Radio Clyde's 50th anniversary: 'We were a family from the word go'

Norman Ross (Image: Norman Ross)

I was involved in hospital radio, at Foresthall, Springburn, which I had set up in 1969. When Clyde was in the process of being established, I think most people in hospital radio applied for a job with the new station.

Jimmy Gordon, the managing director, sent me a letter, asking me to see him. I met him in his temporary office in Sauchiehall Street and he asked if I would like to join. I said, 'no' -  everybody seemed to be sending him their reference. He said it would be good to have me on board, and I said, okay then.

I left it at that because I had a good job at Caterpillar at the time, and had the hospital radio. Nobody knew at the time whether Clyde would sink or swim. By the end of the year [1973] Andy Park called and asked if I would like to do the role of night production supervisor. I agreed. I had to try to supervise people who came in, like Tiger Tim, and I'd stand behind him as he tried to learn the controls

Broadcasters lead tributes to 'inspirational' former Radio Clyde MD Alex Dickson

Clyde was a place where you'd meet the boss in a corridor and say, 'Wouldn't it be a good idea ...?' I said to Andy, wouldn't it be a good idea if we did a hospital visiting show, and go out and get requests? We could broadcast to families, the other way around from how hospital radio worked.

I did a few programmes and Andy liked what he heard, and said he'd make more time for it. Visiting Time went on to become the most-listened show on Radio Clyde - 360,000 listeners, an amazing figure. 

The Radio Clyde newsroom, November 1973 (Image: Newsquest)

Visiting Time was so innovative. It accepted people for what they were. It was so popular because it was the first reality show. I would go out and talk to real people who were having real issues, real calamities. What they wanted to say was, well, I'm here, with broken legs or whatever it was, but I'm okay.

This was a time when hospital visitors were only allowed in for an hour a day, and they weren't  able to travel so much to hospitals. People were in for a long, long time, and many a great story came out of the show.

There was even a catchphrase that came out of it - 'Hello, Norman!' I was at Belvedere hospital and there was a wee boy in traction. The nurses said I should talk to him, but he was only about three or four. I thought, how am I going to have a conversation with a boy of that age? I asked him questions but he said nothing. A nurse said to him, 'say hello to Norman'. 'Hello, Norman!' he said. She said, 'say goodbye to Norman'. He said, 'goodbye, Norman!' That was all he said.

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I made a promotion trail for the Belvedere programme and included the wee boy saying 'hello, Norman!' and, at the end of it, 'Goodbye Norman!' Steve Jones thought it was hysterical and he played it over and over. Bill Smith picked it up, and it just grew from there. The next time I went into a hospital, the patients all said, 'hello Norman!'

It broke the ice whenever I went into a ward, and I recorded them all. I have endless recordings of people saying the phrase, and I guess that's how my name got out there. It was the same whenever I went to open a fete or something - people would greet me with 'Hello, Norman!'

Norman Ross in the hot-air balloon at the pipe band championships at Bellahouston Park (Image: Norman Ross)

I remember when John MacCalman suggested I do an outside broadcast from the World Pipe Band Championships at the Bellahouston Park. I said, why not?, despite not knowing about pipe bands. He said I should go there, and set the scene for listeners and tell them how it all looks.

When I arrived one of the Clyde technical engineering team handed me a radio mic. I said fine, I'll need it if I'm wandering around the park. They said, no, come over here ... and they took me to where a hot-air balloon was sitting on the ground. They stuck me in it and gave me a crash helmet. But you could see the fear in my face when I found myself 200ft up in the air - and you could hear it in my voice. The balloon was tethered to the ground but, still, I have a fear of heights.

While at Clyde I also presented the Saturday Breakfast Show. Later on, I went back into doing community radio and I still promote hospital radio.

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It's been really interesting to work on the Clyde 50th anniversary reunion. I think it's important to keep all the original people together. It's important to recognise their efforts from that time. They were genuine pioneers in a sense. Yes, it was a commercial venture, but for them it was personal. It's important for me that their efforts are publicly recognised by the city. I'm pleased that this is happening and that so many of us will be at the civic reception on January 18.

TONY CURRIE's was the first voice ever heard on Radio Clyde

Tony Currie (Image: Tony Currie)

My most abiding memory of those early days relates to the camaraderie,
the comradeship. I've worked all over the world in radio and television, and journalism, and practically everywhere I have ever worked, there were people stabbing each other in the back. But that did not happen on Clyde.

