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.

The BASF CR-E II Cassette Design – Circa 1986

I mentioned this design variant of 1980s BASF chrome cassette in yesterday’s BASF CR-E II 1988 post, but didn’t have a photo handy and couldn’t put my hands on the actual product. A quick dig through some drawers, and a snap of the shutter today, has just remedied that, so here it is.

This CR-E II 60 minute tape was bought in England, in March 1986, so manufacture would almost certainly have taken place early that year, or in late 1985. The front faces of the cassette feature the chamfered user-write white label portion, and matching case relief – traits that were associated with the first half of the 1980s, and which would be resolved into a straight rectangular shape by 1987. The combination of this latter 1980s style of CR-E II label and the chamfer was short-lived.