Biography 6: The radio station scale: A materialized European event

Abstract

In his song ‘In the days before Rockʼn Roll’, the Irish songwriter Van Morrison conjures, in a slightly ‘technostalgic’ mood, his sensations when turning the radio dial in search of rockʼn roll sounds. ‘Without those wireless knobs,’ he sings, ‘Fats did not come in […], Elvis did not come in […] Nor Fats, nor Elvis/Nor Sonny, nor Lightning/Nor Muddy, nor John Lee’. Illuminated station scales have engraved themselves as imagined world maps in the collective memory of a whole radio generation. Although Van Morrison primarily reflects on the radio as an ‘ear to the world’ and medium of cultural modernization, the song starts with the description of the bodily interaction with the radio as an intimate companion, and - even more interesting for our purpose - he enumerates a number of radio stations listed on his radio scale. As most of the European stations in long and medium waves bore the names of the cities or places of transmission, radio station scales read like atlases of European broadcasting landscapes. Metaphorically speaking, station scales became a roadmap and timetable for the journey through the ether - each frequency point mutated into a ‘station’, inviting the listener to dwell for a while. Looking at the dial was an open invitation to an imagined ether voyage, where London, Paris, Oslo and Hilversum were just a little turn away from each other. Station scales evoked to the radio listener - who was a radio watcher too - a mental map, which could only be decoded by the listener himself. Turning the dial was an act of symbolically appropriating the world.