"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." So quoth novelist L.P. Hartley at the begriming of his great novel, "The Go-Between". And the summer after LP's death, I fell into his epitaph, riding in the back of my brother-in-laws car on Sunday afternoon with my sister and her kids listening to Simon And Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water on the 8 Track player.
I thought the 8 Track was bizarre even then.
Popular for motorists because it didn't jumped when the car jiggled like a 45 player, and also, unlike a cassette player it looped back on itself and could be played forever.
But it was a cumbersome plastic piece of crap and had NO SONG TRACK BREAKS. Instead, similar to reel to reels it had four arbitrary breaks, which would cut some songs in half as it switched from one track to another before looping back to the start.
It was a pretty terrible format.
The sound was terrible, it was big, it was cumbersome, it desecrated the music, it didn't have much room (40 minutes tops) and if Ford hadn't stuck it in all its cars (because they were part owners? nooooooooo) it would have died a well deserved death.
And, compact discs destroyed it before the 80s were over.
But back to me in a foreign country. My brother-in-law has been dead for years now but then he was at the peak of his powers, driving through the winding greenery in Helenburgh on a sunny day. The car was a stick shift and the road was open and the haunted sound of "Cecilia" breaking off in mid-stroke with a whiiizzz a burr a click, before starting up again, is just a memory of the world's most loathed music player format.