Nick Hornby has a bit in “High Fidelity” where he talks about making compilation tapes.

I used to make lots of compilation tapes when I was at college, and Ashley reminded me of one in an email he sent today. Back in those days, unlike Hornby, I wasn’t principally making compilations for my girlfriend, but for friends and my brother, Nick.

These tapes were made around 1986-1988, so had all sorts of stuff on them. I wasn’t much of one for arranging playlists by mood or type of music, I just slung stuff that I thought was good onto tape, in pretty much any order, sometimes trying to find a theme for each side of the tape. Ashley’s tape was a fairly typical one, featuring Tackhead Age of Chance and Was (Not Was ).

I used to take a lot of time making the tapes, and printing out cassette inlays using my Atari ST and dot matrix printer, each had a full track listing and often a few decorative touches, like an illuminati pyramid if there was a JAMMS track on the tape. Pretty much everything was recorded from vinyl because I didn’t buy a CD player until 1987, and most of the stuff I liked wasn’t easily available on CD then.

Looking back, there were a lot of tracks that I really ought to get CD or MP3 copies of, as I haven’t used my turntable in about a year. One favourite track was Boris Badenough’s “What’s Up Rocky” on a “House Sound of Chicago” compilation. Loads of samples from “Rocky & Bullwinkle” over a great Chicago House tune.

I haven’t made a compilation tape (or CD) in ages. Maybe it’s because there hasn’t been anyone to make them for recently, or because it’s so easy for people to get stuff now, or maybe that a lot of my recent music purchases have been old 80’s tracks anyway. With the advent of CD burners and MP3s, it could be that the art of the compilation tape is dead. As Paul Morley says will be no objects to hold or fetishise, and people will simply collect lists. When music becomes easy to obtain, collecting it becomes less important, unless you change the focus from the magic contained within the sleeve to the sleeve and the packaging itself, which is more than missing the point.

There’s still something magical about finding something after years of searching, and even though Ebay and Google make the finding easier, some of these things were so limited that it’s still difficult or impossible to obtain them. In some cases, I’m happy to settle for MP3s of tracks that are no longer available in a more solid form, but in some cases, even this is not possible, as it would seem no one has ripped the item or made it available.

So if anyone has an original CD of Win’s “Uh! Tears Baby – A Trash Icon” that’s taking up space, I’ll be only too pleased to take it off their hands.

Update: I’ve found clean MP3’s of the Win CD, but would still like an original if anyone has one