There's a statistic about how the music you like when you're 13 will stay with you for the rest of your life. It was certainly a key age in my life and musical journey.
As a teenager in the Gloucestershire countryside, financial opportunities were few and far between. The only way to indulge my fledgling love of music was to buy a handful of 7” singles a year with money saved up from birthdays and Christmas. The cheaper alternative was to record songs to cassette tape from the radio. The Sunday night chart show was essential listening, with finger poised over the record button should something good come on, hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over it. That would have been Tony Blackburn in 1980. Or, if you were lucky enough to have a whole tape spare, you'd record the entire show and pour over it afterwards.
Music was a valued distraction from the the Yorkshire Ripper, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and “the troubles” in Ireland that seemed to take up most of the time on grown-up TV. Meanwhile I was still trying find something to fill that last 3-minutes of side 1 on my latest C-60 cassette tape.
