I’m sure there has been a time in your life where you caught a few notes of a song on the TV or radio only for it to get its hooks into you and never let go?
What if you didn’t know what it was and had no way to track it down? That happened to me at a time when there was no internet, no Shazam or even a schedule on the ol’ TV. This is a story about that time.
It was the 90s, man…
Picture the scene… It was around 1993 and Little G was on the customary six week summer break from school. Little G spent much of that time watching any old trash on daytime TV in those days. These were long, lazy days of watching anything on the four TV channels we had and eating beans on toast. Good times.
Thankfully, kids TV was much better back then and there was usually a film on in the middle of the afternoon. One day, I became engrossed in a film about someone pretending to be a boy so they could get into a band. At the end of the movie there was a song that I really, really enjoyed, but I had no idea what the film was, let alone the song.
Back then we had purely analogue TV and whilst Teletext existed, we didn’t have it on our wood-panelled TV. The only way to know what you were watching was to catch the opening credits or buy the TV guide, which I hadn’t.
This song would proceed to live rent-free in my head throughout the 90s, the 2000s and even the beginning of the 2010s. I went roughly 25 years without hearing that song again.
Around 2010 I found myself with an hour-long drive to work every day. The day would start around 6:00am and I would tune the car’s radio to the local station, until I lost the signal halfway down the motorway. One morning, I caught the end of that song again.
It was just the last few bars, but the DJ didn’t say what it was. The frustration continued.
Bicycles…
In around 2015 I found myself diving head-first into the world of cycling. I even had a blog about my adventures and discoveries cycling around my home city. This was also the time when Twitter was still good.
A chance post about bicycles in movies caught my eye one afternoon in an all-too-frequent scrolling session (it wasn’t that doomy back then).
In that movie, there was a scene where this group of kids were cycling through their town and I knew immediately it was the movie I was looking for. It turned out to be called The Challengers.
The Challengers was a made-for-TV movie from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), released in 1990 but first aired over here in 1993.
The song turned out to be by Jon & Vangelis and it was called ‘I’ll Find My Way Home’. In 2025 I finally have the album on CD and it neatly ties up a few strange coincidences.
It would be only a few years later that I would be teaching myself to play the guitar, followed by the drums and getting into bands, recording demos and playing gigs anywhere that would take us. I would also encounter Vangelis again in the sublime Blade Runner soundtrack.
These days you can just reach for your smartphone and get an app to identify the song for you, but those were simpler times. I am starting to wonder whether trying to find my way back to this song has influenced the directions I have taken in my life so far. Was it Vangelis’ distinctive sound that drew me to Blade Runner? Was it the idea of performing on stage in The Challengers what steered me towards music?
Perhaps I am over-thinking it, but it does make me wonder.
G.
You’ll find me on Mastodon