Transmission 8: Hartshead Pike

Friday 12th July 1985 — it had all been arranged. Rory and a few friends were calling it a ‘party’, as you did when you were 14 or 15, but really it was just a small gathering. They were heading to Charlotte’s house for the night.

The deal—set by Charlotte’s parents—was simple: the boys could stay for the evening, but once her parents got home around 11 p.m., they’d have to camp out in the tent in the garden. Sounded great to the boys. School was nearly out for summer, ‘Live Aid’ was on TV the next day, and they’d be hanging out with Charlotte and her mates.

Rory had forgotten, though—‘hay fever’.

They arrived around 7 p.m., still full daylight of course. Rory, as usual, didn’t really know where he was, but it had taken a long time to get there—one bus from Stockport, then a lift from Mark’s dad. The man was older than Rory’s dad and not especially friendly. He dropped them off in what felt like the middle of nowhere.

As they walked toward the cottage at the end of a long gravel path, Martin pointed up at the nearby hill.

“Hartshead Pike. You get a better view of the ruins from Lottie’s garden,” he said.

Rory just nodded and looked.

The night went well. Rory got to hear loads of records he’d never heard before—Someone put on a seven inch vinyl— The Smiths. The first time Rory ever heard ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ blaring from someone else’s stereo. It stuck with him.

Eventually, Charlotte’s parents returned and it was time to move into the garden. They took what little they’d brought and headed into the tent.

That’s when the sneezing began.

And kept going.

And going.

In 1985, hay fever was just something you put up with. Rory remembered a trip to the GP once, after a particularly bad attack. The doctor had nodded sympathetically and said:

“Shut the windows.”

By midnight, Rory’s eyes were puffy and raw, and he kept rubbing them, which made everything worse. Sleeping outside in July? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Eventually, the chatter inside the tent died down. Rory, in a haze of congestion and drowsiness, managed to nod off.

By 5 a.m., the sun had already risen. The tent was “boiling”. Pollen hung heavy in the early morning air. Rory stirred, eyes gummy, throat raw. He crawled out of the tent and blinked against the brightness.

His eyes stung. He rubbed them. Opened them just enough.

There. On the hill.

A figure, standing in front of the ruins at Hartshead Pike.

Rory squinted. His vision was blurred—but the outline was unmistakable. Tall. Still.

Ryden Nova.

He blinked again.

Same shape. Same stance. The same man he'd seen on the bus at Stockport. The same man he saw near Jodrell Bank.

Something tugged at Rory’s stomach. Not fear. Not surprise.

Something else.

Like he already knew. Like he’d been here before.

“Déjà vu” in stereo.

Then came the sneeze. Violent. Rory’s neck snapped downward.

When he looked up again—Ryden was gone.

Just the ruins.

Just the morning.

Just the garden tent behind him, zipped and silent.

Spring 1985: Rory, unusually, got a phone call at home. He didn’t often answer the phone—he didn’t really like phones—but the one in his parents’ house rang all day and all night.

When his mother shouted up the stairs—

“It’s for you!”

—he didn’t reply.

She yelled again, sharper this time—

“Simon’s on the phone! And turn that bloody music down!”

Eventually, Rory trudged downstairs and picked up the receiver.

It was his old mate from school, Si Holden, who’d moved away from Stockport a couple of years back. He was living in a place called Goostrey now—a rural village in the south of Cheshire. Si was calling to invite Rory over for the weekend.

Yeah, thought Rory. Why not? Be great to see Si again. Get out of town for a bit.

Come Saturday, Rory was at Stockport train station, scanning the departure board and feeling slightly out of his depth. He hadn’t been on many trains. Si had given him instructions, but Rory hadn’t bothered to write them down. He vaguely remembered Si saying something about getting a train to Crewe.

A long, sleek train rolled into the platform. It looked much fancier than Rory expected. Unsure, he turned to an older man nearby.

“Does this train go to Crewe?” Rory asked.

“Yes,” said the man.

So Rory climbed aboard, not realising that while this train did go to Crewe, it was a London inter city —and definitely wouldn’t be stopping at Goostrey.

He found an empty seat, and the train glided out of Stockport station. Almost immediately, it gathered speed, the windows blurring with fields and rooftops.

Si had mentioned that his new place was near Jodrell Bank—a place Rory only vaguely knew as that giant telescope thing. A landmark in the North West, famous for radio astronomy, cosmic signals, and, of course, Doctor Who.

Rory was staring out the window, half-daydreaming, when he saw it: a colossal white dish emerging above the tree line, tilting toward the heavens. He figured it must be Jodrell Bank. The train roared past, not slowing one bit. Rory realised, with a sinking feeling, that something wasn’t right.

And that’s when he saw… him.

A figure out in the field near Jodrell Bank. Rory blinked. He’d seen that man before.

Ryden Nova.

The same figure he’d glimpsed on the bus at Stockport Bus Station. Now here—by Jodrell Bank. The same place where Tom Baker had become Peter Davison as Doctor Who.

Ryden Nova was definitely here, in the North West.

Outside, the giant dish loomed like an ear tilted to the cosmos. Inside, Rory’s pulse thudded, a steady rhythm of confusion and possibility.

One Sunday night in early December 1984, Rory stayed up long after his parents had gone to bed.

He had a portable black-and-white TV in his room. It buzzed and crackled with static and faint interference.

He was watching BBC2’s “Future Tense!“ sci-fi season.

A faint voice echoed across the grainy screen. The picture twitched. The sound wobbled slightly—that unstable analogue warmth.

