AS RECORDED music formats go, I always felt cheated by the tape. Your favourite band’s new album seemed too have shrunk, like a crisp packet in the oven.

The artwork was miniature. The sleeve notes required complex unravelling. Plastic cases quickly cracked.

So as good as cassette releases from local indie labels such as Abingdon’s Swirly Tapes were, they never made me punch the air like a shiny new LP from long lost shops such as Garon in the Covered Market, and Manic Hedgehog on Cowley Road.

I am of course, going back a quarter of century here. The cassette tape has however, recently made a startling and unexpected comeback.

If you have a box of old tapes in your loft, you could have become quite the hipster. Without ever knowing it.

This Christmas, newly pressed cassettes sit on the counter at Oxford’s Truck Store. It’s possibly the first time I’ve seen the like on sale, as most retailers pulled the plug on the format a decade ago.

The driving force behind the resurgence is said to be nostalgia. The aspect of the cassette that I’m most nostalgic about is the lost art of the homemade mix tape.

Computer technology enables people to assemble CD compilations of music at the drag of a mouse. But cramming a C90 tape with handpicked tunes was a lengthy labour of love.

Once upon a time, making a mix tape could take up evenings for a couple of weeks. And that’s before you even got to hand drawing the sleeve.

Which brings me to my 2015 Christmas mix tape.

I could include the current favourites for Christmas number one, such as Billy Fury and the wonderful NHS Choir. But instead I’m plunging into the miserable, misunderstood worlds of gospel and country music.

Surrounded by piles of dusty records, I get down on my knees, pressing the play and record buttons simultaneously as I tape Empty Chair at the Christmas Table by Bob Wills, then Kitty Wells’s Christmas Ain’t Like Christmas Anymore. Both bounce along like a bag of broken toys rolling down the staircase.

After a few songs from my all time favourite, the timeless Jim Reeves Christmas Album, I’d slip in Christmas Eve Can Kill You by the Everly Brothers, and the unclassifiable Merry Christmas You Suckers by Paddy Roberts.

All of side two would be filled with Death May Be Your Christmas Gift by the Rev AW Nix, played over and over until the tape runs out of space. Nix’s throbbing, rhythmic voice builds through every spellbinding second.

My Christmas mixtape might not be everyone’s idea of a good Christmas sing-along. But I tell you folks, you just can’t buy this sort of thing in the shops.