DRIVING my daughter to work at stupid o’clock the other day I absent-mindedly turned on the radio and had one of those Proustian rushes. Wake Up to Money was on 5 Live and it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard it since my international globetrotting journalism days – ie, the odd trip to London back in the pre-pandemic, pre-Zoom world.

Back then my dark-hours journey to Edinburgh airport was always accompanied by the voice of Mickey Clark telling me about the Dow Jones or something else I didn’t understand. But the wash of voices was always welcome on those 5am starts when the rest of the world still seemed asleep.

These days I’m with the rest of the world. I’ve realised that increasingly my radio listening has become a daytime activity. From around 8am to 7pm or thereabouts. Unless there’s a football match that I want to listen to when I might tune in at 10pm.

How did that happen, I find myself wondering? When I was a kid and well into my teens, 20s and 30s, I listened much more at night than during the day. As soon as I had my own radio in my early teens I’d be trying to tune into Radio Luxembourg through the static.

My student nights were soundtracked by Billy Sloan on Radio Clyde. And if I picture the house we lived in when my first daughter was a toddler, John Peel is on the radio while I’m washing the dishes.

Apart from intermittently tuning into Radio 3’s excellent Night Tracks, the last time I regularly recall deliberately tuning into late night radio was to catch the late, great Janice Long after midnight on Radio 2. And that came to an end in 2017 when Long was dropped by the station (such a commonplace story now).

Partly this change in behaviour is personal. Circumstances and habits change, right? But some of it is cultural too. That twentysomething me was listening to Billy Sloan to hear music he couldn’t get to hear any other way.

Now, music of all flavours is available at all times via the internet. You don’t have to wait until nighttime radio to hear indie music any more. The demarcation lines that were set in stone back then no longer make sense.

So what room does that leave for nighttime DJs? Well, they’ve moved on from being the indulgent gatekeepers who let you hear the stuff that daytime jocks would run a million miles from and have become curators instead. We are encouraged to tune in and be impressed by their record collection.

If I am tuning in in the evening – usually on those rare occasions when I’ve been out and about in one of the big cities and I’m driving home – then I move up the dial to Radio Scotland to catch Vic Galloway, Roddy Hart, Billy Sloan (still fighting the good fight) or Natasha Raskin Sharp, who turns up on a Thursday night between 10pm and midnight before Radio Scotland gives over its airwaves to 5 Live for the late night shift.

Raskin Sharp, probably best known for her appearances on Bargain Hunt and Antiques Road Trip, has a great (slightly raspy) radio voice, but it’s the eclecticism, eccentricity even, of the musical choices that are interesting.

The other week she played It’s Four in the Morning by Faron Young – one of my dear departed dad’s favourites – and followed it up with Prefab Sprout’s Faron Young, one of mine.

Time travel is easier in the dark and for a moment I was back in both a council house in Northern Ireland in 1974 and a student flat in 1985.

It also made me think of the way radio cocoons us, wraps us up in that intimate communion of voice and music.

Especially at night.

 

Listen Out For: Charlestonian Rhapsody - The Story of Edmund T Jenkins, Radio 3, tomorrow, 6.45pm

Before his death in 1926 African-American composer Edmund T Jenkins was a successful composer and band leader in the early years of the 20th century. But he was then forgotten. Allyson Devenish uncovers his story.