The fading of Radio

THE START: When did I start listening to radio? I'm not sure but, given that I was about to start school before we had a TV, it must have been the early 60s, and as a pre-computer yunk I wouldn't have known what a radio was in any case. It might have still been called a wireless for all I know - one of those things that used to heat up before it was usable. One of those pieces of furniture with strange writing on like "The Light Programme" and such - made of bakelite before it became übertrendy

 

THE 60S: Ed Stewart comes to mind, although there were earlier DJs. He had a programme called Junior Choice and it was full of songs that pre-teens would have listened to back in the 60s. Champion the Wonder Horse, Delaney's Donkey, There's A Hole in my Bucket, Runaway Train....stuff like that. Not a "shake your booty" in sight, although I have since heard that Puff the Magic Dragon is all about drugs.

If you don't know about the 60s, you've been under a rock somewhere. On the Moon. On the Far Side. There were, of course, the Beatles and the Stones. The Move, The Shadows, Herman's Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Hollies, the Bachelors, the list is almost endless but they were artists I heard on the radio rather than actively sought out.

THE 70S: This is musical decade that was MINE, and It was full from start to finish of the best music ever. Flower Power was finishing, Heavy Rock was taking off, "pop music" was fantastic, Prog Rock was there too, as well as the first wave of Kraut Rock (groan). Punk, New Wave and Disco were there. Country was still around, the music grounded in the US was on the horizon with AFN. There was even Easy Listening if you so desired. This was also when radio deregulation came in. I could listen to all sorts of local radio - Radio Tay, Radio Forth, Radio Clyde, Radio Scotland - radio was booming. Then there was John Peel. Thank you, John. I also stumbled upon Radio Luxembourg, but more of that later.

The outcome, strangely, of all this choice was that I stopped listening to Radio 1 and sought out the specialists. But I get ahead of myself by a couple of decades.

Before I stopped tuning in, I, like everyone else of my age I suppose,  started listening to the charts at the start of the week when I would listen avidly during a lunch-break hoping that Quo were going up the charts rather than down, and watching TOTP on Thursday (again hoping to see Quo) and finally rounding off the week with the chart show on Sunday night.

I wouldn't catch much radio in those days as I was a young school boy and carrying a tranny around was out of my financial reach. Tuning in to 247 (that's a wavelength for you youngsters, not when the station was available) was done on a communal tranny in the school playground. The radio at home was more likely to be a "portable" - if you were built like Desperate Dan.

I broke out of the mould though and started listening to mainstream radio. Back then that would have been Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. That's all there was until the mid- to late-70s. I listened to pop on Radio 1, rarely Radio 2, even more rarely Radio 3 and rarest of all Radio 4. I did start to get a bit choosy as the 70s progressed and did listen to oldies/middle of the road on Radio 2, classical stuff on radio 3 and the shipping forecast on radio 4. Of course, Radio 1 was a mainstay of my summer berry-picking. There was always someone in a dreel close by with Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis or Noel Edmunds on.

THE 80S: My life changed though when I caught the Great 208, the Station of the Stars or, to give it the correct name, Radio Luxembourg - Europe's biggest and best commercial radio station, broadcasting with 1.3 million Watts of power! I wasn't around when the station started in 1933 so I missed a great deal.

I tuned in from about 6 in the evening when there was an international broadcast before the English stuff started proper. The DJ enthused in Dutch and English, if I remember correctly. I'm sure I heard it in German prior to that.

208 went on until about 3 in the morning when we had closedown. Back in the day there was no 24 hour radio that I listened to.

Sadly 208 perished as British commercial radio developed, although there is talk of it going DAB so who knows? I do wonder if there is a call/audience for the music of the 70s - I hesitate to call them oldies but we are all heading that way.

It was here, too, that I was able to savour my other passion - the Eurovision Song Contest. This is where I heard a Dutch Version of Nicole's winner. This is where I was able to hear ABBA in Swedish.  This is where I could hear Spanish Punk. This is where I heard about the Neue Deutsche Welle (New Wave of German Music). This is where I heard foreign covers of English language songs.

