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.