‘I threw it in the bin with everything else he gave me': the mix tapes that defined our lives

The Guardian

16-07-2025

At 18 my go-to albums were Dog Man Star, His 'n' Hers and a mix tape called Really, Basically, In a Sort of a Way, Volume 1. Named after the mutterings of a particularly long-winded lecturer, it was the first of many TDK D60s – always the same brand! – from my mate Pat. We had met at our university's registration day a few weeks earlier and would be friends for more than 20 years until his death in 2018. By then he'd not only been on staff at the NME – teenage Pat's dream job – but also written a book about its history.
Side A of the tape (entitled 'Barry Manilow Live!') has bands we'd bonded over, such as Kenickie and These Animal Men, two of our first London gigs together. Blur's Popscene is included because we were sweaty regulars at the club night of that name at LA2 in Charing Cross Road. The other one ('David Hasselhoff B-sides') includes Gallon Drunk, the Byrds and Stereolab, all a bit more mature, all nudges into new directions. Everything on the inlay card is in caps and even Pat's handwriting was cool. I hero-worshipped him well beyond our university years and he shaped my taste in films and fashion as much as music. When we were young he could be brutally, hilariously scathing about bands he despised; later, that energy would be spent more on championing than dissing. It's years since I owned a cassette player but, looking at the tape now, I'd forgotten it ends with a 'secret bonus track!' I'm guessing it's a shared guilty pleasure (Carter USM?) and can't wait to find out. It'll be another joke from not just a cool and funny friend but an all-round unfaltering one. Chris Wiegand
Nobody had ever made me a mix tape (or a CD playlist as it would have more likely been, since I grew up in the 00s) until my 19th birthday, and even then it wasn't a proper one. Having failed to track down a blank CD in Madrid, where we were both working as au pairs, a girl from Colorado I wasn't exactly dating but who was definitely more than just a friend wrote me a list of songs on a page pulled out of a notepad. I remember reading it for the first time, with its loopy handwriting, doodles, and songs chosen just for me, and thinking it was the most romantic thing in the world.
Like most 19-year-olds, I was confused and anxious about so many things, but she brought so much kindness and fun into my life. We were the same age, and I can't imagine that she had everything figured out herself, but she seemed to know more than me about most things, music included, and it was exciting to take a step into her world. I must have lost the scrap of paper at some point over the last decade, and now I can't recall a single song that was on there. I wish I did, and I wish I had a way of contacting that girl from Colorado – I still owe her a 'mix tape' in return. Lucy Knight
I find it easily in a bag in the attic – it has a sticker of a cat smoking a spliff, cut around the spools: a remnant of the 90s ska band Hepcat. The one mix tape I would never bin. Chris gave it to me in late 1999. He was 17 and playing gigs at venues like the Astoria. I was 16 and couldn't go to most of the gigs at venues like the Astoria because it was a school night.
It's not what you'd call your classic heart-on-sleeve emo mix. It's full of hardcore and punk anthems by bands such as Operation Ivy, Madball, Good Riddance and, randomly, multiple tracks by New Bomb Turks (he must have just bought their album at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, where he, then later we, would go on pilgrimages to find all the newest albums).
There are also, seemingly, no songs on side B. I re-listen to the tape now on my grandpa's old cassette deck, and have to endure almost 45 minutes of static to get back to the start – I simply cannot risk pressing fast forward in case the whole precious thing gets chewed up. Then, all of a sudden, the radio-recorded dolphin tones of Mariah Carey emerge from the static singing Heartbreaker, a track he knew I loved more than any punk, then cuts off before Jay-Z's verse. Worth the 43 minutes of white noise, truly.
But the start of side A, the pièce de résistance – and surely the real reason he wanted me to have the tape – was so I could hear his own band. Two tunes, recorded live with laughably terrible sound levels but faultless drumming by Chris. Two tunes my teenage self listened to over and over.
Twenty-five years on, this is the only version of those songs that remains. I absolutely love that they are unShazamable, that they exist solely on this crinkly tape that is one listen away from ruination. I still love those tunes – just as I love his new band. Our two children do, too. Kate Abbott
We didn't call them mix tapes back in the day. Well, I didn't. Wasn't cool enough. They were just tapes with songs on. The first life-changing one was sent to me by a friend Steve and it was just the most brilliant mix of all the punk songs I didn't know – the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones, the Pistols, of course, and best of all the Vibrators with Baby Baby. It was – and is – amazing. Lush, romantic, as much full of yearning as feedback, and super loud. Imagine Phil Spector turned punk and you've got Baby Baby.
It didn't make me a punk (still too uncool), but it did make me want to dye my hair black (pointless, as it already was), spike it up with sugar, and stick a red arrow through my ear. Which I did a bit later.
The last mix tape I made, in December 2023, was very much a modern mix tape. Improvised on the night, and on YouTube. Mum was dying and I spent the night by her bedside with my laptop. I just played song after song that I loved for her, unsure whether she could hear. I introduced them, like a DJ. 'And this is Tom Waits's version of Somewhere for you Marje because it's exceptionally beautiful and I love you.' 'And here's a little number from Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville Don't Know Much,which makes me cry and think of you because I love you.' 'And here's Leonard Cohen at his most melodic singing Dance Me to the End of Love, and I've chosen this because, erm, I love you.' 'Now for something a little different, Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne, which I've chosen for you because I love you, even if its meaning is a bit more complicated.' The songs kept coming through the night and I played them really loud. 'And of course the night would be incomplete without Stevie Wonder's As. This one's for you Mum because yes, you've guessed it, I love you.'
