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.

Tina Turner – “Tina Live in Europe” Audio Cassette

Sony UCX 60 High Bias Audio Cassette (1985)

1984 was a year of transition for Sony’s range of blank audio cassettes. The retailers’ shelves saw stock of the early(ish) 1980s design of Sony UCX, with its brushed metallic effect and attractive purple and silver livery. But before the year was out, these heavily updated replacements were ousting them, for a tenure lasting through the mid 1980s and into what we can effectively call the late ‘eighties.