With the demise of Luxy, my ears caught onto shortwave radio, sometimes called world band radio. This was the internet before the internet. I wonder what part Tony Hancock's "The Radio Ham" played in that? I had seen all sorts of radio stations on the odd radiogram that I saw in my travels and on the odd table top radio receiver (tranny to you lot) that I had.

My first shortwave receiver was bought from a local electrical corner shop for about £30 back in the late 70s or early 80s.

It looked, somewhat, like this:

It ran off 6, or maybe 8, batteries

£30 was serious money back then but I was a student on a grant and could afford it. It was an Eastern European model judging by the Cyrillic writing inside the cabinet. It had several wave bands that you selected via a clunky dial - the actual stations had to be tuned in by following the red strip along the front of the machine - this was before digital, it was analogue. No easy, type in a number and it's there back then. No way to store your favourite stations. You need to know the time (GMT all year) and roughly what wavelength you needed to hone in on.

You'd hear all sorts of bells and whistles and strange noises as you scrolled through the airwaves. Those sounds are very "cosy". I remember lying in bed, warm and ready for sleep, with a warm drink listening to this stuff. Not for us the clean and crisp (and soulless) digital. I even remember listening to a repetitive 1010, 1010, 1010 (or some such number) through the night, which turned out to be the bleep system for the hospital! In amongst all the hissing and eldritch screeching, dross and strange languages, suddenly a very strongly accented English voice would blare out - usually Radio Moscow, Radio Tirana, or Radio Berlin, the voice of the German Democratic Republic!

This machine, which brought me endless hours of pleasure, was broken by some nameless person and I was radioless for some time. I don't count MW and FM as radio as they were somewhat limited and they were on the "music-centre", which wasn't very portable!

I then bought myself a Grundig yachtboy for about £100 and it still serves me to this day.

It's a bit battered and needs a tender hand but it can still pull in the stations. This model has the benefit of allowing you to scan for stations. You press a button and the machine scans through the airwaves until it finds a station, whence it stops. It might be someone reading from the Koran, it might be some delightful bazouki music, or it might be the Chinese talking about tractor production. You just never know. On the other hand, if you want to tune in to Radio Austria International and know the frequency, you just type it in and you're listening in to Mozart in a thrice. It also stores a limited number of favourite stations. So if the mighty Shortwave Listening Guide isn't to hand, you can store the station and go and find out exactly what it is, if you don't want to wait until they tell you.

THE 90s: Missing from here because they were crap. As far as radio is concerned.

THE 00S: The internet is a great boon to world band radio listener now - no more browsing through tables and tables of stuff trying to find out who exactly is broadcasting on some strange wavelength at 4 in the morning in a language that, to your ears, is Spanish but might be Portugese. No more having a mighty tome that is probably out of date by year end. Not just world band, but that dig at Medium wave earlier on, is no longer valid. Now there are hundreds of radio stations streaming their stuff at you. You can randomly listen to whatever the web page throws your way, or be selective and just tune in to Alpine yodels, if the fancy takes you. As it does me.

Back in the day, I used to like tuning in to Radio Tirana, East German State Radio, Radio Moscow and the like. Either to hear their rubbishing of the West or their trumpeting of their dubious sportsmen's/women's winning ways. And they really did talk about potato harvest and tractors.

Taking the rose-coloured specs off,  the internet now reigns. I don't listen to DAB as it doesn't cater for me yet, as far as I'm aware. I get my fix on the 'net. There are some useful sites out there - a couple that I'd recommend are surfmusik.de - a German site (available in English) that lists radio stations by continent, country and genre, and get your www over to radioshaker.com - if you've never listened to a station out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, or some Volksmusik out of Bavaria you really are missing out. The world's your oyster someone said.

THE ??s: I have my eye on a Grundig satellit 750 or an Eton E1XM, or maybe a combined DAB/DRM model. I might even go down the Software Defined Radio route - you know, plug a black box into the back of the computer and off you go. Sadly, pulling a signal out of the ether and cleaning it up, digitising it and putting it out through some headphones looses out to the feel you get from a real radio but that is advancement. Hey, maybe someone will develop an app that puts all the rubbish back into radio. Or do we already have that with mainstream DJs of today?

I suppose you could still listen in to UK radio to get what you want but there is a lot more out there if only you'd care to tune in. Oh yes, in general it's free.

A bit long for a blog, but it is a passion.