There was a tune that haunted me for about thirty years before I finally found out what it was. I first heard it issuing from a television set, but it wasn’t ‘on TV’ exactly.

When I was given my first home computer as a birthday present in late ‘82 (a Sinclair ZX Spectrum), it came with a TV to serve as its display. My parents had pushed the boat out for the computer, and couldn’t afford to buy me a new TV too. Having asked around, my mother learned that her cousin Betty had an old one she didn’t use any more. Betty was a flight attendant for TWA, and had picked it up at some point on her travels.

It was a nominally-portable Hitachi unit, a ’70s model with an 11" screen and a tuning dial rather than buttons to switch between channels. It could theoretically pick up both VHF and UHF transmissions, but, lacking an aerial, didn’t do so at all well. Not that it mattered that I could only conjure up a snowily indistinct ghost of the BBC, as it worked fine with the computer.

In the days before the world wide web, one was often bored. One of the things I sometimes did when boredom weighed heavily was to idly scan through the TV’s frequencies in the faint hope of finding something, anything unusual. To my great surprise I did on odd occasions detect unexpected audio issuing from it, having (I presume) strayed into shortwave radio territory. Most strikingly I could sometimes discern a chiming fourteen-note melody, in two similar sets of seven tones, floating eerily over a bed of inteference. I never heard any accompanying announcement, just the same music repeated several times. I lacked the presence of mind to record it.

When, twenty years later, I heard about shortwave numbers stations, I thought maybe my mystery tune might be connected in some way with those, but I found nothing to match it on ‘The Conet Project’ CDs, or elsewhere. More time passed and, although I never forgot the tune altogether, I sometimes doubted whether my recollection of it was correct.

Then, in November 2014, I heard it on the radio - on scheduled terrestrial digital radio this time, not in any random traversal of the airwaves. During one of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone shows on BBC 6 Music, he played some tracks from OMD’s 1983 Dazzle Ships album. One of these, ‘Swiss Radio International’, an addition to later CD re-issues of the album, was the melody I remembered, a recording of the eponymous station’s ‘interval signal’: mystery solved! I further learned that the tune had been drawn from a 19th-Century song called Lueget, vo Bärgen und Tal.