By late 1977 those whose sonic horizons stretched beyond the classic verse/chorus structure began to seek new ways of putting out material deemed un-releasable by the independents. The answer turned out to be the humble cassette tape.

The cassette was a natural medium for anyone on the musical margins pursuing an experimental or industrial agenda. Often the recordings took the Punk DIY ethos to its logical conclusion using cheap or home made instruments and equipment or occasionally no instruments at all.

Using cassettes meant there were minimal mastering or printing costs (the cover being often as not a photocopied collage). Duplication runs of anything from as little as 5 up to 300 copies were viable.

With the exception of Rough Trade, most record shops were nervous about stocking DIY cassettes and so distribution was almost exclusively by post. Soon an underground network of home-tapers developed, and the door mat in the Snatch Tapes HQ in a run down basement in Paddington London was covered every morning with a fresh batch of hand decorated jiffy bags.

Somewhat begrudgingly the main music papers, NME and Sounds began to run cassette friendly features, namely Garageland and DIY Corner, which added a further spur to activity. Radio silence however was maintained, as DIY tapes were never considered 'proper' releases and as such denied airplay even on the John Peel show.

There were hundreds if not thousands of cassette 'releases' and just listening through several C90's a day and answering all the correspondence could become a full time job (thankfully 9 out of 10 tapers were signing on or students, or both). Some labels put out several new tapes a week, and it may have been the sheer volume of releases that caused the cassette movement to implode almost as quickly as it had started.

People did go on releasing cassettes into the mid 80's and indeed still do so to this day but the real explosion like all good teenage movements was short lived, it started sometime in 1977/78, peaked in 1980 and was really all over by 81.

In the last 5 years there has been a renewed interest in Cassette Culture and many formerly cassette only releases are now resurfacing on CD and original copies of tapes (which may or may not still be playable) can command handsome prices on ebay, Somehow the cassette seems so much sexier than the CD-R.

Philip Sanderson London 2004

Rewind