Clyde was a family from the word go. We all bonded before we went on air, and that was down to the collective judgments of Jimmy Gordon, Andy Park and Alex Dickson. Andy and Jimmy's judgements were superb. They chose the right people and left them to get on with it.

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My second abiding memory was that it was the only radio station I ever worked in where no-one told me what to do. There was no playlist as such. We were left entirely to our on devices; we would go into the studio at whatever time we were due to start with a pile of records and we would play them as we felt. Nobody said, I don't like you doing this, or, I don't like that. The only criticism I ever had was Andy saying to me, 'I wish you wouldn't use the word nice. It's so weak'. And I stopped using it.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing was the opening night's show, the first three-and-a-half hours of Radio Clyde. There's a quote here from the Evening Citizen, on December 28th, in which Jimmy Gordon said, 'The programme with start with a simple news bulletin, ending with an item saying Radio Clyde is on the air, followed by introductions of the staff and then a swinging programme which includes links from Scots living abroad. It seemed a natural way to do it and will get us over the initial uneasiness'.

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But they didn't tell me any of that until afterwards. They just left me to do it. Andy was in the studio, just to make sure I didn't pass out, but at no point did he say, I don't think you should play that, or can you not do this?

I had a wee list of the things that we wanted to get into the programme, because we had pre-recorded interviews with Kenneth McKellar, Jackie Stewart and Sean Connery. I had recorded them and was going to slot them in where I thought they belonged.

Tony Currie, pictured in November 1974 (Image: Newsquest)

We had a live reporter: Tom Steele was at Glasgow Cross for the bells, and we went over to the radio car for midnight, but apart that I got to play what I wanted. There was never any discussion about what the first record would be [Song of the Clyde, sung by McKellar, a director of the company]. It all sounded relaxed because I was relaxed, because I was doing what I wanted to do, as opposed to being uptight because I was fulfilling somebody else's brief.

Clyde did break new ground. Setting five precedents before breakfast; there was nothing to copy. The opening line of the Radio Clyde franchise application to the IBA was, 'To Glaswegians, Glasgow is the centre of the world, and we intend to reflect that'. And that's what they did, and very well.

DJ Steve Jones, November 1973 (Image: Newsquest)

There were, of course, a number of little mistakes. There were one or two people who were chosen for the initial team who either didn't make it to opening night or didn't make it much beyond opening night.

There was one guy who was supposed to do the afternoon show with Maggie Cockburn, and the day before we went on the air he disappeared; he phoned from Plymouth to say he wasn't coming back. He was just too scared to do it.

There was a club DJ who was given a half-hour show on a Sunday afternoon. I never understood why, particularly as the description of it didn't match anything that he had ever done. Andy didn't like him, and he was got rid of. Some years later I employed him to do disco shows on the radio, and he was absolutely brilliant. Horses for courses.

By the time of that opening night I already had a long background in radio. I had set up a radio station in my attic when I was 11 and continued to run it throughout my schooldays and beyond. As I got older friends would come and help me: Dave Marshall, Steve Wright, David Page, Dave Jamieson  - all of whom, apart from Steve, ended up at Clyde.

Thank you for the music

I was passionate about radio, and my attic adventure was quickly extended to the old folks' home next door; I had a captive audience there, quite literally. I then went into retail and managed a couple of hi-fi shops and while doing that I got, through a friend, a contract to a late Saturday-night show on KPFK radio show in Los Angeles. It's still, today, the highest-powered radio station on the West Coast - it reaches San Francisco.

I was on every Saturday night at midnight, playing New Age music: bands like Kraftwerk, Radio Gnome Invisible with Daevid Allen. In fact, Kraftwerk later took me to dinner to thank them for breaking them in America. I was recording these shows in Glasgow and sending the tapes to LA and nobody ever gave me any feedback to say, this is great, or this is rubbish.

It was only many years later that I discovered that the programme actually had a huge cult following. They still have all my old programmes up on a shelf, all these years later. People still remember me in Los Angeles. I was there quite recently. People tell me, 'I used to listen to you'.

Remember when ... Radio Clyde’s news team, ready to take to the air

That was my professional debut, and then I came to Clyde. I joined in October 1973 and left as a full-time employee in April of 1976. From then I used to do a weekly classical music show and some other programmes - sometimes the overnight show and occasionally the Saturday breakfast show. I was employed as as a freelance on Clyde for eight years.

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Clyde was a great learning-curve for everybody. The best part of it was that we had nothing to base our assumptions on, or rules, or anything like that. It would be fair to say that as far as was feasible, Jimmy Gordon modelled what Radio Clyde did on what pirate Radio Scotland had done. Radio Scotland had so many constraints because it was out at sea, but while all the other ship-based radio stations did either non-stop pop music or non-stop easy listening, it played different kinds of music at different parts of the day.