The film was strange. Sterile and glowing. Someone alone in a house. Machines speaking like men. Rory didn’t know the title. He wouldn’t have remembered it even if it had been announced.

Somewhere along the way, he drifted off.

But the sound continued.

Through the haze of sleep, Rory heard something else begin. A new film? A new dream?

An acoustic guitar.

A song, barely audible, like it was hiding in the static.

Then a voice. Crackled. Distorted. Yet somehow calm—gentle, poetic.

“The Structure of Nowhere.”

That was the only phrase Rory could hold onto. He didn’t know if it was a lyric, a title, or just a line his mind invented while half-asleep.

It didn’t matter.

It lingered.

It became part of the night.

On his way home from school, Rory had about a ten-minute wait for the 370 bus.

Stockport bus station. Cold air was pushing its way through each of the bus shelters.

Early December cold air—the kind of cold that tenses your muscles.

He watched the buses come and go. It became almost hypnotic.

Today stuck out.

Everyone had been talking about the Band Aid single.

It was the 3rd of December, 1984.

The video had been shown that morning on TV, and by lunchtime it was echoing round every corridor at school.

All those pop stars in one room.

But Rory... Rory felt something else. Something missing.

He hadn’t said anything, but he couldn’t stop thinking:

Where was Ryden Nova?

What would it have sounded like if he’d been there—stood next to Paul Weller from The Style Council?

Would they have let him sing a line?

He could see it. Ryden in his long, black duffle coat, standing just a little apart from the others, like he always did.

Rory's eyes blurred as the cold swept over them. He blinked hard.

He was off now. Deep inside the picture playing in his head.

A kind of dream-haze.

Another bus rolled through. Didn’t stop. Just passed right through the station like it was late for something.

And in that moment—

just a flicker—

Rory thought he saw him.

Near the front of the bus. Looking out the window.

Ryden Nova. Calm. Still.

Like he’d always been there.

The bus was gone in seconds.

But the image stayed.

Ryden Nova. In Stockport town centre.

Clear as day.

Like something had happened.

📻

Sometimes Rory wonders if he imagined the whole thing.

The song that morning.

The voice in the static.

Ryden Nova.

But then — a slant of light across kitchen tiles,

or the hum coming from the radio —

and it’s there again.

A shimmer. A flicker. The radio in the grass.

Is this the Zone — something altered,

half-buried beneath the familiar?

A broadcast just beneath the definite.

Still out there.

Still waiting to be found.

🎙️: Wir neigen dazu, an das Vertraute zu glauben ...

wir neigen dazu zu sagen, das sei das Endgültige ...

It’s 1983. Rory is back at Dan Gerard’s house — the same house where, a year earlier, he first saw The Who detonate their instruments in glorious televised chaos.

Dan had what Rory didn’t: a cool older brother with a heavy record collection and an electric guitar leaning in the corner like it knew more than you. This place was a portal — and Rory stepped through most weekends.

The ritual was simple: pick a record, blast it, and take turns spinning each other in a creaky office chair until gravity lost all meaning.

That day, Dan dropped the needle on The Idiot by Iggy Pop. The track was “Nightclubbing.” Cold, metallic. That dry drum sound looping endlessly. As Rory spun, the rhythm locked into his head like coordinates. The ceiling was gone. The floor was gone. He could hear a voice — maybe from the vinyl, maybe from space:

“Solar Parade... Solar Parade…”

It sounded German. It sounded important.

That was it. The first Ryden Nova song — beamed straight through nausea, through vertigo, through 'the zone'.

That’s how the album began: not with clarity, but with dizziness.

Rory collapsed sideways, nauseous… but inspired.

Transmission 3: The Smashing Point

📡 Stockport, 1982

It felt like a normal Saturday. Two boys in a bedroom, swapping stories about this and that. Then — Sound. From below, a sudden burst of music, thick and bright like breaking plastic. They floated down the stairs.

In the living room, his friend’s older brother and his mates were transfixed by a flickering screen. The colours bled: radioactive reds, bright white. On it, four men in wild suits were playing instruments as if time was running out.

Then: silence. Then: destruction.

Drums shattered. Guitars splintered. A microphone stand fell like a monument. And the smoke — was that really smoke? Or was it just the glow of something ending?

Rory had no name for what he was seeing. Not until years later would he learn it was The Who on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, seen through the prism of a documentary called The Kids Are Alright.

But names didn’t matter. What mattered was this: Ryden Nova would do this. Of course he would.

This was performance as ritual. Sound as signal. It wasn’t music — it was transmission, combustion, rebirth.

Pop wasn’t just shiny suits and space-age hair. It was electric. Glamour. Smoke and explosions and something breaking behind the mask.

Transmission 2: Ryden Nova Lands

Why wouldn’t a glam-rock astronaut beam down to Stockport?

For Rory, Ryden Nova was that falling star — the out-of-space pop idol he’d been waiting for. A cosmic frontman. A glittering fragment of the radio transmission he’d never forgotten.

Back at school, Rory would daydream through classes, drawing gig posters in the margins of his notebooks. In his mind, Ryden had just finished a legendary farewell show at the Interstellar Kiosk — a final blaze of synths, stardust, smoke and feedback. Then, silently, he slipped through the atmosphere and landed in Stockport. No fanfare. Nothing.

Rory imagined himself in Ryden’s band, guitar player to the galaxy’s most tragic, dazzling singer.

The first real appearance of Ryden Nova came during a particularly dull lesson at school. Rory scrawled the name across the front of his exercise book in metallic blue pen, right under a crude sketch of a microphone and the Earth seen from orbit.

The character had arrived. The music would come next.