The death of a disco walkman

My reaction to Sony’s announcement this week that they are ceasing production of the cassette Walkman was one of surprise. Surprised that they are still making the damn things! Moreover, who, other than ‘retro-geeks’ is buying them in this age of the ipod, mp3 player etc??

I have chequered memories of my own experience of the Walkman. I’m not sure I ever had a Sony Walkman. My first walkman was a cheaper imitation, a sort of ‘no name’ walkman. Or personal stereo, to be strictly accurate. It had large-ish, ‘over-ear’ headphones and took 4 x AA batteries. As you can see above, a designer’s dream. They were quite clunky, generally too big for a pocket. Many’s the jacket pocket I ripped trying to wedge it in.

The headphones were seldom good quality. After a time, usually one headphone would stop working. This sometimes gave a whole new sound to older music, memorably the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar, where I lost the saxophone side, so just had Keith Richard’s dirty guitar riff. I always liked hearing it that way. For other albums, a strategically placed finger resting beside the headphone jack would allow stereo sound to resume for the most part.

The cheap nature of the headphones led to serious leakage, ie on a bus journey the whole bus would hear a tinny version of whatever you were listening to. My brother used to be quite disdainful of whatever nonsense he would inadvertently hear spewing put of my headphones when we got the bus to school. Still it wasn’t as bad as the guy with the crimped hair who used to get the same bus who used to listen to P0rn0gr@phy by The Cure every day, at the same point. Thus you’d hear him coming, announced by the dismal riff of One Hundred Years and Robert Smith groaning out “it doesn’t matter if we all die” (and I like The Cure!).

Batteries were a huge issue. As I said my first walkman took 4 of them. Not to put too fine a point on it, it ate batteries. Particularly fast-forwarding a tape (cassette) used up a lot of batteries. Early versions had no rewind button, so if you wanted to go back, you had to turn over the tape and fast-forward, guessing the point in the tape that you wanted to hit. On the other hand, this difficulty meant that you really listened to an album, with no option to skip tracks, and those lovingly assembled tapes became the soundtrack to growing up.

One of the ways of getting around the battery eating problem was to spend a dull class winding the reels of tape with a pen. Or another way was to carry around a ‘fast-forwarding set of batteries’, ie. batteries which were almost used up. This was because when your batteries started running down, the tape would play slooowwwer, with unintentionally hilarious results (everything sounded goth!). Later versions only needed 2 batteries, a major leap forward.

There was a certain art to avoiding having to fast forward on a walkman, you had to make sure that every minute of your C60, C90 or even C120 tape was full of music. The ideal was to have a 45 minute album on each side of a C90. Invariably I ended up carrying around 4-5 tapes with me at all times. Several variants were launched, I seem to remember a Walkman Sports, which was distinguished by having curved edges and being yellow. Very sporty.

It was revolutionary though at the time, being able to hear your music on the go. It brightened up a dull bus-ride and blazed a trail for the mp3 players of today. Other versions had a radio as well as tape player. Some tried to listen to music in class, courtesy of a single headphone up a sleeve! In later years, the CD walkman (of Discman) was launched. I never really took to it, as CDs are not the most portable things and one CD was seldom enough.

So long, walkman, you served me well. After all how many other devices were immortalised in song by Morrissey (“as the flames rose to her Roman nose and her walkman started to melt” – Bigmouth Strikes Again by The Smiths).

In Defence of the CD

A lot has been written recently about the demise of the CD and talking about what an unloved format it really is.

I started buying music on vinyl. Mostly albums, never had much time for singles. I liked the large sleeves with the intricate artwork, but buying records in Dublin was an experience fraught with uncertainty. Assuming the shop put the right record into the sleeve (this did actually happen several times), there was always the chance of some slight damage. This then played havoc with the family record player, which I was allowed use sparingly. Was always handier to immediately tape the album. Though there was nothing like the status attached to a Freebird Records bag (great Dublin record shop), always the bag of choice when loaning out a record.

Amongst my peers there was a culture of taping records for people. I was unwilling to buy The Cure’s album Pornography myself as the drama it would have caused at home wouldn’t have been worth it. One of my classmates had it. He was dubious about my ‘Cure-credentials’ but eventually relented. Imagine my surprise when I got the tape home to hear Glenn Miller!

It got to the stage where I graduated to just buying tapes. They were portable and handy for me, being the owner of a tape recorder where much of my formative listening was done and then also a walkman. The problem with this was the fast forward and rewind element, alien to many under 30s! To skip the dodgier tracks, you had to fast-forward the tape and guess when the next song would start. A skill perfected by many but lethal for walkman batteries. And with purchased tapes there was always the situation where both sides of a tape were of unequal length, so you invariably had to fast-forward one side or another. Though it did make you actually listen to a whole album, rather than skipping around, mainly due to my laziness in fast-forwarding!

There was also the tape eating that went on with tape recorders. Basically tape recorders would chew up a tape randomly, in the middle of playing it. There was no particular genre my tape player liked more than others, though it liked a bit of goth now and then. Repairing a tape was a real science. Invariably the tape would have snapped so it was a case of unravelling the tape from the player, smoothing out gently and surgically applying some sellotape to the underside of the tape. A skill at which I became adept.

Towards the end of the 80s, compact discs (CDs) started to appear in Irish record shops. At this stage we had only one CD player in the house, purchased at huge cost. CDs were a good bit more expensive than records and tapes at first. They were supposedly indestructible, though as most people know, they scratch just as easily as records or anything else. And the smaller format meant reduced size artwork inside a plastic box, which are irritating in that it’s incredibly easy to break the little hinges which holds the package together.

Some bands used the new format to their advantage. Artwork has involved into little booklets, which can offer contain an array of images, photographs, lyrics etc. Though many avoid the plastic cases and produce a cardboard digipack. These work well as long as they avoid taking a big drink (!), something from which they never recover. The rounded edge CD cases look awful though, no time for those!

The beauty of a CD is, apart from the digital sound, is the ease and convenience with which they can be used. Skipping from song to song is taken for granted now but was revolutionary for those of us used to tapes. Works really well when you are playing DJ while having a few drinks, though the aftermath can often consist of a carpet of CDs and open boxes! CDs can also hold up to 80 minutes of music, which usually means more tracks and more value for your money.

But the real plus with CDs is a convenient physical package. I can’t warm to mp3 files, they are hard to love and harder to hold. They seem like a transient format to me, one wrong-click and it’s gone forever. The ultimate disposable format. To me music should not be disposable like this, but cherished. And I really don’t want my music collection to be solely based around a computer. Where are the joys of flicking through a CD rack on a computer? A CD collection says a lot about a person, what music is contained there, how it is sorted etc. Imagine going over to somebody’s place and just clicking though files. Joyless.

Listening to a CD, while flicking through the booklet is part of the experience in my book. It’s too hard to care about mp3 files. Though they are convenient and mobile, I will admit that. Purchasing a CD is a lot more satisfying to me than purchasing a download, which I just burn on to CD anyway. CDs are not perfect, but I'll stick with them.

Bah humbug.

PS I’m afraid I never embraced Minidiscs, so no comment there I’m afraid, though when’s the last time anyone came across one?