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The point was that you could make these strange connections. "It might have been a bit of Kraftwerk, maybe some industrial, early house stuff from Detroit, African rhythms, something from south-east Asia. "Like many people, I used to make a lot of compilations for myself," says Toop. It was about to launch music into a new decade. Home taping had not, as the industry had warned, killed music - quite the opposite. Cold, wet mornings at the bus stop had the capacity to be something wonderful. But you didn't have to be in a plane, and the sun didn't need to be coming up. Toop remembers being in a plane, listening to Chic as the sun came up and feeling utterly magical. Sony launched the Walkman in 1980 pre-recorded music cassettes overtook LPs in sales terms in 1982 and the decade was lived out to personal soundtracks. It opened up a market that had been dominated almost completely by film soundtracks and allowed hundreds of small local producers to release their own styles. In his book Cassette Culture, the anthropologist Peter Manuel explains how the cassette smashed EMI's monopoly of the record industry in India in the early 1980s. "The sound quality wasn't wonderful, but it was subversive, and people loved that."

"It was quick and it was cheap," Teipel says. He has written about the German punk scene in a book called Waste Your Youth. But a lot of it wasn't."Īt Eisengrau, the cassette-only Berlin boutique set up by Einstürzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld and Berlin Wall graffiti artist Kiddy Kidney, bands would come in to record in the morning and the cassette would be on the shelf by lunchtime, remembers Jürgen Teipel. You didn't need the record industry at all. People believed in it in an ideological sense. "A lot of the music that came out of the DIY movement was only ever released on cassette. David Toop, the musician and writer, calls them "post-punk". Disposable like pop music, and prone to self-destruction.īy the late 1970s, the cassette was political.

With LPs you collected music with cassettes you possessed it. And it brought out the librarian in us: listing, labelling, indexing. It allowed us to listen to music differently, privately.