You'd imagine that calling your band Radio might get you more airplay... or it might have the opposite effect, depending on the DJs or Programme Controllers you send your music to. Over the years though, there have been hundreds of bands with the word radio in their name, from Radiohead to Human Radio, The Radio Department to Radioslave. This week though, we're only interested in bands called Radio (and as always, to irk George, other spellings will be allowed).
RAYDIO #1
Who ya gonna call? Not just a misspelling to differentiate them... because these were the first band I could find to use this name. And the "Ray" spelling was, of course, down to their lead singer, Ray Parker Junior - before he started bustin' ghosts. Here's their big hit from 1978...
Minimal ambient electronica from Spain in 1999. Kind of ironic that these guys should be Radio 6, since this is the kind of stuff Mary Ann Hobgoblin and her ilk play far too much of on 6Music these days. In this old fogey's opinion anyway.
I know, I know, all you cool 80s kids were busy taping John Peel and archiving Fall sessions, while I was the one setting the clock/alarm/cassette player to record the first hour of Steve Wright In The Afternoon so I could catch up on what I'd missed while I was at school.
When Terry Wogan left Radio 2 at the end of 1984, I finally turned to the station all my mates had been listening to for years and discovered a wealth of new music, along with some very dodgy presenters. Simon "Our Tune" Bates. Gary "Bit In The Middle" Davies. Whoever was on the breakfast show back then. But Steve Wright... he was a revelation. While he didn't have the warmth and charm of El Tel, he did pioneer the "Zoo" radio format in the UK, and more than any other jock, it was Steve Wright who made me want to go into radio. Because of Sid The Manager. Gervais the hairdresser (different times). The Pub Singer. The Pretentious Music Journalist - "Sonic cathedrals of sound!" (He became a blogger, I suspect.) And then there was The Pervert - "I got this strap from an Arab I used to know"... at 16, I had no idea what an Arab Strap was... but I used to cry with laughter all the same. Best of all was Mr. Angry from Purley. "You make me so angry, I want to throw the phone down!"
(That was a terrible single, and didn't do Mr. Angry any justice at all.)
Spurred on by Steve Wright, I started working in local and hospital radio, and eventually ended up with my own co-presented Saturday morning show with loads of silly characters and competitions, all influenced by Steve Wright. At the age of 18, I recorded a demo tape that still makes me shudder to think of it, and posted it off to Broadcasting House. I had this great idea, you see, that what Steve's posse really needed was a young lad from Huddersfield to join the ranks...
I never heard anything back, but I bet they all had a good laugh.
It all started to go wrong for Steve Wright when he transferred to the Radio 1 breakfast show. After that he had his wilderness years, then reinvented himself as a cheesy and smug Radio 2 DJ. I remember Mark 'n' Lard ripping the piss out of his "Big Show" every afternoon... ironic, really, when you consider that they'd picked up the baton of Steve Wright In The Afternoon and were running with much the same format in their glory days. But the Mark 'n' Lard show had a similar shelf life... it makes me wonder if that kind of show can only last so long before the presenters have to change their ways. If they want to survive. I know Steve Wright didn't invent the zoo format - he just stole it from American DJs like Rick Dees - but everything has its day, especially in radio. Nobody knows that better than me.
I couldn't listen to Steve Wright on Radio 2. The sound of one man constantly patting himself on the back grew tired after about ten minutes. But I'll always have a warm place in my heart for his Radio 1 golden age. And let's not forget, if it wasn't for Steve Wright, we wouldn't have this...
I knew that other bloggers would be far better at eulogising Annie Nightingale than I would, especially those of you with one foot in the dance music camp, like Khayem.
That said, I couldn't let her passing go without a mention. The term "legend" is over-used, particularly in radio circles, but when you consider what Annie Nightingale achieved in her lifetime, both in terms of shattering the glass ceiling for female DJs and being a champion of new music well into her 80s... "legend" is a term richly deserved.
The number of acts who owe their careers to Annie Nightingale is inestimable, so I'm surprised I couldn't find more songs that mention her name. But here are two, starting with the ridiculous... though I'm sure Annie found it amusing.
