In the formative years of DAB (I'm talking early naughties) I had, as part of my then Hi-Fi set up, a rather snazzy Cambridge Audio digital tuner; I won't lie to you, I thought it was the cat's pyjamas. In all its brushed chrome finery it looked great and sounded, to these ears*, even better. And at a time when there were precious few DAB stations around - FM still ruled the (air)waves - being able to listen to fledgling DAB broadcasting was very much seen as a novelty (car radios were still FM/AM only). You felt you were a member of a very exclusive club. So when the BBC launched 6 Music in 2002 I was hooked. In the early evening slot all round good egg, Tom Robinson, had a two hour show where he would, every night, introduce me to bands and artists I was hitherto blissfully unaware of (the Medds would often be dining at this time with TR acting as our soundtrack). Anyway, one such act was Schneider TM - the handle for a Berlin cove by the name of Dirk Dresselhaus. For a whole week solid Robinson played the single Reality Check. I loved it (still do). When I eventually got a hold of the album it came from (Zoomer) a couple of weeks later (in the equally early days of buying stuff online) I remember the German seller enclosed a lovely handwritten note explaining in his best English that he'd thrown in a copy of the single gratis. I was made up.
As a footnote to this little Anglo-Deutsch yarn, James told Claus-Peter, a German friend of his, that his old man was getting off on Schneider TM; you will not believe the kudos I (& James) got from this: ''Your dad is listening to Schneider TM?!'' Seems there was a time when I really was ahead of the curve. (Thank you, Mr. Robinson.)
* That said, 'these ears' I mentioned aren't, unfortunately, the same ears I possess now. I'm sure many of you can relate to that.
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