Relic

Cassette (A5 pencil and collage on sketchbook page 2016)

As the excellent Christophe Gowans might say, ‘today I did a drawing of a relic’.

‘Home-taping is killing music’, the record companies tried to convince us in the 1980s. Yet so long as people stand up in front of others to sing, there will always be music. What home-taping probably did was cut into the lavish profits of the handful of recording conglomerates who tried to dictate our taste. With the internet, that particular game was over.

When I lived in Germany and my good friend, Ian, lived in Hong Kong, we exchanged a number of cassettes of our latest enthusiasms. He once sent me a cassette of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres which resulted in my buying, at the latest count, about 15 CDs of the Estonian composer’s music. At some point I sent him a cassette of Tom Waits, and if there is a Waits CD that Ian hasn’t since bought I’d be surprised.

So let us celebrate the humble cassette – a thing that probably played a part in everyone’s musical education by allowing us to share our discoveries with our like-minded friends. Without them I doubt if I’d own half the CDs that are sitting in boxes in my garage.

This scruffy little drawing came at the end of a long day. I’d spent the evening trying to do something else that proved too complicated for my limited skills so I did this nostalgic little drawing in a few minutes, collaging Tom Waits over the top the following day.