Before file-sharing, home-taping was the bane of record company execs who claimed it was killing music. Hardly says Ryan Crabbe, who champions the phenomenon of the mix tape and looks at the role of the humble cassette in underground music scenes.

As a teenage boy, I often spent time hanging out with mates in bedrooms comparing acne, listening to music and rating female school-friends by their looks on a scale of one-to-ten. The usual sort of stuff. And it was during one such occasion, round at a friend’s house, that I discovered something in his Woolworths-bought cassette storage carousel that has stayed with me ever since: a home-recorded tape with ‘Metal Mayhem’ scribbled down the spine in blue biro.
Had I chanced upon a dog-eared copy of Jocks in Frocks hidden away in a double-album sleeve, I would undoubtedly have been a little more sensitive and circumspect. But fancying myself as something of an arbiter of taste when it came to music, I wasted no time in ridiculing the offending tape compilation. After all, most of it wasn’t even proper metal anyway but was instead comprised of histrionic cock-rock workouts produced by long-haired men in spandex.
Thankfully, I’ve had the best part of two decades to get over my affront at what I then perceived as a contemptible musical crime, and generally I like to think that I’m now far more accepting of other people’s tastes, or at least more able to keep my opinions to myself. Consequently, the lucid memory of this otherwise unremarkable incident serves me less as a reason to feel superior about my own musical choices at the time (though deep in my heart I still do: yes I am one of those truly irritating people), than as the first time I can recall anyone I knew having made a mix tape.
And now, inspired by a recent book edited by Thurston Moore, entitled Mix Tape; The Art of Cassette Culture, I felt it was time to pay tribute to my old mate and anyone else for that matter who has ever taken the time and effort to lay down a bunch of tracks on a C90 and christened the resultant mix something endearingly dumb like Metal Mayhem or Funk ‘n’ Disco Mega-Mix (a home-made mix tape I recently upon in a charity shop) — hand-drawn cover art optional!
As anyone who has ever made one knows, a good mix tape is so much more than just the laying down of a random selection of tunes. For me, the secret of a good mix tape lies in the unlikely juxtaposition of different musical sources and genres into a coherent and truly unique whole which embodies a certain twisted logic – if only to your own ears. After all, nowhere else other than on the mix tape of my dreams would I expect to find the Associates, Killing Joke, Public Enemy, Wreckless Eric, Swans, Sweet Tee & Jazzy Joyce, Shirley Bassey and Coco Rosie — all seamlessly segued in discordant musical harmony. Ultimately, the mix tape becomes something more than just the sum of its component parts and as such, effectively marks the point at which you become not just a mere consumer of popular culture but a creator of it.

Rewind: The Story of a British cassette-only record label
If you were ever in any doubt as to the status of home-taping as a form of folk art, then a quick rummage through the Bi-Joopiter tape archives should be enough to convince you otherwise. For here, stored in a large cardboard box, exists a treasure trove of musical recordings, mostly on cassette and featuring unique cover artwork created by the musicians themselves. You’ll find hand-painted casings containing lo-fi pop noise from Japan, as well as tapes housed in all manner of decorative and highly-impractical packaging concepts, including one which came in a foil takeaway carton.
Founded by Paul Rixon and Gillian Elam in 1983, Bi-Joopiter existed originally as a cassette-only recording label, though later they embraced vinyl.
‘The whole idea of a cassette label drew upon the DIY ethic of punk, but more so.’ explains Paul. ‘Rather than the notion that you can make your own record, it was more; you can do your own tape at home, with no need to involve record companies, pressing plants and distributors, at all.’
Initially, Bi Joopiter’s output consisted of Paul’s own band, The McTells, as well as recordings of friends who were involved in music. And it was through those early releases that the pair realised that there were a whole lot of other people out there putting out cassette-only releases.
‘People would send us stuff to include in our catalogues and we’d put out compilation tapes of the material people sent in which we liked,’ says Gillian.
‘The economics were that you would produce 500 cassettes, but you couldn’t sell 500 in your own territory, but if you sent 400 abroad they could sell them there and in exchange you could sell their ones.’ adds Paul.
Meanwhile, Bi-Joopiter’s catalogues evolved into little zines, often featuring Dadaist slogans and featuring colour screenprints by Gillian.
‘At the time we really liked the idea of mail art and the notion of sending out packages which looked really nice, and getting stuff in return. A lot of people who got involved with Bi-Joopiter via our compilation tapes were expressing themselves with creative ways of packaging, which in themselves were an anti commercial statement, simply because you couldn’t display most of them in a record shops.
But despite the Dadaist slogans that sometimes appeared in their catalogues, Paul maintains that Bi-Joopiter wasn’t overtly political. Instead he explains,
‘it was very much an anti-copyright ethos. It was the idea that you can copy this and give to other people.’
Eventually, Bi-Joopiter moved from cassettes to vinyl, ‘but still with the same ethos of swapping ideas and supporting others.’ says Gillian.
But as Paul concludes, ‘Everything has a natural lifespan and so did Bi-Joopiter. Particularly the cassette thing, because after a while people stopped making them in the same number.’
www.bijoopiter.co.uk
Extracted from an extensive feature which originally appeared in Nude issue 7 (Winter 2005).
Illustration by Gwyn Williams
Cassette cover artwork from the Bi-Joopiter archive.