It had a Scottish music programme (Jack McLaughlin's Ceilidh, of course) but it also had the One o' Clock gang, as well as Eric Milligan's recipes, and horoscopes, and the Good Neighbours programme. It even had an Irish club night. It had a far more balanced range of programmes than any of the other pirates, and I think that did influence Clyde.

BRIAN FORD was one of Radio Clyde's best-known voices for years, hosting such innovative music shows as Street Sounds and Stick It in Your Ear.

Brian Ford (Image: Brian Ford)

Those early days at Clyde were so exciting. A lot of us were radio virgins, apart from Steve Jones, who'd worked on Radio 1, and Richard Park, who'd been on the pirate Radio Scotland on 242. The others - people like Tiger Tim, Bill Smith, myself - had never actually done anything like that before, unless you include hospital radio, where a lot of us had worked - Dave Marshall, for example.

People were anticipating the arrival of commercial radio when the pirates were sunk; unfortunately, it didn't always work out the way we wanted it to be, because obviously the pirates were non-stop pop, and so it went on. So when the independent radio network started, there were all kinds of restrictions put on - you were only allowed nine minutes of advertising per hour of needle time, for example.

You had to invent things to fill up the spaces; we had competitions and recipes and all sorts of things, in order to make the whole thing gel together.

Initially Clyde was like a melting-point for everyone to see what they could do with the station within the restrictions. Thankfully, with Clyde, we had the three-day week. The telly was not great. And as soon as we started, there was instant success. The people of the west of Scotland were quick to hold the new station very close to their hearts, and there was a great, fierce loyalty.

Brian Ford at work, 1978 (Image: Newsquest)

There was so much about Clyde that was a novelty. It gave local people a voice on radio that they had never had before. They had never seen a radio car before, driving around their streets. It was a Ford Cortina Estate, with an extending aerial on the roof which you cranked up with a handle. Jimmy Gordon was driving the car once but he had forgotten to take the aerial down and went under a low bridge.

But the team at Clyde were real pioneers. It was a really exciting time for us. Outside the station, everything was pretty dismal and bleak at that time. It wasn't the best of times for everyone but we did our best to try to cheer everybody up and give them another outlook on life. I think we succeeded in some ways.

Radio Clyde production assistant, Magi Sloan, 1983 (Image: Newsquest)

We tried to get out of the office on outside broadcasts as often as we could. I did one in Coatbridge during the heatwave summer of 1976; the actual seven-inch singles started to melt on the turntable, which was slightly unfortunate. But the shows was always well-attended, with massive crowds, and to be honest the DJs became almost like stars because of the Clyde connection. 

Comparing the broadcast equipment we had back then with today's equivalent is like comparing night and day. I actually prefer the turntables and the cartridges and the reel-to-reel tape recorders. It was like keeping a number of spinning plates going at the same time. These days, presenters have it very easy on their computer screens, with everything on a playlist. You just don't do anything apart from press a button every so often.

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The other thing was the excitement that was generated by you engineering the whole thing, by knitting the whole thing together. It kept you on your toes and kept you mentally alert. When I was involved in radio broadcasting using the new technology, your mind can wander. Maybe that's just an old dinosaur talking; people would just look at you and ask, why would you want to do all that when you can merely press a button? It's the way of the world, I suppose.

JOHN LUMSDEN

John Lumsden (Image: John Lumsden)

I had been head of engineering at the pirate station, Radio Scotland, and had worked with Scottish Television alongside Jimmy Gordon and Alex Dickson. The three of us ended at Radio Clyde.

I started with Clyde probably six months before it opened at Hogmanay 1973, because I was employed as chief engineer and head of engineering. Getting the studios put together was a massive undertaking. We eventually got it all ready in time for the launch on Hogmanay.

The engineering side of things was a real challenge - getting the station on air, and in meeting the very tight government restrictions governing broadcast quality. We had to come on as a shining example of what could be achieved but it became very clear in the first year that there were other things that we could do - things that had generally not been done by the BBC before.

Broadcasters lead tributes to 'inspirational' former Radio Clyde MD Alex Dickson

At Clyde we had various mobile recording units, and we were able to undertake major recordings of the Scottish National Orchestra. We did lot of lunchtime concerts in and around Glasgow. We even had a mobile with a stage that folded down. There was so much innovation, both on the programming side and in the engineering side: it was that which enabled the programming side to be able to do the things it did. We had so many firsts, and it was nice to be able to part of that.

