Its impossible to count how many of these babies I’ve been through…from my very first portable recorder taping tunes from the radio, through to making mix tapes for girls I was madly ‘in love with’ and onwards to having them duplicated in batches of 50 when I started DJ’ing seriously.

I have (thanks to Nick) a whole archive of DJ mixes from my days in The Sandmen (whoosh, dangerous knowledge and other great demos), each one filled with 90 mins of musical ephemera from ‘back in the day’. Listening back to those old school mixes is sometimes shocking, with some dodgy mixing - but always great tunes and fantastic memories I know I have a box full of these things around somewhere - and probably not even a player to play them on.

So its sad to hear that they will no longer be stocking them - we’ve all moved on, firstly to CD’s - when it was cheap enough to make your mixes on a PC and have them run off on CDR - and now onto MP3’s and podcasts, which means I don’t have to make much effort at all to get a mix out to people that want one.

Farewell - the cassette tape: