entertainment. And until the arrival of the recordable CD in 1990, it was a means of aural communication for lovers and would-be paramours – the slavishly compiled mixtape – and for bands trying to flog their wares to publishers, record companies and journalists. Some of those demos, by the famous and the forgotten, still take up a chunk of loftspace hereabouts.

Also, while making an album on vinyl was prohibitively expensive for many, in the 80s running off a few cassettes (no minimum) could move you into ‘musicassette’ territory. It was a physical album you could flog at gigs. For a time, one of the country’s biggest cassette duplicators, the misleadingly-named Grampian Records, was based in Union Street, Wick, of all places. Until it closed in 2003, Grampian Records (later Sound Services) duplicated some of the creme de la custard of punk, new wave, folk and rock. Like John McClarty’s Emblem Records studio in Strathaven, they are part of the unrecognised rural hinterland of Scottish pop culture.

Cassettes were small, portable, repairable (who remembers the pencil rewind, the sellotape repair?) and prone to hissing, even with the more expensive chrome or metal tapes. Dolby reduction circuitry always muffled and dulled. Which is why the tapes played on this show have Dolby switched off.

You could multitrack and overdub on a cassette, just about. The Debbie Scotti and John Hutchison tracks here were recorded by me on a basic Tascam 4-track Portastudio, and mastered at long-lost Centre City Sound in Glasgow. And of course Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was recorded on a Tascam 144 Portastudio. There was even an 8-track Portastudio

Nowadays, cassette releases tend to come with digital download codes. You can buy not-great-imitations of the Sony Walkman brand new or search for the ultimate vintage cassette machines from Nakamichi or my favourite, the Sony Walkman Pro WMD6C, as used almost universally by the BBC until Minidisc, DAT and finally digital recorders and smartphones took over.

But cassettes go on. And the tape lasts forever. There are patches of gutter in Glasgow familiar to cyclists where thousands of metres of unwound one-eighth-inch tape spiral in the dirt. Like a silent, forgotten guide leading to the sounds of the past. Or not.

Mind of a Child — Clouds

Lonely Girl — Lucia & The Best Boys

Tuddal Troll (Live) — Catriona Macdonald & Ian Lowthian

Holy Ground — Wolfstone

Waste the Paint — Jim Hunter

Another People’s Palace (live) — The Big Dish

Beyond the Pale — the Big Dish

The Germans are out Today — Ricky Ross

Take the Saints Away — Deacon Blue

Debbie Scott and John Hutchison

Fiddle — Debbie Scott and John Hutchison

Klink Hamar/October/Avunavara — Debbie Scott and John Hutchison

Salvador Dali And Me — Yvonne Lyon & Boo Hewerdine

Love’s In the Neighbourhood — His Latest Flame

Her Heart Moves Like the Sea Moves — The Pearlfishers

My My My — The Lushrollers

Weightlifting — John Douglas

Ever The Optimist — Trashcan Sinatras

All Will Be Well — Michael Marra