I remember one occasion, a royal gala performance of The Merry Widow at the King's Theatre of The Merry Widow. We got the mobile recording unit outside the King's and we were all hooked up. The announcer who was supposed to put it all together was a lovely Irish guy called Charles FitzGerald. We nicknamed him the phantom of the opera because he was experimenting with going down theatre passages and everything. He was a real character.

What happened was the Queen's entourage was coming down Bath Street but  Charles was nowhere to be found. He was supposed to be with me in the van, on microphone, to describe what the Queen was wearing. Well, guess who ended up doing that on air? I think I made an acceptable job of it, though.

I went on to establish Clyde Electronics, where we were building radio stations all over Scotland and England. There was a limited amount of expertise in putting these things together at that time. The thinking up to that time had been BBC thinking, or independent television thinking, and it was different from what was needed.

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So Clyde led the way by showing that there were other ways to provide radio coverage to the population, to make the feel that they were part of the station. Clyde was very good at that, led by Jimmy Gordon. He had a great method of management.

When he saw talent and ideas he was prepared to stand aside and let you go with it. That was in news and in programming but in the engineering side as well. I didn't have an open chequebook, but he allowed me to spend a lot of money, doing things that hadn't been done before. That helped the station get to where it was.

Richard Park, 1979 (Image: Newsquest)

There were definitely times when we had to think on our feet. You had to make things happen when they were extremely difficult to make happen. Overall, we punched above our weight for quite a long time. It's hard to believe it was all of fifty years ago, though.

DAVE MARSHALL

I had been a volunteer on hospital radio back in the day alongside such people as Norman Ross, Tony Currie and John MacCalman.  A lot of us knew each other and when it came to recruiting at Radio Clyde we all met up again. 

I was working at the time for Rank Xerox, in Fleming House in Cambridge Street, working with photocopying machines. One day the phone rang. It was Jimmy Gordon, saying he wanted to buy a photocopier for his new office in Fitzroy Place. The boys in the office knew I wanted to be a DJ so they said, you'd better go and see him.

Dave Marshall, pictured in 1976 (Image: Newsquest)

He signed up for a new machine and I told him that I'd love to join the new Radio Clyde. He said there were six contenders for the licence to run the new station and that if he got the franchise he would be employing a middle-management team who would recruit new talent.

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After he won the franchise, he wrote to ask if I would go and see him. I'd recorded a demo tape in the hospital radio studio; it was a spoof breakfast show, with commercials recorded off the TV.  A fortnight later he wrote again, saying that Andy Park wanted to talk to me about joining.

Radio Clyde offered its own memorabilia (Image: Courtesy of Dave Marshall)

It led to me getting a job as a presenter. From memory, Steve Jones, who'd come from BBC Radio, had been offered the breakfast show, but didn't fancy getting up at 3.30am. So he was offered the mid-morning slot and I was very happy to take on the breakfast show, from 6am, and I did for twenty-eight-and-a-half years. It was fantastic, a real dream come true for me.

Clyde was groundbreaking in those days. For some reason, the BBC opted not to open a local radio station back then in Scotland. Maybe it was because they thought BBC Radio Scotland was doing the job already. 

Unlike the situation nowadays, where you can sit down with a microphone anywhere and broadcast - from home, more often than not - in those days the studio walls were two feet thick, and the Independent Broadcasting Authority, as it then was, came round with meters to check all the volume levels and to make sure that the doors weren't letting any sound through. They seemed determined to put a spanner in the works at every stage of the game.

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We did a few dry runs and recorded some pretend tapes. I remember the enthusiasm from everyone there, from May in the canteen to Sandra in the music library. We knew it was going to be fantastic. The people of Glasgow were waiting for something like it - they knew it was going to be amazing.

The opening night was such an exciting time for us all. Everybody was excited, guided by people like the late Sheila Duffy, Alex Dickson, the head of news, and Andy Park.

I remember once coming into the studio at 4.45am and walking past Alex's room, which was quite small. I looked through a glass panel at the side of his door and there was Alex, fast asleep in a camp bed, his specs still on. He'd been there 24/7, especially in the early days.

A letter received by Dave Marshall in 1973 from Radio Clyde (Image: Courtesy of Dave Marshall)

At the end of 1973, I remember, the [Conservative] government declared that energy had to be saved [there was a global oil crisis, and there was industrial unrest in Britain's coalfields], and it was decreed that TV stations would have to shut down at 10.30pm. I'm sure the bosses at Radio Clyde thought this was manna from heaven.

