30 Day Music Challenge: Day 17

‘A song you hear all the time on the radio.’

Part of what I enjoy most about radio is how the answer to this question is always changing. Like the ever-breaking waves on the shore, the radio crashes to its musical identity at a rhythm and pace bound by other influences… not the moon, perhaps, but the earth, and the pace of its weeks of charting and releases and new discoveries, old favourites, daily themes.

I make a lot of new discoveries of my own through listening to the radio. I always mean to listen more… it’s my early morning pleasure, mainly, or my link to the rest of the world when I’m driving on my own. There’s nothing better than driving when a song you love comes on the radio, with all the serendipity of someone else’s playlist… and you turn the stereo up loud. Sometimes, in traffic, you can tell that someone in a nearby car is listening to the same thing… you can lipread that they’re singing along, or tapping out a rhythm on their steering wheel. That moment of half-shared pleasure with a stranger who might not even know you’ve noticed them, is the magic of radio, encapsulated there… that individual as part of a whole wide magic thing, where you’re alone in your car (or your room, or wherever you are) as you listen… but you’re inextricably linked to all those millions of others in their cars and their rooms and their wherevers, listening with you, not knowing you’re alive.

I could make a list here. I’ll keep it short - just a few highlighted moments from not very long ago.

A few weeks ago, I made a round-trip of about 160 miles to attend a work-related training course. It was a stunning, slightly cool spring day, all wall-to-wall sunshine and glittering rural landscapes. I wished I’d had the time to stop here and there to take photographs. That day, ‘Bumpy Ride’ by The Hoosiers seemed almost to be on a loop on the radio, no matter what station I changed to… and as I hurried my pace along winding and, yes, often slightly bumpy rural A and B roads, at the end of quite a difficult week (and towards the end of rather an excruciating term) it amused me with how the cheery melody and manner of performance juxtaposed themselves against some quite foreboding lyrics. It seemed almost like a commentary on what was going on in real life, off air - and it seemed to be the kind of commentary which whispered, between the lines, that everything might just turn out all right.

Early many mornings this month, quite similarly, I’ve heard ‘Nothing on but the Radio’ by Roxette. One morning I sniggered to myself as the presenter joked that, at that hour, quite possibly some listeners really did have nothing on but the radio. It was that radio magic thing again, albeit in a slightly more unsightly form: that moment of realising that, everywhere, people were in their bathrooms or their bedrooms or their kitchens, getting ready for a day of work or school or adventure. It made me feel better about how tired I was that morning, imagining that all these nameless others were probably tired too, as we all dragged ourselves through the motions of preparing for another day after insufficient rest.

Sometimes, half-remembered magic from the past sneaks up on you on the radio, and you’re back in a moment you’d forgotten about, really, but which seems so immediate and real when it returns that you’re back there - it’s so secure, that travelling in time, that when the song ends you have to check what year it is. ‘Somewhere in my Heart’ by Aztec Camera did that for me a few weeks ago: driving home from work, I was suddenly back in sixth form in such absolute reality that I almost panicked at the traffic lights… how did I get home from here, given that as a sixth former I hadn’t learned to drive, and that I didn’t live anywhere near here but over 60 miles away…? It was my ‘Back to the Future’ moment… aptly enough as that series of films came out during my teenage years. I was back with all the worry of A level grades and friends and boys and how on earth I was ever going to master the unattainable art of being ‘cool’.

I love the roulette of radio: you switch on in the hope of hearing something you love, or discovering something new which you’ll go home and download and add to the ever-growing ‘Favourites’ playlist. ‘Oldies’, like I am, remember the days when the weekly chart show was exciting: when the internet hadn’t been invented, much less blogs or Twitter, and you didn’t know in advance what order in the Top 40 the songs would come. You knew roughly what you were going to hear, but it actually was properly exciting to find out what you’d here exactly when. What was up - what was down - what was where in the Top 10. Teenage fingers everywhere were poised on Argos radio cassette recorders, ready to press ‘Play/Record’ at speed once a favourite song was cued up and announced. Scratchy compilation tapes in the attics or at the backs of cupboards of people who remember doing this have seconds of DJs’ mid-Atlantic announcings interrupting the flow of songs. Chart shows now are so boringly predictable that I haven’t listened to one for years. Even the race for the Christmas No.1 is no fun any more. But the roulette of radio still exists in the caprice of station playlisting - and that’s a big part of what makes music-based radio still worthwhile. You might end up with the sort of songs I’ve complained about on previous days… you might end up with an overkill of the seasonal at the expense of everything else… you might end up with one of those radio magic times, when you realise you’re part of something broader, listening on your own, but as though, somehow, you’re right beside the friend who’s just texted you to ask if you’ve just heard it too. That’s one of my favourite moments of all, with radio (or TV, or film): that moment when you know that someone who matters in your world is listening or watching, many miles away, to just the same thing at just the same time. That’s the moment when you shiver with recognition and know that you’re still friends…

And without the roulette of radio, never quite knowing what you’re going to hear or when, that magic could never happen.