The Friday Night Rock Show

Old Rockers of a certain age may remember this well.
It was a radio one show, running from 10 till midnight from '78 to 93' hosted by the rather cheesy and incredibly earnest Tommy Vance.
I began listening in '79 when I came across it purely by accident one star crossed enchanted evening.
I was an avid fan for around 5 glorious years, but nothing can ever match those first couple of years of my initiation into the dark labyrinthine, occult pantheon of rock. (I know, I sound like Tommy.)

Locked away in my tiny bedroom, the curtains open, the night big and vast and full of symbolism and strange surreal connections, I hunkered down on the floor, back against the bed and gobbled up this brand new nocturnal carnival of soul food.

I was a 13 year old virgin who had tentatively dipped his willy in Slade, T-rex, Queen and Status Quo, but what I yearned for was total psychic and bodily immersion into something deeper, more symbolic, a new lexicon - something artistic that my adolescence could grab onto and use to articulate the swarm of new feelings and sensations that were, literally, keeping me awake at night.

The names of the bands awed me at first: Whitesnake, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush, Judas Priest, Deep Purple...Black Sabbath!
These names were electric, they sounded mythological and timeless. The songs had wicked titles too: Heaven and Hell, Black Night, Tarot woman, the Necromancer, Spiral architect, Gypsy queen.

I'd just began around 6 months earlier getting into the habit of reading horror and sci-fi novels too: James Herbert, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft...heady days.

Unlike chart music, TOTPs and all the other mainstream music sources, FRS seemed akin to a secret society, a trans global Illuminati psychic crash pad for the more spiritually inclined. I felt a feeling of anticipation, imminence, travel and adventure when in my little Friday evening rock box.

These bands and their music were so romantic and picaresque, so historically embedded somehow.
I used to set up the silver mike from my black Decca cassette deck next to the radio speaker, and slip in a C-90 BASF tape (remember them). The little red recording light would glow and I'd be crossing my fingers.

I would experiment with various recording positions, I was an apprentice sound engineer, A bedroom George Martin, attempting to discover the magical level point where perfect voice, guitar, bass, drums synchronization would be achieved - at least to my ears.

Fucking Tommy, not as bad as some, but he did tend to talk over the songs;finger hovering over the pause button...'Now'! Shit missed it, bastard, ruined. Sometimes I'd catch it just right and have an almost perfect recording without DJ contamination...and then find the tape had snapped and tangled in the mechanism, aaaaargh!

What hard work that old technology was, very physical and time consuming for our young audio engineer. Kids today eh,they haven't got a fucking clue.
No seriously they haven't and its their loss. I really learned to appreciate my music back then in the days before, MTV, MP3's and YouTube, and still do today because of those experiences.
Music was hard won, a rationed experience and a real event.
Then I got my Japanese Les Paul copy from my mum's catalogue and things got serious, and darkly funny too. That's another story though.

RIP Tommy and God bless Rack and Roooooowl!