Cassette Kid

It is something of a birthright as a Gen Y to drag out your residency at the family home long after you have outstayed your 18 year welcome. I was perhaps then something of an aberration when I sped off out of suburbia and into urban student slum dwelling as soon as my checkout chick savings allowed. As I flitted from share house to share house, little did I realise the enormity of what I had left behind. An ever-burgeoning collection of items accumulated from childhood, no longer of any use but somehow too precious to throw out.

Deconstructed into its individual parts, this amorphous pile of stuff wouldn’t have seemed particularly menacing. ‘Most Improved’ trophies from childhood, celebrating my under-achievements. Friendship bracelets from some long forgotten BFF. God-awful stuffed toys from high school boyfriends celebrating 3 day anniversaries. Harmless, perhaps.  But when combined, these items could have formed a mass with enough gravitational pull to have its own moon in orbit.  

Had Mum and Dad not exercised a baby boomer birthright of their own by recently spending my inheritance on a city pad and selling up on the family home, this mass would have remained safely confined within suburban crawl space.  Emerge, however, it did one Saturday morning in the form of four unwieldy boxes dropped off by parental stealth onto my front porch. I dragged the first of the boxes inside, full of apprehension. With a garbage bag in hand, I resolved to face my feng-shui demons and rid myself of these defunct possessions once and for all.  

Had Mum and Dad not exercised a baby boomer birthright of their own by recently spending my inheritance on a city pad and selling up on the family home, this mass would have remained safely confined within suburban crawl space.

It all felt so wrong at first tossing once-cherished items into the rubbish. As I watched the pile grow, my sentimentality faded as I became intoxicated by the purge. With every scoop into the garbage bag I felt physically lighter, dizzied by the unburdening of it all. But then I came across an item that was for a long time my most prized possession.

I was nine and I had just enterprise bargained my way into $5 per week pocket money. Rather than save that first $5 instalment carefully away into a Dollar-mite account, I knew enough arithmetic to calculate that this $5 plus $10 Christmas money from Nanna made up enough cash to purchase something I had been coveting for some time. My own, brand new cassette tape.    

Sadly, my choice of album was not exactly an investment laying the foundations for a respectably cool music collection I would then build upon into adulthood. See, I had consulted the Top 40 charts that week and figured that whatever was Number 1 must be the best. And so it was that my first cassette tape purchase was Jason Donovan’s debut album - Ten Good Reasons.  

Some may say there are reasons aplenty to have condemned this particular item straight to the garbage bag. Granted, this album will never find itself hanging next to even a toe-clipping of Nick Cave’s in any kind of music hall of fame. But when I dusted off a tape deck retrieved from the back of a cupboard and listened to that cassette again, I found myself gleefully singing along to lines like “give me one good reason to leave / I’ll give you ten good reasons to stay”. I couldn’t help but find a renewed appreciation for the genius of Stock Aitken Waterman, paring down the complexity of human experience into chord sequences and mathematical equations so irresistible in their simplicity.

"As I gazed down at Jason’s fresh album-cover face beaming back at me in earnest I knew I just couldn’t bring myself to let go of that cassette tape, even if it was for recycling."

As I rifled through the remaining boxes, I discovered more forgotten cassette tape gems – my later purchases expanding beyond soap-star protégés to as far reaches as Kate Bush and the B52s. But far greater treasures were to be unearthed – the DIY mix-tapes, especially those made by friends. Listening to the muffled tones of their hilarious voiceovers introducing their mix-tape selection made me grin with nostalgia for not only music but friendships long forgotten.

That was the beauty of the cassette tape – the technology was so tangible. There was no need for a PC or fancy recording equipment. When tragedy struck and you would find tangled loops of brown tape spilling out of the cassette tape or split in two, it was never anything the twist of a pen and a bit of sticky tape wouldn’t fix.

As I gazed down at Jason’s fresh album-cover face beaming back at me in earnest I knew I just couldn’t bring myself to let go of that cassette tape, even if it was for recycling.  Sometimes, you just don’t need a reason.