Sure enough, when TV closed down for the night, people would switch onto Clyde and listen to people like Richard Park or Don Cumming and Frank Skerret or Glen Michael, until midnight. At midnight they would switch off - but in the morning their radios would still be tuned to 261. It was just an amazing time. Great fun, great fun.

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One of our many studio guests on Clyde was Uri Geller. In the very early days we had an analogue master-control clock that governed all the electric clocks throughout the building. The analogue clock and master-control hadn't worked for a month or so. Steve Jones had interviewed Uri and we all gathered in the control room. Somebody said to Uri, could you get that clock working again? Uri put his hand over the face of this clock - and it began to work again. It stopped again after 15 minutes, though.

Andy gave us a free hand at the beginning, in terms of the records we played. We knew the format, we knew what we wanted. We had two boxes of records in the studio - box A and box B. This was the time of the Tartan Thirty. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I would play 15 songs out of box A, and on Tuesday and Thursday I would pick out of box B. Steve would pick the opposite box each day. This was an unscientific method of playing the current hits but it worked a treat.

Station to station

Andy Park put together an amazing variety of programmes, including Folkal Point, with Colin MacDonald, and Iain Anderson's The Anderson Folio.

Clyde recorded quite a few gigs at the Glasgow Apollo, which opened just a few months before Clyde, and we also got tickets for some concerts. I saw John Denver, Neil Sedaka, a whole lot of big stars, in the days before MP3s and sound files. The record companies used to send reps up and, quite often, stars to do the rounds of the radio stations. In 1979 the Bee Gees brought out their album, Spirits Having Flown, and we were taken to meet them at a hotel and we were wined and dined.

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On Christmas Day morning back in the Seventies we used to broadcast a special  ‘Children’s Choice’ programme from around 8 am.

I would be based in the studio, playing the Christmas songs and requests, and our outside broadcast teams would head for Eastpark Children’s Home in Maryhill to meet the children and deliver Christmas presents.  It was a real team effort. Many of your readers might also recall visiting our outside broadcast George Square in Glasgow on Christmas morning.

In an era before PlayStations, drones, X Boxes and mobile phones, the words “Batteries Not Included” used to appear on early electronic toy boxes, and with most shops closed on Christmas Day, we would announce on air that Radio Clyde’s team were in George Square, handing out free batteries.

Within minutes, hundreds of mums, dads and children would descend on our 261 radio car to meet our guys and girls, to tell us, on the radio, about their favourite presents from Santa, and of course collect their free batteries.

COLIN MACDONALD presented the hugely popular show, Folkal Point. He was also, between 1976 and 1981, a Herald columnist

I left my desk as a feature writer at the old Scottish Daily Express on Friday December 27, joined Radio Clyde the following Monday and the very next day - Hogmanay 1973 - we went on air.

Colin MacDonald in studio A at Clyde's original base at Anderston Cross (Image: Radio Clyde)

Colleagues in Albion Street reckoned I was mad; cautioned that "this radio thing" was untried, "pie in the sky, maybe have second thoughts about leaving a daily column on the paper?"

But there was no stopping me. Head of entertainment, Andy Park, had asked me "to be his John Peel" on 261. Folkal Point offering "musical alternatives from folk to rock" proved my open sesame to the great and the good of popular music.

Colin MacDonald (Image: Colin MacDonald)

Over the next decade it included interviewing the Mael brothers in a London hotel room just before Ron and Russell took Sparks into the British charts by storm. Donovan at length, in Dublin. Plus various established and emerging Irish and Scottish folk bands at the legendary Lorient festivals in Brittany.

Taking tea with sweetheart of the rodeo Emmylou Harris in studio A (long before our hair turned white!) and recording the late-lamented one-man-band John Hartford sand-dancing in studio B with Pete Shipton behind the desk.

Hosting a late-night programme with Roger McGuinn of The Byrds phoning his music pals on air during an extended edition of Folkal Point, with Andy Park cheerleading the studio.

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From literally hundreds of out-of-studio interviews I especially recall a compelling but quietly-spoken Canadian in a grey suit who likened Glasgow to Montreal (Leonard Cohen), and a passionate debate about where the cash from Scotland's oil should go (Linda Ronstadt over dinner at the long-gone Albany Hotel).

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason gave me one of the band's only radio interviews after a stunning quadrophonic performance of Dark Side Of The Moon in Edinburgh.

Half a century on and from my rural retreat in Co Armagh there's still a brand-new weekly edition of Folkal Point for a string of local and community stations across Scotland. where it all began on 261 in January '74.