Abstract
In his song ‘In the days before Rock’n Roll’, the Irish songwriter Van Morrison conjures, in a slightly ‘technostalgic’ mood, his sensations when turning the radio dial in search of rock’n 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.
[ … ] I am down on my knees / At the wireless knobs / I am down on my knees / At those wireless knobs / Telefunken, Telefunken / And I’m searching for Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Athlone, Budapest, AFN, Hilversum, Helvetia [ … ]
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Literature
Andreas Fickers, ‘Sichtbar hörbar! Radioapparat und Stadt — Knoten im vernetzten Kommunikationsraum’ in Clemens Zimmermann (ed.) Die Stadt als Kommunikationsraum. Medialität und Raumgefüge der Großstädte im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag 2006), pp. 83–103.
Alexander Geppert, Uffa Jensen and Jörn Weinhold, ‘Verräumlichung. Kommunikative Praktiken in historischer Perspektive (1840–1930)’ in Geppert, Jensen and A. Weinhold (eds) Ortsgespräche. Raum und Kommunikation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2005), pp. 15–49.
René Schickele, ‘Paneuropa der Sender’ in Irmela Schneider (ed.) Radio-Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen 1984 [1931]), p. 141.
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© 2010 Andreas Fickers
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Fickers, A. (2010). Biography 6: The Radio Station Scale: A Materialized European Event. In: Badenoch, A., Fickers, A. (eds) Materializing Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292314_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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