It is the summer of 1986. I am parking off in a deckchair in a patch of fynbos right on the rocks at Pringle Bay, watching the surf roll in, gobbets of spray blotting out the sky, and sucking sea air into my lungs. In my right hand I have a Lion lager, in my left a knock-off Walkman in which a bright yellow cassette is slowly unspooling. JJ Cale sings,
Roll it out, roll it in
Here we go down the road again
Drifter's life is a drifter's wife
Don't say I didn't tell you so.
A surge of joy. After five years of boarding school and two years of state-mandated misery in the air force, I am free at last. Lord, what a rush of blood to the head. Free!
I watch those reels in that yellow tape spool on and on, the gravelly voice that nobody can mimic, the taste of beer, the smell of sea all fused into a single moment and caught, like a photograph I can smell and hear. I am 20 years old. Life begins.
Did anyone shed a tear for the clunky cassette when one day music companies stopped releasing albums on tape and gave their hearts to compact discs, that bright and brittle Cinderella who came late to the party?
CDs were the future. The CD Walkman killed the tape deck. Sales of blank tapes fell like a burning Zeppelin from the sky. Suddenly music was expensive again and the rough and cheap democracy that cassettes had brought in 1966 was over. We all went along with it and bought CDs. Some of us carried on collecting LPs because vinyl was trés cool.
My first tape was Electric Light Orchestra's Time, a present from my brother on a winter afternoon in 1982. My best mate Robbo and I were about to have our first-ever mixed jol, ja, with real girls and ... and ... maybe a couple of skelm beers. Truth was, we had no clue and anyway, the guest list had been managed by Robbo's old lady, although I had managed to get her to invite Boomie, my crush who rode horses and had blue eyes.
"What music do you have?" asked my boet.
"Music?" Robbo and I stared at each other in horror. "Music?"
Matt solved the problem - sort of - with the timely gift of ELO and our dad's hi-fi blasting through a single big speaker from a film projector. And so we danced in the little attic party room, playing ELO over and over until James hissed in my ear, "Ag, c'mon okes, I wanna shuffle with this chick I've been spading all night - so play this," and he thrust a bootleg of Barbra Streisand's Woman in Love at me. And so we played that over and over, and I had my first-ever slow dance - with Boomie - flipping back to ELO every time we needed a change of pace. We played that tape until it broke and everybody went home.
After that, tape was a grand obsession. Robbo and I had rubbish little radio tape decks. We taped anything that moved: the dogs barking, passing aeroplanes, our parents bollocking us, crickets chirping each other ... At boarding school the game ratcheted up. Now we taped the Springbok Top 20 on Saturday nights, finger hovering over the pause button as we tried to beat the DJ speaking over the end of the songs.
We made mixed tapes for girls, because as my mate Allan says, nothing proved your love like a mixed tape. "You had to plan it so that it worked and that all the songs fit. You had to sit and watch the record and turn it over. What're you going to do today - give her a memory stick?"
We argued incessantly about tape. TDK was better than Maxell ("No, it isn't!"), "nineties" (90-minute cassettes) were better than "sixties" ("Ag, rubbish, man"). We all agreed that BASF tape was shit (actually it was great).
We sat in our dorms at night and watched the spools roll, immersed in the tape hiss that came free with the medium.
With tapes you could hold the music in your hand, rattle the cassette and check how that glorious brown tape glistened in the light. Try get that visceral moment with an MP3 player.
I became a connoisseur. In 1990, a friend gave me a box of a dozen Maxell chrome tapes. It took me a decade to use them because they were for the most special projects only, such as recording sound for a documentary we made on land-mine clearing in Mozambique.
This week I dusted off the Marantz deck and listened to the Mozambique tapes and was transported into the fearsome heat of Tete province, all birdsong and insects dive bombing the mic, panting dogs working a minefield, the soft instructions from the Norwegian de-miner to the dog handlers.
Now, as I type this, JJ Cale's yellow cassette is rolling - as pristine and hissy as it ever was - and all is right with the world. ..