Oh Anne Nightingale, what's your blinking game?! I waited for your roadshow, but your roadshow never came And guess who I blame: Anne the DJ, Anne the DJ, Anne the DJ...
In 1987, Annie Nightingale went to Moscow because she was interested in the Russian underground music scene. Back then, if you wanted to make pop music in Russia, you were either signed to the state record label, Melodiya, or you were on your own. There she met Boris Grebenshchikov, “the Russian Bob Dylan”, an artist who was getting his music heard despite having no state support (and no money). A few years later, Boris released this... a fine tribute.
I drove to Birmingham last week for a teaching conference. The journey down on Thursday night was pretty uneventful, if you ignore the M42, a jumped up dual carriageway which thinks its a motorway but only has two lanes, even though everybody drives as if there were three. I made it down in two and a half hours, spent the night in a wonderfully Fawlty Towers-esque hotel, and then headed off to the conference which was a very useful and engaging day.
However, I arrived in Birmingham about the same time as Storm Babet. I'm not sure there were any rooms left in the hotel for her, so she raised merry hell for the rest of the night and throughout the following day. My journey home then, took seven and a half hours rather than two and a half, and culminated in a lengthy period sitting on the edge of a hillside in Glossop with a flat tyre, waiting for someone to come and fix it. The RAC told me the waiting time was 5 hours, so I called a local mobile tyre guy who was able to get there in just an hour and a half. When he finally arrived, his headlights revealed that I'd also lost a number plate while driving through one of the many road-swamping rivers I'd had to ford as part of my journey. If only cars still came with spare tyres, like they used to... but don't start me on that.
Altogether, I think I listened to my entire in-car memory stick during those journeys, which is made up of a mix of current albums I'm into (The Hold Steady, Jenny Lewis, The Handsome Family, Laura Cantrell, BC Camplight, Jim Bob, Lloyd Cole et al.), and some older wonders (most notably the first disc in Cherry Red's excellent Where Were You? compilation). To keep me sane while I waited for the recovery guy though, I needed a little more. So I put on a recent edition of the Mickey Bradley Record Show on BBC Radio Ulster (available on BBC Sounds, should you have the time and the inclination). Mickey Undertone always plays a great selection, mixing punk and new wave with classic soul, pop and folk plus a bunch of new stuff that fits well with the old. He may even have overtaken Natasha Raskin-Sharp on BBC Radio Scotland as my favourite radio show at the moment (but don't tell Natasha, she's still delivering the goods). Anyway, here's a few of the tunes Mickey played that kept me going while I waited for a new tyre...
Last one of these, I promise. Or else (much as I'm trying to help promote his book), I'm probably going to get sued by Dave Eggers.
King Cnut could not hold back the tide, and I cannot hold back society's full-throttle descent into dystopia. All I can do is watch helplessly from the sidelines, and nod my head sagely when others hold a mirror up to the madness. Which is why I've been using this space over the past few weeks to quote excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel, The Every. Because everyone should read it and face up to the horror...
In this final extract,
Delaney goes to work in the Iris-Tracking department. When she arrives, they
give her a demonstration of the tech they’re developing…
“As you sit in front of the monitor,” Eric said, “an
infrared light is being directed toward your pupils. This causes reflections in
your pupil and your cornea. The vector between the cornea and the pupil is
tracked by the infrared camera, and this way we can determine what you’re
looking at. This also gives us the ability to track when you get fixated on
something, what order you look at things – that kind of hierarchy is so crucial
to study – and what things you come back to.”
“So it’s recording what I look at and how long,” Delaney
said.
“Exactly!”
“But isn’t this illegal? I mean, didn’t some people sue?”
“They did,” Eric said, “and there are laws in some cities
and states that limit their use. But there are millions of systems already in
place. It’s been used for years within the Implicit Association Test, the Stroop
Test, and of course the gaze contingency paradigms.”
“Using eye-trackers,” he continued, “just to figure out what
people are looking at and for how long – that’s only logical. It started with
marketing. Advertisers want to know what you look at. This serves the makers of
ads, sure, but it serves the audience, too. A bad ad will be ignored, whoever
made it will find a new line of work, and you won’t see any more like it.”
