92.7 FM WLIR* was our secret!
Updated: Jul 8
I was genuinely upset when the rest of my high school discovered U2.
My best friend and I had them all to ourselves before The Unforgettable Fire exploded in 1984. Then suddenly, overnight, the most musically illiterate people in school became “huge fans.”
Fine.
Whatever.
The good news was that about 95% of what WLIR was pumping out still remained part of our little secret society.
Back then, discovering music actually required effort and if you were not in a nightclub listening and dancing badly to the New Wave tunes being spun by awesome DJ's,
92.7 FM, WLIR* was the only game in town...if you could pick up the signal from this underpowered broadcasting gem.
And money.
Money we definitely did not have.
So if you wanted access to this strange new world coming out of the U.K., you recorded songs directly off the radio onto cassettes using your trusty single-speaker Hitachi AM/FM radio.
Those tapes became treasure.
Everybody had their own secret stash of chopped-up recorded radio mixes with the DJ always cutting in before the song ended and bootleg cassette copies that had been passed from friend to friend like underground contraband.
(Still, when you hear these songs today on your playlist, your brain expects to hear the very next song you recorded on that tape…back then.)
At one point, my friend Cori handed me a cassette copied from our other friend Dan and said:
“You are going to love this band.”
The tape was “Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape” by Bauhaus.
That one cassette completely opened the door to darker music for me.
And for the record…
We did NOT call ourselves “goths.”
That label showed up later when somebody decided every music scene needed a marketing category.
“Dark music” worked just fine.
Same thing happened when people started rebranding New Wave as “Synth-Pop.”
No.
Absolutely not.
It’s New Wave.
It was New Wave then. It remains New Wave now.
Forever.
Be proud, Latchkey.
Be proud…but don’t tell too many friends.
— Latchkey Boys
*WLIR: Red APPLE MEDIA
Are you cool with New Wave being re-branded to Synth-Pop?
Yes.
No.
Hell, no!
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