The Cassette Problem

I still remember the day clearly. I was nine years old and I was woken at just after 6.30 one morning by a hammering on our back door.

I rushed downstairs, still in my pyjamas. As I expected it was Alun, who had run here straight from seeing the boatman.

“I’ve got it Jed, I’ve got the tape player.”

He stood there with a massive grin on his face, holding out a chunky red cassette machine, and a single, solitary tape.

“What’s the music?” I asked.

“The boatman says everyone on the mainland listens to this Jed,” Alun said, “It’s a band called the Smiths.”

We went to a quite spot on the edge of the island, inserted the requisite batteries and listened to the tape in the kind of awe you can only achieve as a child.

“My god Jed, what is this?” The music was like nothing we could have imagined. We’d grown up with nothing more than my mother’s guitar and the occasional folk song. For the rest of my childhood I’d try to capture the noise that Johnny Marr made on my guitar, but came nowhere near it. As for the lyrics, words were used in ways that I’d never even conceived of as possible. This was poetry, but not as we knew it.

We played that tape every day until our ears bled and then some more. Gradually we saved up for new cassettes, Madness, The Cure, The Pogues, The Pixies, but nothing ever sounded quite like that first Smiths tape, nothing like Hatful of Hollow, which we played every day, at least once, throughout our childhood, always in a quiet, private spot, away from our parents, away from the rest of the world (our parents).

Then one day disaster, fizzle, fizzle, whir, whir, the cassette mangled, unfurled itself within the cassette player’s mechanism. The tape was ruined and the machine proceeded to mangle any tape we put in it.

At the time the island was going through a period of austerity. My mother had given up her job to become a full-time parent, and Jed’s parents had retired, living off the meagre pension provided by the mainland authorities. My pocket money had been cut to nothing and even birthday and Christmas presents were not sufficient to pay for an expensive devise like a tape recorder.

Alun and I were distraught. Without the Smiths to cheer us, our days passed in misery. The quietness of the island was suddenly unbearable. Our life was one of silence. Our one link to mainland culture had been removed, we were truly cut off from the world.

Then, one morning, I was woken early by a hammering on the back door. I rushed downstairs, still in my pyjamas, to see Alun brandishing a letter.

“I’ve been accepted, Jed” he said, “I’m going to university to study medicine.”

“What, you mean leaving the island?” I said, incredulous. But what am I going to do?”

Alun left the island a few months later. I rose early that morning to see him onto the boat and wish him a tearful farewell.

With Alun gone I really was alone, the only person on the island under the age of 50. The only music available were the 100 year old folk songs my mother knew and my very poor attempts to tackle the Smith’s catalogue on acoustic guitar.

I tried to save up for another cassette machine, but it took me three years, pooling money from birthdays, Christmas and the occasional gift from the tooth fairy. Eventually I had enough, placed my order with the boatman and a new cassette player arrived the next day. After a 3 year vacuum the music was back.

However, without Alun to listen with me, it wasn’t the same, and, listening to the music without him made me somehow even more lonely than living in silence.