My first was a very compact crystal set in the early 50s. Unchained melody indeed, and then real rock music. Folk songs didn't get on the radio, much, in Melbourne then; we sang them instead. In the early 60s I worked summers for the importing distributors for National (now Panasonic) but couldn't afford any of their trannies. At one stage I needed to make thermocouples out of wire fine enough to fit inside a set of #22 syringe needles (measuring temperatures inside eucalypt gumnuts in fires) and put the HT output stages of an old mantle valve radio to good use. The repeated short-circuitings did nothing for the radio but I got what I needed.

My first properly portable radio (a National trannie) didn't come until 1973. And got stolen in '76, by which time I'd started playing concertina.

Cheers, Rowan