“It’s the perfect symbiosis,” Delaney said, and finally she
saw Eric smile. “It’s the only meaningful way to determine what someone’s
actually seeing, reading and responding to.”
“Well, right,” he said, and Delaney felt he’d finally begun
to like her again. “The utility of this tech for advertisers drove its progress
in the first place. But then film and TV asked for data, and that was huge. It
was kind of hilarious, because with the first test group we did, we discovered
that this one very highly paid actress was actually being avoided by most eyes.
She would come onscreen and the eyes – seventy-seven per cent of them – would
dart away like she was an infection. You can be sure that data affected her
future salary negotiations.”
Delaney smiled, then thought she should be more emphatic in
her approval of his joke. “Ha!” she said.
“So apply the same idea to any movie or show. Where does the
eye really gravitate to?” Explosions, breasts, abs – this was obvious enough.
But it gets more subtle. Certain clothing tested high, certain cities, décor,
facial expressions, animals, children. If you knew what I knew, you’d know how
seriously it’s already affected filmmaking. By any chance have you noticed a
pretty dramatic increase in the number of toddlers and medium-sized dogs in
contemporary film?”
“I have!” Delaney lied.
Eric nodded. “And fewer heavy people. Fewer romantic scenes
between people over 65. Fewer scenes in Baltimore and the Middle East. That’s
the easy stuff, to be honest.”
Soon enough, Eye
Tracking Technology takes off in a big way…
The global debate about the ethics of eye tracking, which
began that afternoon, was vigorous, but anyone hoping to hold back the advent of
ETR was proven a fool. The unexamined glee with which it was embraced followed
a familiar pattern. First hobbyist explored its limits, producing results both
innocuous (which parent does your baby prefer?) and terrifying (which parent
does your teenager prefer?). Heedless capitalists leaped in, apps and related
products proliferating, enabling anyone with a self-cam to determine where the
eyes of any other humans around them were landing. The software and hardware
necessary had been built into Every phones for years; it was only a matter of
activating it.
Over the next few weeks, it became clear that because half
of humanity’s iris scans had already been stored, their owners could be singled
out in seconds. If a man ogled a woman at a New Jersey dog park, those eyes
could instantly be paired with the offender’s name, and his family, employers,
and the public would be duly notified of the transgression. A new wave of
suicides ensued, the embarrassment and discredit being too much for certain
called-out persons, mostly men. In the first week, one hundred and seven humans
in Tokyo took their lives, thirty-one of them by throwing themselves in front
of trains, the scene of their eyeshame. Tens of thousands followed elsewhere on
earth, and a few hundred, nicknamed Oedipals, chose a middle path – they gouged
out their eyes.
Whatever the name for the offenders, eyeshame was the term that stuck to the crime. The Every resisted
it, tried to push ocular offence, but
eyeshame was more direct and descriptive. It was not strictly speaking a crime,
of course; no laws prevented anyone from looking where they shouldn’t. But
shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet’s currency and
lever for change. As ETR spread without resistance among the vast majority of
the species, there were occasionally calls to ban it. But like most innovations
in the twenty-first century, the spread was caterwauling, without organisation
or caution, and thus unstoppable.
The latest changes to 6Music have me convinced they want me to switch off completely. It's been reported as another nail in the coffin of guitar music, and I can't say I disagree. Apparently The Bug Club are also up in arms about it. Who'll play songs like this on the radio anymore (other than Mickey and the wonderful Natasha)?
It's a cheesy old line, but Roger Taylor was onto something there. I've always listened to night time radio to help me through the long lonely hours, to stop my mind racing at 3am, to take comfort from music and a friendly voice.
A few years back though, radio was supplanted by streaming. Although there were a couple of shows I listened to, I found myself losing interest in a lot of night time radio (or my favourite old shows were one by one taken off the air and replaced by bland, airbrushed blah... i.e. Radio 2 over the past five to ten years.
Night time radio's a tricky one, because it can't be too loud. I loved Peel, but rarely listened to his show to calm my troubled mind or help me get to sleep. Because you never knew when he was going to play some screeching unlistenable toss to shake you out of your slumbers.
