In the 1980s there was a kind of magic to the mixtape.

They could be anything its creator wanted. The mixtape was like a letter, but it was also a personal soundtrack. You wanted it to say something about you - to express in some abstract way how you felt about the world, life, hopes, dreams and love. This book is like a mixtape because it is a mixture of things, all of them touching in one way or another on life in the 1980s and music. Through a series of funny, heart-warming and incisive memoir pieces, stories and essays, the 1980s are brought back to life - the last decade before personal computers, the internet and mobile phones came along and changed everything. So hit rewind and then press play...