I Rememember Rock n' Roll Radio

Do you remember lying in bed
With your covers pulled up over your head
Radio playin' so no one can see?

It must have been around 1988. A friend of my parents left the UK for 6 months and she let me borrow her small, white portable radio. It was the first time I'd ever had control of a wireless receiver, and being able to drag the little line over the dial and rest at random on the musical islands that populated the hissing, crackling sea of white noise was a new kind of freedom. I was thrilled.

Unlike the Ramones, I didn't need to pull the covers over my head. When everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I shut my bedroom door and turned on the radio at a low volume. At the flick of a switch, the adult world of political debate and euphemistic pop songs filled the room.

I would love to pretend that I suddenly realised something profound; that I yelled Eureka! and ran out to Tesco in search of hair dye and the complete works of Albert Camus. But I was eight years old, and the young are notoriously wasteful with their youth. I just sat there spellbound and drifted in and out of the stations, not really understanding or enjoying what I was hearing. Unintelligible broadcasts beamed in miraculously from another planet, for my ears only.

It would also be great to say something profound like I sat up 'til dawn with the radio glued to my ear, eyes wide open in wonder. That, too, would be a lie. It may only have been 5 minutes, probably just an hour or two before I got tired and went to sleep. The quality of the experience, not the quantity, has kept it lodged in my brain for the last 21 years.

This first magical encounter with radio has stayed with me since then, and I still occasionally recall that initial excitement as I search the Berlin radio waves in vain for something worth listening to. Alas, like a disenchanted lover, I'm bored. The promisingly-titled Jazz Radio plays health club music rather than real jazz, the rock stations favour the cheesy, eyeliner-wearing bombastic anthems that leave me cold, and the alleged cutting-edge stations all play that new wave of British bands I just feel too old to understand or care about.

This cynical approach to the medium was put to the test recently when I picked up Matthew Collin's book This is Serbia Calling, which tells the story of the underground Belgrade radio station B92. The station started out in the 1980s as a counter-cultural student radio project, and rose to become a national voice of resistance to the Milošević regime in the 1990s. Their critical news coverage, which included information from like-minded stations in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia made them a natural target for the government.

B92's subversive musical selection, however, was just as important to its philosophy of liberation through culture. For many young people, they represented a lifeline to the outside world through in a country that was stewing in government-sponsored hatred and paranoia. While the rest of the nation was listening to patriotic turbo-folk and swallowing the official lies broadcast by Radio Television Serbia, B92 chose "the international call-signs of techno and rock'n'roll over the parochial, folksy paeans to nationalism".

"Art is more important than truth," said Nietzsche. Maybe so, but B92 was fighting for both of them at once against a government that respected neither. This led to an interesting hybrid of the two abstract concepts in March 1991 when, in the wake of mass protests for a liberalised media, the station was forbidden by the police to broadcast news. Strangely enough, they were still allowed to play music over the air. Station boss Veran Matić (pictured) explained:

"We were able to say through music what we would have said in the news if it had been allowed."

So The Clash, Thin Lizzy and Public Enemy were their spokespeople instead. B92's dissident DJs broadcast all sorts of calls to arms, sending out rallying cries in a foreign tongue to be decoded by the listeners as the police censors dozed in the corner of the office. The station had ceased to simply reflect information and events: it was now actively attempting to shape them with its soundtrack. And while radio has been a component of warfare since the 1930s, I doubt if it ever sounded this damn good.

Fast forward a few years to 2000 (hey, you can read the book or check out B92's own chronology of events here) to the collapse of the Milošević regime. B92, having spent the last few months broadcasting from secret premises as B2-92 after government cronies took over their station, returned to the air on their old wavelength and with a new television channel to boot. Today the station remains a major media voice in post-Milošević Serbia.

Curious, I searched Google for B92 and found the station's website. I can now listen to this once-guerrilla outfit's breakfast show, or tune in late at night to hear the obscure rock songs and the low, grainy voices of Serbian DJs chatting to their regulars across the airwaves hundreds of kilometres southeast across the vast, darkened continent.

There's something very romantic about it. I don't really know what's going on, I just enjoy the strange music and the incomprehensible monologues and feel excited and uplifted that I'm making some kind of contact with these cool people in a far-off place. And I can remember exactly what it felt like, sitting alone in West Ealing after midnight sometime long ago in 1988.