Jools Holland – Live Performance Audio Cassette – 1994

He’d been the keyboardist in Squeeze, but many teenagers of the early 1980s didn’t really get a taste of who Jools Holland was until he barged his way to the forefront of youth culture TV as a main presenter on The Tube.

The Tube exploded onto UK screens in early November 1982 as a flagship programme for the brand new alternative channel – Channel 4. As its name suggests, ‘4 was only the fourth TV channel to join the UK’s broadcasting network.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Radio One Cassette

Quite a few people could claim to have invented rock music. But there was only one inventor of rock sensibility, and that was Jimi Hendrix.

This was the man who turned the Fender Stratocaster guitar into a sex symbol, and its life was never the same again. It’s now the most famous and popular guitar on the planet by a humungous margin. But in fact, before Hendrix achieved fame, the Stratocaster was far from a world-beater. Its fortunes had been significantly waning, and its makers, Fender, had been focusing on other models.

Stevie Ray Vaughan – Texas Flood Audio Cassette

There is no real blues without torture. And what Stevie Ray Vaughan went through in order to produce his stunning range of guitar sounds and expressions was a severe punishment in itself.

To optimise the tone, he would use incredibly heavy and thick strings, which were actually painful to play in a blues style – sometimes slicing into the tips of his fingers as he pushed them into wide bends. The pain was clearly visible on his face, and the guitar fingerboard literally convulsed with the power of his vibrato. This was a man for whom no agony was too great in the name of musical expression.