August 18th, 1983

Time to flick the tranny1 over to the FM band and check out what was happening at SA-FM. Originally they were Double-SA FM but I guess that was too much of a mouthful, so they were quickly able to switch to the shorter name. Kind of pissy, though because it made them sound as if they were the only FM station in the state but they were actually beaten to the line by the ORIGINAL TripleM—yes, you read that right; the original TripleM was not the commercial monstrosity that we know now but was actually a small community station with the call sign 5MMM. When the cunts who own the commercial station wanted to start broadcasting their shite in Adelaide, the original station had to give up their call sign and become Three D Radio.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s the first of the SA-FM charts I have salvaged and scanned. Not sure how it stacks up against the 5AD chart of the same week but the two are probably fairly close. Not a real lot that excited me back then or now but there are a few; The Call, Human League, New Order, Bob Marley, Yazoo, Mike Oldfield, Talking Heads, Malcolm McLaren, and The Police all get a thumbs up from me. The rest just get a shoulder shrug:)

It’s interesting that they use the asterisk to denote what is a FM album/single. I can only assume that this means the songs/albums without the asterisk2 are only played on 5AD, and this means SA-FM didn’t think Wham! were worth playing. Very interesting.:D

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Footnotes

  1. No, I’m not being a transphobe or a smartarse. Pretty much everyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s called their little portable radio a tranny; short for Transistor Radio. ^top
  2. I’d just like to be honest and admit that I twice spelled “asterisk” as “asterix” before correcting myself:D:D^top