DUBAI: If you are in your late thirties or older, then the likelihood is that you will have owned cassette tapes at some point.
They were all the rage during 1970s onwards, taking over from vinyl for a lot of music fans, until they were finally replaced by the digital era when the CD came into fashion.
The tape also offered people, for the first time, the chance to record at home, and for the average adolescent that meant picking off their favorite tunes as they were played on the radio.
And then there was the mixed tape – what is now known as the playlist on the likes of iTunes or Spotify – involved a great amount of thought and effort, making sure that the music followed a common theme, no two songs by the same artist. There was no reasoning to these rules – they just existed.
Of course there was little good about them – they wore out, got chewed up in the cassette player if the heads were not cleaned properly and the sound quality was not great.
But none of this means anything to British dad, James Crane’s three children, who he filmed as they tried to work out how to get cassettes to play.
In the hilarious minute-and-a-half video the 39-year-old can be heard giggling in the background as he filmed his children,12-year-old Archie, 10-year-old Oscar and 9-year-old Grace, as they were left clueless trying to figure out how to use his collection of old cassette tapes.
“Just shown my boys some tapes, they were told this is what I used to listen to music on,” he wrote on his Facebook account.
“Their idea of how to listen to it had me in stitches,” he added.
In the video the children can be seen holding the cassettes to their ears, looking through the holes, saying that all they can hear is rattling.
There is even a suggestion that maybe batteries are needed before Grace speaks, suggesting that perhaps the tape needs to be put in the television – but according to the boys – there was no television when their dad was a child.
