I remember being incredibly excited by the idea of putting Letraset directly onto a cassette body.
Sunday 13 January 2019
Peel Tapes
I remember being incredibly excited by the idea of putting Letraset directly onto a cassette body.
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really cool! i did a few cassette covers myself back in the eightes but then the rate of accumulation got too fast for me to customise them and i stopped bothering. the best ones involved messing around with photocopier, rephotocopying the same image until it distorted. also had an art school friend who did some really great designs for cassettes for me, out of pure generosity and overflowing creativity. Matisse-like colour blocs and so forth.
ReplyDeleteExcellent! Glad you mention photocopying, creative use of - that was a whole Thing in itself, wasn't it?
DeleteAh, these really bring back some memories. I've got several boxes of Peel tapes up in the attic (all from the late 90s/ early 00s in my case).
ReplyDeleteDifficult to imagine now that sitting there for two hours four nights a week, instinctively hitting 'record' every time an elderly man in a studio in London decided to play a record that sounded good and/or crazy, was more or less the only way for many of us to engage with any music beyond the mainstream at this point in time.
I never bothered to do covers for mine, but I also began to give them misguided, wacky names (often taken from a particularly goofy song title or lyirc on the tape, or sometimes just apropo of nothing) as soon as writing "Peel Tape # 27" etc on the spine started to get boring.
Those track-listings look almost identical to mine, except that for the sake of sanity I skipped song titles and just tried to get the artist names down -- and even that led to plenty of "???"s, embarrassing, pre-google spelling errors (French, German etc names were particularly tricky), and sometimes just basic descriptions ("long techno thing", "nice reggae", "some noise") if I missed the accompanying info.
I never had any fun with Letraset, but I do remember going through a period when I was actually feeding the inlay card into a typewriter and typing out the tracklist live as I played back the tape. Some may question the sanity of doing such things in what was basically the internet era, but what can I say -- I liked the way the type print looked, and it was a hell of a lot easier than basically typing the same stuff into the PC, trying to print it to the exact size needed, glue it to the card etc etc.
I *totally* understand the pref for typing vs printing from computer. The latter was always a massive pain in the arse - same for CD track-listings. And as you suggest, real type always looked super cool :)
DeleteHave to admit never did Peel tapes, but used to do compilation ones for friends and myself. A fantastic collection Bollops. Love In the cornfield cover.
ReplyDeleteCheers, Keith! Now I think about it, I'm sure I have a Psylons track on one of these tapes :)
DeleteNow that I do have on cassette. In a box in the loft is a cassette with Peel playing the 1st single and Peel and Kershaw sessions.
ReplyDeleteNice selection. I wish I still had all my Peel tapes. Getting a 2 hour show onto a 90 minute tape wasa bit tricky and sometimes I had to guess if the next track would be a good one or not just by the first few notes! If the session was a repeat it was easier to edit. Good to see there are so many shows online to download if |I want, even the early pirate ship recordings "Radio Caroline"? I had some on reel to reel too which have crumbled away to dust!
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