SFX Cassette Music Mag 1982

This maybe a bit obscure, not many people remember it, but in the early 80s there was an audio music magazine called SFX a little on the lines of Smash Hits.

I was more of a Smash Hits reader than and NME or Melody Maker fan myself so this thing appealed to me.
Smash Hits in the early 80s was less of a girly boyband rag than it was to eventually turn into in it's later years and seemed to be the only place that covered anything Electronic. The "Credible" music press hated the likes of Depeche Mode and Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark and as far as i was concerned spent far too much time kissing the backsides of bands sporting long hair and playing guitars during a time when synthesizers were king.

Looking back i think i probably only bought Smash Hits because they aimed themselves at any type of mainstream mass pop music and printed the top 75 on the back page every week.

Anyway back to SFX. It only ran for about a year and came in the form of a cardboard cover with a cassette tagged to it via a small piece of wire.

The tape consisted of a C60 with two half hour type radio shows each side that included interviews, music clips and conversation.

A sort of audio version of a music paper.

To be honest it sounded very amateurish and a bit tacky, but it was something different and they gave it a good go before it all collapsed and the mag wrapped up sometime at the back end of 1982. (Edition one came out in November 1981).

This particular episode included a cringe worthy interview with a very arrogant Lou Reed where he more or less tells the interviewer off before disappearing up his own backside, Haircut 100 telling us about their new television show ???? EH ?. And an album review with Mary Wilson (Just what i always wanted) plus Toni Basil talking about the time she worked with David Bowie.

I have uploaded a little clip for your listening pleasure below.

See how many of the "Hot Picks" New Releases you remember from March 1982. (More Here)

Cassette Singles

They were the same price as a 7" single but if you were lucky the 12" version and the 7" versions were included on the same piece of tape no more than 15 minutes long.
On the down side, like all tape, a few plays in and the sound quality started to go all weird and if you kept them in the car during cold weather it sounded like they were singing underwater.

The Cassette single, or the "Cassingle" as no one i know ever called them, was born in 1980 as far as i am concerned, although i read somewhere that the first was Howard Hughes by the Tights in 1978 (who ???...exactly!).
The first cassette single i ever owned was by Bow Wow Wow called Your Cassette Pet. Bought in 1980. It reached No 58 (UK) in December of that year and if i'm being honest i only bought it because it was sold as the first of it's kind.

Not that i didn't like the single, i just preferred Vinyl to Cassette and after trawling through a pile of old tapes tonight i can understand why. (they take forever to rewind and fast forward).
I don't think they ever really started to take off big style until the early 90s but It was of no surprise to me that they never replaced the vinyl version. However, when i worked in a record shop i was always surprised how many we did sell sometimes.

It all depended on the music though. Big Cassette single sellers were Boybands and Kids stuff (Take That, Mr Blobby) Crap sellers always seemed to be heavy rock and Indie music. In fact in the end a lot of rock bands didn't seem to bother with a cassingle version of a release. The reason was simple. Kids had little Sony Walkmans or cassette players, grown ups had record players and eventually CD Players.

But dance and rap fell somewhere in between the two. Credible dance music only sold on 12" Vinyl, mainly for budding DJs to bedroom mix with. Pop/Dance on the other hand sold by the bucket load in tape form to the masses. Probably the biggest selling Cassette single i remember from my shop days was Snap Rhythm is a Dancer. Outselling in quantity the 7" & 12" put together for us.

But then again, Vinyl singles were just starting to show signs of a huge decline in 1992. Who was to know that record shops themselves would go the same way ?. Like cassette singles, record shops are a remnant of the past that the next generation of kids will soon be asking, "What's a record shop ?". Before you can answer the question, you might first need to explain what a record was. I wonder what they will think of Car Compilation TDK C-90 tape ?.