Your Mix Tapes - The general concept of the thing, (not endless tracklistings)

.. there are other threads for your tracklistings.

What, how, why?

I found a cache of mixtapes I made from around 1978 up to, ooh, I vaguely remember adding Manson "Take it easy (chicken)" to one, so whenever that one was..

The general indie rubrick goes "Hey, I made you a mixtape", which could have been a title for this thread, but I never did this: I made copies of tapes for people, but never made a specific bespoke one for anybody.

Also, it seems that another cliche about them is using an Ivor Cutler track in there 'somewhere', yep I would do this often, no idea it was a 'thing'..

They started out as being a 'soundtrack' for particular events/holidays/festivals, and then became 'what to have in the car when driving from work to meet-ups and then onto wherever', rather than listen to daytime Radio 1.

Then CD writers came in, and the need dissipated somehow. I used to make then on 4-track machines to allow for fade-in/out tracking. After that, just made sure the gaps between tracks were microscopic. And, of course, to fill the side of the tape so almost nothing was blank.

I named some, I made sleeves for maybe two, I never spray-painted them like you get on t-shirts from Primark thesedays..

I made a lot of tapes recording from my favourite radio shows in the pre-internet days. so it would a odd mish-mash of indie rock and thumping house

Oh I did plenty of this sort of thing. One mammoth task I set myself in the mid 90s was a set of mixtapes called "A to Z". I made a spreadsheet of every single artist I had on cd at the time - even if it was just one song on a compilation - then picked one song per artist, then sorted that list of song titles alphabetically and started taping them from A onwards. I think there were fifteen C90s in that set.

I only ever made one mixtape for a girl, and she's now my wife. Anyone else before that I would tend to write songs about in a creepy stalker-ish way but we won't go there.