I can still picture the scene: a Saturday night in the early 90s with nothing on telly and the same diet of classic hits and twaddle droning out of the local radio stations in Sussex.

In a world before mobile phones, internet and social media, I found myself doom-scrolling the medium wave, more out of habit than hope. Suddenly South Coast Radio’s golden oldies started getting clobbered by a loud, rhythmic splatting. A nudge down the dial and -bang- something alive snapped into focus: hard, propulsive, modern. For these young ears it was nothing short of revolutionary.

That signal was NRK P3 (then “Petre”) on 1314 AM, and what I’d stumbled upon was the UK DMC Mixmag Top 40 - a weekly countdown of upfront dance I simply wasn’t hearing anywhere else. I was hooked within minutes.

Those Saturday nights became a ritual, and many of the records I first heard there wove themselves into my teenage soundtrack, helped shape my love of dance music and, years later, nudged me towards launching Passion Radio, our classic dance station on DAB in the UK.

“The Thunder From Down Under”

Front and centre of those memories is the show’s host: Erik Lloyd Walkoff, billed on air as “The Thunder From Down Under.” Australian-born, at NRK he brought pace, enthusiasm, and a sense that you were being guided towards the future.

It still floors me that he died so young; I wish I’d had the chance to tell him how much those shows mattered, and how the ripples reached all the way to the airwaves of the South Coast all those years later.

A superpower signal

What made this discovery possible was the frankly bonkers engineering behind it. The programme came via 1314 kHz, a superpower medium-wave site in Norway throwing a carpet of signal across northern Europe after dark by bouncing signals off the ionosphere.

NRK carried English-language shows specifically aimed at listeners beyond Norway - which is how a teenager on the south coast of England ended up mainlining Norwegian radio on a Saturday night.

In a pre-internet world, the concept of beaming signals from one country to another was a clever workaround to restrictive formats and licencing and I've written previously about how this changed UK radio here.

Four that lit the fuse

These are the ones that stick out for me, tracks I either first heard, or finally heard properly, thanks to that 1314 AM signal:

• Gat Décor — Passion
  Proto-progressive house before we even had the term; that surging piano break felt like a door opening, and is the origin of the name "Passion Radio".

• Robin S — Show Me Love (StoneBridge mix)
  The synth stab that launched a thousand nights out. The fact it's still on high rotation on many UK radio stations shows the power and influence of dance music of that era.

• Jam & Spoon feat. Plavka — Right in the Night
  Trance-kissed eurodance with a flamenco twist; instantly continental.

• Underworld — Rez (1993)
  Hypnotic, ascending, euphoric—proof that repetition, done right, is its own kind of storytelling.
  

A little anniversary gift from NRK

For many years I attempted to find information online about The Thunder from Down Under and that dance music show that shaped my teenage years, but with no luck.

So I was very pleased to discovber that NRK P3 recently marked 30 years on air, and they’ve uploaded a classic show from the archive. If you want a taste of the era and the energy that reeled me in, you can listen on the link below.

Click "Tidspunkter" (Times in Norwegian) and use the button to jump forward to 56mins 44 seconds. Then sit back and let the nostalgia, the pianos, basslines and drum machines flow back into your mind.

https://radio.nrk.no/serie/p3-30-aar/sesong/199310/KERA93001693