Scott - The Vinyl Frontier: the story of the voyager golden record

Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:

Spirals in Time by Helen Scales

A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup

Breaking the Chains of Gravity by Amy Shira Teitel

Herding Hemingways Cats by Kat Arney

Sorting the Beef from the Bull by R. Evershed and N. Temple

Death on Earth by Jules Howard

The Tyrannosaur Chronicles by David Hone

Soccermatics by David Sumpter

Big Data by Timandra Harkness

Goldilocks and the Water Bears by Louisa Preston

Science and the City by Laurie Winkless

Bring Back the King by Helen Pilcher

Furry Logic by Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher

Built on Bones by Brenna Hassett

My European Family by Karin Bojs

4th Rock from the Sun by Nicky Jenner

Patient H69 by Vanessa Potter

Catching Breath by Kathryn Lougheed

PIG/PORK by Pa Spry-Marqus

The Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker

Wonders Beyond Numbers by Johnny Ball

Immune by Catherine Carver

I, Mammal by Liam Drew

Reinventing the Wheel by Bronwen and Francis Percival

Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup

Best Before by Nicola Temple

Catching Stardust by Natalie Starkey

Seeds of Science by Mark Lynas

Outnumbered by David Sumpter

Eye of the Shoal by Helen Scales

Nodding Off by Alice Gregory

The Science of Sin by Jack Lewis

The Edge of Memory by Patrick Nunn

Turned On by Kate Devlin

Borrowed Time by Sue Armstrong

Love Factually by Laura Mucha

For the other book club

Contents

I still remember the first mixtape someone made for me. It had three words written on the side in blue ink: Punk for Jono.

This pre-playlist playlist was produced in around 1987, 10 years after the launch of the Voyager space probes. Unlike the Voyager interstellar message, it wasnt imprinted on a golden record encased in an aluminium cover and attached to the side of a spacecraft. It was a plastic C90 tape handed to me by Ed, a cool kid in the year above. The only thing it had in common with the Voyager records was that it included music selected by human hand. I would have been 12. I had stopped listening to Starlight Express , noting that Lloyd Webber musicals didnt carry much weight in the school cool-o-sphere, and had recently discovered The Blues Brothers, Atlantic Soul Classics and Otis Redding.

Then Ed made me a tape.

He only recorded one side of the tape, and there was quite a long gap at the end, so it can only have been around 40 minutes in length. The tape has not survived, but my memory of it remains clear.

Ed set the record levels a little too high. So by the time Topper Headons rumbling intro to I Fought the Law had crescendoed, the drums were distorting. Then came the power chords. It was indescribably thrilling. Lets just say Arthur Conleys Sweet Soul Music suddenly seemed a little thin.

Eds compilation taught me the importance of starting strong. And even though I havent actually seen this particular tape for 15 years, I can still recall every song two more by The Clash (Safe European Home, Guns of Brixton), Guns for the Afghan Rebels by Angelic Upstarts, Greatest Cockney Rip Off by Cockney Rejects, Seattle by PiL, Eton Rifles by The Jam, Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols and The Damned covering Jet Boy, Jet Girl. This was the first mixtape someone made for me, and in a way it remains unsurpassed.

Around the same time I received a double tape deck for my birthday. Suddenly, at my disposal, was the heady power of being able to share and disseminate music. I was able to easily transfer any music I had from one tape to another. Im pretty confident I owe Whitesnake quite a lot of money. I must have supplied copies of Here I Go Again (from Now Thats What I Call Music 10 ) to most of the boys in my dormitory. But the first proper compilation, mixtape, playlist whatever you want to call it that I made for someone else, came much later. It was for a girl called Beth.

It was the summer term of my penultimate year at boarding school. I had just emerged from a four-year imprisonment in braces. I had joined a band. I had got drunk. I had successfully snogged one female to date. Then a friend informed me that Beth had taken a shine to me. That was the summer I found out a little of what love was like. Id had crushes before Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz , for example but nothing like this. I didnt know her well. She was a couple of years younger than me. But she was pretty and funny, with a disarming, slightly dozy way of moving and talking, as if her body was suspended from a head full of helium.

Messages were exchanged. We were to meet at Doctors Lake after lunch. We had the whole afternoon. Doctors Lake was in reality a fairly dismal pond, but it was a place within school grounds where couples might go with a relatively high expectation of solitude. We went there. We were alone. I remember it being hot. I remember being terrified of any physical contact. I remember leaning back, accidentally touching her hand, and actually screaming with the shock.

The afternoon wore on. Screaming aside, there had been no physical contact. It was becoming awkward. We had to go back to our respective boarding houses soon. Eventually we did, walking in a slow meandering way, conscious of important work still to attend to, expectations to be met. Then, as we approached the back of the old squash courts with the leaky roof, we faced each other. I pushed through a bewildering fog of terror, and we managed a kiss.

That evening, snog under my belt, I set about fulfilling a promise Id made earlier in the day I would make her a tape. I can still recall the feeling, the excitement, the compulsion to create the ultimate calling card of cool. In that C90 tape, I was seeking to represent myself as a sensitive, discerning boy with startlingly good taste.

There was a time when I kept a journal of every tape I made, with each song noted down so as to guard against that cardinal sin of giving someone the same song twice. Although that journal no longer survives, I still remember some highlights from the first tape I made Beth. This was around 1991 and I was a British indie kid, so there was certainly Vapour Trail by Ride, Grey Cell Green by Neds Atomic Dustbin, some Violent Femmes (probably Good Feeling), and I remember very clearly that sides one and two were kicked off by songs from earnest Irish rockers Power of Dreams.

From that day forwards, for the best part of two decades, any good friend of either sex would probably receive at least one compilation from me. Some were short, on C60 tapes, some were long. At times I ventured into double and triple albums (reusing those tape cases that generally housed cheap blues compilations). I gave the tapes names and made covers, usually with random punk writing from letters cut out of magazines. Later, I made the leap to producing compilations on CD, and even playlists that only existed in digital form. But it was never quite the same.

Back in my mixtape heyday I had rules: I stopped including more than one song by the same artist or band, and all the songs had to be unknown to the receiver (although this wasnt always possible). I also liked contrasts. I liked to follow serious, mournful songs with novelty pop. I liked to have quiet followed by loud, or loud by quiet, so a song from Anthrax, for example, might well be followed by Flanders and Swann.