The early hours of every Sunday, which people would commonly describe as Saturday night. BBC Radio 5 Live host Dotun Adebayo runs a segment of Up All Night called the Virtual Juke Box.

For a couple of hours listeners call, text and email in musical suggestions to be considered for the Virtual Juke Box based on the theme for the week. The song with the most votes at the end of the segment gets added to the said Virtual Juke Box.

Over the years I’ve texted in suggestions. But never had one used. I have a lot more success with other shows on the network. I even got to ask Stan Lee a question on air back in 2009.

In last nights show the theme for the Virtual Juke Box was, “what is the one song that defines your era?”

So I sent the text below in. Fully expecting my usual lack of success.

As I was listening to people’s choices, I started to drift back to sleep. Suddenly I was wide awake. There coming out of my phones speakers was the Thing on a Spring theme.

I had finally had a text used for the Juke Box.

As my tweet straight after shows, I was a bit happy.

Let me expand a little on my reasoning.

As I said in the text to the show, I could have easily chosen a heavy metal song as my song for my era. It would most likely have been a KISS song, probably Detroit Rock City or I Love It Loud. More likely I Love It Loud.

Back in the early 80’s before MTV and satellite tv, all we had in the UK were 4 channels! Seeing my favourite group on any of those was a rarity. In fact extremely rare. It wasn’t until a tv show called Entertainment USA was on the BBC (which was a Friday evening iirc) that I got to see them. And the first video of theirs I saw I Love It Loud off the Creatures Of The Night album.

However during my teenage metal years the British home computer revolution was taking place. My parents had bought me a ZX81 for Christmas one year. Which within months I had replaced with an Oric-1 (that I later on had upgraded to an Oric Atmos). From there I went the Commodore 64 route whilst my brother got a ZX Spectrum (that I would later own as well).

Some of my favourite gaming memories are on the C64. And a major part of those memories are the iconic 8 bit chip tunes created by the under appreciated genius of Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Whittaker et al. What they did in 5k or less with the SID chip on the C64 was amazing.

My era was the home computer boom of the 80’s, I am the first generation of gamer. I had to choose a tune from those memories.

The first one I thought of last night was Thing on a Spring. So instead of thinking it over, and trying to decide what was the “best” SID tune from a game (there are so many great tunes) I went with my gut and first thought.

It’s a fun bit of music. Even decades after it was written it brings a smile to my face. And when I create a SID playlist is always included. And yes I have CDs of their music from C64Audio.com and other places.

Thing on a Spring was a great platform game (ZZap64! Sizzler iirc). The titular character from the game went on to join Rockford (from the Boulderdash games) as humorous margin art in ZZap64!

How impactful was this music on me? Even now I can’t watch the 80’s action movie classic Commando without the music from the C64 port of the unrelated arcade classic with the same name.

To this day I still remember loading Hyper Sports on the C64 and hearing the Chariots of Fire theme blasting from the tv speakers as the game loaded. Or ghostbusters being shouted out as the game Ghostbusters played the theme tune from the movie.

And the C64 demo scene was amazing at extracting the music and sfx from games so that you could listen to just the music from a game. And thanks to CNet (I think it was called that) the Commodore bulletin board I had a few 5 1/4 ” floppies worth of those demos.

So you can see I had to no choice but to nominate a SID chip tune as my song of my era.

What would be your nomination for the Virtual Juke box?