1993 TDK AR60 Type I Audio Cassette

The TDK AR60 was one of the better Type I audio cassettes. The sound from Type I tapes could vary enormously, going from a woolly blob of poorly defined warbling at the low end of the market, up to a frequency-rich and high fidelity experience in the more expensive echelons. Not that Type I cassettes could ever be described as expensive in themselves, but if you used a lot of them and bought in bulk, there’d be a dramatic difference in price between a batch of low end Type Is and the high end alternatives.

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols Cassette

So who actually did play the bass?… Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols is probably one of the most hotly-debated albums of all time. Much of the confusion probably stems from the insistence by the late Malcolm McLaren (Sex Pistols manager) that the band couldn’t play their instruments. Notions sprang up, in the wake of this, that the songs were recorded with various levels of ‘depping’, right up to a belief that the entire backing track was played by top session musicians and the only band member on the album was vocalist Johnny Rotten.

Belinda Carlisle – Heaven on Earth Audio Cassette (1987)

For some reason, the solo career of ex-Go-Gos singer Belinda Carlisle always made me think of Feargal Sharkey – the ex-Undertones singer whose solo work had taken off slightly earlier in the decade. They were both characters from the late ’70s alternative (punk-orientated) rock scene, with a similar rapid vibrato in their voices, who turned to the mainstream in the middle of the 1980s and stormed the UK charts in major fashion.