by Brittlestar » Thu Feb 12, 2004 10:14 am
Great to see the NewWave Outpost coming to life with people! I did a search on a few song titles, and I discovered this forum thread.
I grew up in Rockville Centre and I listened to WLIR from '81 until '84, when I went away to college. Although the creativity of New Wave started to lose steam (for me) after '83, there were some wonderous moments from individual bands well into the nineties. Even today I'm glad to hear cues to that era in numerous bands.
I really loved WLIR, and I listened to everything on it -- the punky reggae party, the great concerts, you name it-- for those formative years of my life. My personality type pegs me for a consummate enthusiast & cataloger of music. Since 2000 I started to recreate most of the playlists I've heard since the very early days of WLIR-- some 500 songs. And after I lost a few friends from my 'LIR circle to the Sept. 11 tragedy, reconstructing those playlists became a kind of therapy for me.
These days I live in NJ and listen to WFMU 91.1 -- another kind of rare radio station-- all volunteer, listener supported, free-form format-- where magical things still happen all the time. There are frequent times I'll hear something and I KNOW I'm hearing something ultra-rare, something that I'll probably never hear again because the recordings are so incredibly rare.
Anyway, I just wanted to write a quick introduction about myself and testify that there are people out there who were deeply impressed by that station and the music they played. I'll be very interested to read WLIR playlists and find any missing links to my music collection. I'll also be sure to post my list of songs so that folks can leverage piggy-back off my stuff.
Last question-- does anyone have recordings of the concerts, or know where I can obtain some of them? I think I still have cassettes with live Blancmange, Echo & the Bunnymen, Yaz, Erasure, China Crisis, Paul Young, the Fixx and a few others.