Each one was a love song and in their own way about immortality. I didn't know it at the time. And I didn't know what was coming next. I was just somehow reaching for the right songs, in a state almost as altered as Mum's. I like to think she heard them. But even if she didn't, she knew how much I loved her. She died early the next morning. Simon Hattenstone
Back in the late 90s, whenever melodic noise-rockers Idlewild would tour, my sister and I would go. We had spent hours engaged in classic sibling bonding: listening to guitar squall while I prevented the mosh pit from stamping on my little sister's head. Yes, her taste often tended more towards the likes of Steps, but for some reason we both loved this band's scuzzy pop, and one day, she made me a tape of one of their live gigs.
I was extremely excited. I saved it for a long bus journey, popped it into my Walkman, fired it up and sunk into angular, dissonance-strewn indie. It was absolute joy. There were new songs! Ferociously taut renditions of the classics! And … the random intrusion of Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer.
Confusion reigned as I suddenly found myself listening to a Christian rock troupe's schmaltzy ode to smooching – until it abruptly segued back to the gig. And then back to Kiss Me. And then back to the gig. Five minutes later, a blisteringly distorted riff mutated into an advert for a local car dealership. At which point I realised something: my sister had decided to check out a poppier radio station halfway through recording – and inadvertently created the world's worst Idlewild remix tape.
My sister has since died. I'll never be able to drag her out of a mosh pit again, or hear her attempt at a silly impression of the vocal tics of Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble. But I'll always have that tape. It might have been intended as a killer Idlewild live recording, but it's ended up something much more precious: a testament to her glorious daftness. Best mix tape ever. Alexi Duggins
I was given this mix tape in early 2004, at the outset of a relationship that lasted for almost a decade. It lives on a shelf in my living room with a few other cassettes, displayed for aesthetic reasons, since I no longer have a tape deck to play them on. Looking at it now, it seems like a vivid portrait of my ex and his then passions, from the picture of James Dean rolling his eyes on the handmade cover to the scratchy and abrasive music on the tape itself, from Her Jazz by Huggy Bear to Gutless by Hole, deep cuts like Other Animals are #1 by Erase Errata alongside classics like Patti Smith's Redondo Beach.
More than half the tracks are by female or female-fronted acts; my ex was brought up by his mum and most of his friends were women. He once told me that men had been responsible for all the negative experiences in his life (I suspect that our relationship has now been added to this list). Looking at the track listing I'm reminded of his great taste, noting the appearance of Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then pretty recent but now a romantic classic.
We had our ups and downs, to put it mildly, but I'm glad I have this memento of our early tenderness and intimacy. Alex Needham
I am very slightly too young for the golden era of mix tapes – open my first Walkman and you would have only found storybooks on tape – but I am exactly the right age to be part of the micro-generation of teens that burned CDs (or MiniDiscs) of stolen MP3s from LimeWire for our friends and crushes.
There were two enormous problems with this method of sharing songs: one, the file compression made everything sound unlistenably terrible, and two, what you thought you were illegally downloading from LimeWire was very often not what you were actually downloading from LimeWire. I discovered this when my best friend made me a mix of what she thought were songs by my favourite German metal band, Rammstein. In fact it was a CD full of entirely random European songs that someone on LimeWire had egregiously mislabeled, including a Dutch version of Aqua's Barbie Girl, all with that spangly sound that was unique to low-quality MP3 mixes of the era.
We laughed about this for years, but fun fact, that mix CD was how I discovered Finnish metal (and Megaherz, the most early-00s German metal band to exist). Keza MacDonald
The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. Weezer's Holiday. The Cribs' The Lights Went Out. These are some of the songs that my first boyfriend chose to burn on to a CD for me. It was summer 2006. I had found my true tribe outside of school, most nights (and early mornings) were spent in fields, my last year of sixth form was nigh and I had finally fallen in love. I fell hard. I could not believe – or handle! – feeling that way about somebody.
Music was starting to properly soundtrack my life for the first time: club nights and indie gigs, soaking up the albums my new mates played and making plans for Leeds Festival. My ex opened my world to some great music I wouldn't know without him. I thought that CD was so cool and romantic. ('He wants to hold my hand!')
The short version of this tragic love story: the relationship soured and it ended by winter. It would take me at least a couple of years to get over it.
At some point, I threw the CD in the bin along with everything else he had given me – too young, inexperienced and cried out to know I might quite want to see these items again one day. But every time I hear those songs play – and I do regularly seek them out – I'm comforted by a rose-tinted wave of nostalgia. They take me back to a time when life was just really starting – way more highs and heartbreak ahead. I'm glad I'll always have the music to take with me. Hollie Richardson
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