Reliving radio days behind the wheel of your car

There was a time – and it wasn’t that long ago – when a radio was an added extra in your new car. But then again so were seat belts, so we shouldn’t really wonder.

Now you wouldn’t even see them on a spec list because the assumption is that your new motor has a six-speaker sound system – and the seat belts are standard even for the middle passenger in the back.

But I can still recall the thrill of the first car I owned with a radio – one with buttons on it (not on the steering column) to move you from medium-wave to long-wave and two nobs to adjust the volume or change the station.

Not that there was much call for changing the stations, to be honest, because 2FM was still in its infancy and Radio Luxembourg’s range was never designed with the undulations of the west coast of Ireland in mind.

So you had a choice of about two and a half stations, which came in and out of coverage depending on your speed and height above sea level.

Half the time it sounded like someone trying to play music down a CB – Citizen Band radio or glorified walkie talkies if you’re too young to remember them – but it was the luxury of listening to music while driving that made it seem like the greatest thing since the wireless.

Next step up was a radio that had a cassette slot so that, if the two songs playing on the radio were rubbish, you could lash on a tape of the Buggles singing Video Killed the Radio Star and you were laughing all the way to your destination.

There had been a precursor to the cassette of course and the big old cars could accommodate the big old eight-track, even if it looked like you were trying to insert a book into your dashboard.

But the pre-recorded tape – or better still the C60 you copied from Larry Gogan’s Top 30 at the weekend – meant that you had the choice of what you wanted to listen to. I can still remember a brand new Mazda 323 that had a cassette facility and four speakers in the doors of the car; I sat for ages outside my house with the music on, until the neighbours thought I’d either locked myself out of the house or I had lost the power of my lower limbs.

The sound was superb, if only because the alternative was a record player with more scratches than a child dragged through a bush of thorns. We thought technology had reached its zenith.

Only it hadn’t, because the CD player was just a glimpse away over the horizon. And while initially the cost of these little silver slivers was prohibitive, they gradually came down in price to a point where the cassette was the Betamax of the audio tape world.

That said, your average car was still a distance from a CD player as standard – so improvisation was called for until technology had caught up with our insatiable demands.

They invented a set of wires – musical jump leads, if you like – that allowed you to put your portable CD player on the seat beside you, with a flex from the player attached to a fake tape that went into the cassette slot, and a charger that slipped effortlessly into the cigarette lighter.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.