listening under the covers

best thing I remember from doing this: nightly waiting to see if men without hats or salt n pepa would win the countdown.

Yeah, some John Peel and "Friday Rock Show"s back in '79

I still sometimes fall asleep with headphones on. Then you wake up being strangled by wires.

john peel in the 70s!! not becuz i wasn't allowed to stay up and listen on a grown-up radio — it would probably have been fine — but becuz i had ideologically fixed on the idea that only music that sounded great on the teenytiniest crappy radio money cd buy was actually good, and hey, you COULD take this kind of radio and listen to it under the nice covers really really quietly, snug as a punXoR in a rug

I remember listening to Peel Festive 50s under the covers but I was allowed to. My parents pretty much took the view that as long as I was in my room and not romaing the house after bedtime, what I was actually doing in there didnt matter.

It must be impossible for parents these days with the whole TV-in-room thing.

little geek aged-10 me built radio sets with radio shack/tandy kits and listened on crap little earphone. used to fall asleep to taped top 40 compilations a lot. now occassionally let the md run on and fall asleep to it, with resulting mini strangulation problem alluded to by A.

John Peel again, I shared a bedroom with 3 brothers so had to press the transistor radio against my ear until I got headphones. Hearing him play Altered Images was a pivotal musical moment.

The other fascination was Communist Block radio. Radio Moscow with its tractor quotas was a favourite, and Radio Tirana - somewhere between surreal and Orwellian. One 'news' item would slag off the decadent, imperialistic capitalist west, the next the revisionist pro-Moscow east, and then a piece on the worker's paradise beloved leader Enver Hoxha had created in Albania. I could laugh but God only knows how wretched it must have been to live there.

ps which is more punk? roaming the streets vs nevah getting out of bed? i wuv bed

I remember hearing about Lennon being shot and about the deaths at the Who concert - while listening late at night while I was supposed to be sleeping. I also remember being scared by a radio ad for Talking Heads' "Fear of Music" that I heard late at night.

yep, Peely: obsessively taping sessions, tracks etc, sometimes by holding one of those shoebox sized 'mini' tape recorders up against the radio.

Occasionally I would intone the name of the next track by speaking into the mic, snarling over the top of Peely in my best 'bored working class Londoner' 'Punk' voice. I was of course utterly middle class and living in rural Devon. I go red just thinking of it, but like flared v straight trouser legs, these things felt like moral issues at the time.

Having no money for tapes I would select a track I could do with out and tape over it with one I wanted. Considering the technological limitations - sometimes I was reduced to making a pencil mark on the cassette to indicate where the replacement song should start - the tapes were soon worn ragged and sounded like a weird patchwork of noise.

I still have some, and still weep at some of the now-classic session material I taped over in the hope that the first play of 999s fourth single was going to be a major moment in musical history.

I believe I've got a tape of Peely announcing the death of Ian Curtis somewhere...

Haha I did this but with MARK RADCLIFFE instead - YES! I 3> thee olde Graveyard shift...

Rock'n'roll was forbidden in my house, but it was the only thing that kept me alive....late nights under the wool with my transistor tuned into a rock'n'roll station from Detroit that just barely came in...me adjusting my shoulders to try and improve the reception so "The Wanderer" might come in just a little better...all the while waiting for my Dad, a Baptist Minister who thought the razor strap was the key to salvation, to burst in screaming about the devil's music...me knowing that the beating I was due was well worth another two and a half minutes of bliss...

None of this ever happened. If I was up late doing something, it was probably playing Atari on an 8-inch black & white TV, and then my Mom would come in sometimes and say, "Mark, it's time to go to bed, hon."