Recently, and largely due to the increased anxiety of these uncertain times, I've listened to a lot more radio. These are my favourite shows right now to keep me company through the wee small hours. Thanks to BBC Sounds (the iPlayer was better, but... progress), I can listen to any of these whenever I want. The majority are on the BBC purely because I can't listen to commercial radio. Don't even start me on the sorry state of that medium. I worked in it for 25 years and it breaks my heart what they've done to it. Besides, there's nothing relaxing about your late night radio being interrupted by an ad break. Take it from one who used to write the bloody things.
I record these here for posterity, for my own memories, to remind me of what gets me through the nights, as Mick used to sing. A sample track is given for each.
Only just discovered this because Chuck Prophet is one of the DJs. Free streaming country music. If you like that sort of thing. Which I increasingly do.
Only at number 9 because I don't really listen to them at night time. I do catch up with them on a weekend morning though, comfy as an old pair of slippers. Back in the day, Radcliffe meant as much to me as Peel did to an earlier generation. I'm glad he's still doing what he does best: wittering on the wireless. And Sam has liked Stuart Maconie ever since he won on Richard Osman's House of Games.
Stumbled across Ralph on BBC Radio Ulster and got rather addicted to his Country and Rock & Soul shows. Only an hour and a half (they've cut him down recently, which is a shame) but he's a similar age to me and even more addicted to music. Often does themed shows - last week he did 90 minutes of Otis Redding and other people singing Otis's songs. It was a bloody good listen.
Huey's early Saturday morning Radio 2 show is still an essential download. They took it off the air for a few months during lockdown and I really missed it. It's not as good as it used to be when he was on at 3am, or even midnight, and you can tell he's toned his act down in recent years to keep the Radio 2 bosses happy. But he's still a good radio friend, even though he breaks the "talking directly to you" DJ rule by continually addressing his listeners as "ladies and gentlemen". His 6Music show is also a good listen, but too loud for nights. His favourite Queen song is Dragon Attack and he plays it every three weeks or so. It's not one I care for that much, but I like that he gets away with it. Plus it's the place I first heard this beauty...
On Radio Scotland - which is basically what Radio 2 should be, and confirms for me once again that I have far more in common with my Scottish pals than many of my own countrymen. Roddy is a singer songwriter in his own right (he's played with Kris Kristofferson, so credit where it's due) and that's his bag on the radio. He likes a lot of the same obscure indie songwriters I dig, and has introduced me to a few new ones. Always worth dipping into.
The king of late night Scottish radio, though I never knew him when he was at his peak. Glad to have discovered him in the last few years though. Radio like it used to be. Plus his lyric quiz frequently gets me wracking my brains. I used to think I was pretty good with spotting lyrics...
Laidback Sunday afternoons, and the only 6music show that doesn't try too hard to be hip. Guy's natural northern delivery really does feel like a friend chatting to you in the pub. Now with added Simon Armitage, so what's not to love? (As Radcliffe always says.)
I used to get pissed off with pop stars becoming radio hosts... almost as though they were doing professional DJs out of their jobs. Thankfully, pop stars are now doing a great job of saving radio... and they generally get left alone to play what they want rather than having to conform to the shackles of playlists like Rex Bob Lowenstein did.
Anyway, Ricky Ross. The bloke out of Deacon Blue. Turns out he loooooves country music. And he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
If you'd told me a few years ago that my favourite radio show would be presented by a woman from TV's Bargain Hunt, I'd have laughed in your face. But I am addicted to Natasha's Thursday evening Radio Scotland show... I usually listen to it on Friday and Saturday nights and to say it's a highlight of my week is really no overstatement.
I'm not sure I can explain why. Natasha is a good 15 years younger than me, unlike most of the presenters above who are either my age or older. And unlike a lot of the shows above, I reckon I usually know between 30 and 50% of the songs she plays. But no other presenter I can think of captures the eclecticism of Peel (without the loud bits - so perfect for my ageing ears), moving effortlessly from Television to Chicken Shack, Yo La Tengo to Can, Dawn Penn to Devo. I never know what she's going to play next, only that I'll like it. This is what radio should be. Long may she reign, the Queen of (my) late night radio...
Guest Post Thursday will return soon... otherwise, you might have to put up with more of this waffle.
