HOW did you spend last Saturday night? Me, I was cleaning the shower. Don’t tell me I don’t know how to live.
Still, I had the radio for company. Gary Crowley on Radio London was playing ABC, The Sundays, The Smiths and Happy Mondays. Scrubbing the grouting is always a little easier when you can sing along to Oblivious by Aztec Camera (“They call us lonely when we’re really just alone …”)
While I’m all for talking on the radio, the truth is most of the time the radio I like has music on it. I can track my life through the stations I’ve listened to down the years. From Radio 1 (I’m old enough to have heard Tony Blackburn on the breakfast show) to Radio Clyde (when I first arrived in Scotland in the early 1980s; for Billy Sloan, mostly, though I’d catch Tiger Tim now and then), then Radio 2 and Virgin Radio in the 1990s.
It's been 6 Music for most of the last 20 years, but I can still be promiscuous. Cooking dinner on Monday night (fajitas, if you must know) was accompanied by Radio Scotland’s Get It On with Bryan Burnett, easily the most reliable request show on the radio since Simon Mayo disappeared from Radio 2.
The theme on Monday’s show was Songs about Olympic Sports. Tuning into hear Avril Lavigne singing Sk8er Boi nearly threw me off-piste but before long I was humming along to Christopher Cross and Julian Cope (I haven’t heard Trampoline for years. Still sounds good).
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The art of the DJ is a feather-light but crucial thing. Burnett is very good at it. Chatty, engaged, but never too keen on the sound of his own voice. At the start of this month, he hosted a show on the theme School Trips which resulted in one of the most entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny two hours of radio I can remember. Alas, it’s just dropped off BBC Sounds.
In this new online era, of course, we don’t have to stick to our lane anymore. Hence listening to Gary Crowley on Saturday night. If I get the chance, I’ll also try to catch The Mickey Bradley Record Show on Radio Ulster on Friday nights. The former Undertone can be relied on to play a well-balanced mix of the familiar and the obscure, though, as it clashes with repeats of Top of the Pops repeats, I usually have to resort to catching it later.
Writing this I’ve just listened to another Radio London show on catch-up, Tony Blackburn’s Soul on Sunday, an hour-long mixtape of Blackburn’s signature mix of inconsequential banter and decent record picks. It was an anniversary show, marking the fact that it was 57 years to the day since Blackburn made his debut on Radio Caroline. “And I know what you are all thinking. How the heck has he got away with that,” Blackburn joked.
There would have been a time when I would have turned over at the sound of Blackburn’s voice. But now I find his inconsequentiality rather endearing. A reminder that the words don’t really matter. You tune them out and tune in on the tunes. And what it took me ages to realise when I was younger was that Blackburn always loved his music. As he reminded us, he was playing Motown and Philly records when no one else was. And he still is. And that’s the definition of public service broadcasting if you ask me.
Listen Out For: The Film Programme, Radio 4, Thursday, 4pm. Dear BBC, do not go through with your plans to take The Film Programme off the air. That is all.
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