Creativity Quote by Georgie Fame

Nostalgia can be a cover story for how fragmented culture has become. Georgie Fame’s offhand line about a “good radio” carries the swagger of a time when access felt simple and collective: if you cared enough, you could tune in, and chances are your neighbor was hearing the same thing. The parenthetical aside - “and everybody did in those days” - is doing more work than it admits. It’s a gentle flex about shared infrastructure, but also a quiet claim of cultural equality: the gate wasn’t money or algorithms; it was taste, attention, maybe a decent aerial.

Fame is talking from inside the postwar British boom in mass media, when radio was both furniture and lifeline. A “good” set wasn’t audiophile snobbery so much as a passport to the wider world: American R&B, jazz, skiffle, pirate signals bleeding into the mainstream. The intent is practical (you could find the music), but the subtext is moral (the world was findable). That’s why the line lands now. It contrasts with today’s abundance, where everything is available and almost nothing is encountered together.

There’s also a musician’s self-justification baked in. If everyone had the receiver, then a song’s reach was earned in public, not manufactured in private metrics. Radio becomes a memory of discovery without infinite choice - a culture with fewer doors, but doors people actually walked through.