Radio #001: Humble Beginnings to Humble Ends

The origins of 30 years of music radio, at your expense...

I’ll start at the beginning. There was always music in our house when I was growing up… Bob Dylan on Sundays, sad and foreboding, perfectly evoking the ennui of the end of the weekend. James Taylor, Carole King or Fleetwood Mac in the evenings. Most days, Radio 2 was on from morning until dad got home from work, a not-so-heady diet of Neil Diamond, ABBA, Glen Campbell, The Carpenters and Brotherhood of Man.

‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ was the first song that caught me tight in its snare. I loved the way it made me feel. Mr and Mrs Fellowes who lived next door had their granddaughter staying over for her summer holidays. I was six and smitten. She was called Joanne and had freckles like poppies and long strawberry blonde hair that I yearned to do I knew not what with. ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ felt exactly the same as seeing her through a gap in our adjoining hedge.

My dad had spent far more money than he should have done on a Quadrophonic hifi system, through which he could enjoy ‘Tubular Bells’ in its most fully-realised, four dimensional form. The stereo had four little knobs controlling a display / monitor that represented the balance of the mix as throbbing pink lights on a dark electric blue matrix. Of course I had no idea that that was what it was doing at the time. I thought it was a target reticule for incoming TIE Fighters.

I’m sure I broke this expensive bit of kit, spinning the knobs all the way round, within a couple of weeks of its appearance in the lounge. Just as I had broken his telescope by taking it apart to see how it worked. I was an expensive first-born.

My mum and dad had a couple of hundred albums stacked against the wall next to the hifi and they didn’t mind me listening to them as long as I was careful and put them back in the right sleeves.

Theirs was the kind of music collection that would have been a wet dream for a ‘Q’ reader: every one of Bob Dylan’s albums; similarly complete catalogues for Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Van Morrison (my mum’s favourite); JJ Cale; Ry Cooder… Pete Seeger… great albums by Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Marvin Gaye… but predictably it was The Beatles’ albums that drew - and continue to draw, all these years on - the most attention.

The first disc of The Blue ’66-’70 compilation must have been worn transparent by the time I was 10; songs and arrangements a kid’s imagination could thrive and go feral in. I learnt the vast majority of what I know - and love about music - from those songs. So tunefully abundant, not just in the songs’ main melodies, but in the parts, arrangements, fade outs and surprising interjections. It was obvious that they were having the most fun and wanted to take us all along for the ride… an irresistible invitation.

This baptism of melodicism has meant that I can struggle with music that isn’t - in some way - melodic or imaginative, even now.

The first two songs on the ‘Blue’ album are ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’. Set unfeasibly high expectations, don’t they? That otherworldly chord sequence; the Morse Code pulse in the former; Ringo’s swing and poetic fills; lazy comet guitars; that reverse arpeggio on an instrument that sounds sharp and bright enough to create its own lightning; Lennon’s voice… alone, removed, compelling… a square wave cello saw-toothing the cosmos.

I’m 7 or 8 years old. I haven’t taken hallucinogens. I float in the centre of this song’s universe. The fade out and playful return is a dream of fairy light ice cream vans shooting between star systems.

McCartney’s voice on Penny Lane or Fool On The Hill fills night time car trips, fuzzy head against the cold window, hypnotised by War of the Worlds streetlights marching by somewhere south of Birmingham.

We were always driving at night, “the roads are quieter and safe”. My dad didn’t like traffic.

He used to make compilation tapes for do’s at The Cross Foxes. DJ’ing from a tin, basically, and this meant he started buying Chartbuster and Now compilations to compliment his other albums. Billy Ocean and Feargal Sharkey next to Little Richard and Elvis; Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ crashing into Duran Duran.

He was an electrician by trade and did this on the side, no doubt paid in pints of ‘rusty water’ at the pub. We never talked about how I ended up doing pretty much the same thing on the radio, and DJ’ing at Telford’s Warehouse in Chester for over twenty years. Always with a selection of his 7”s in my box: The Contour’s ‘Do You Love Me?’; Del Shannon’s ‘Runaround Sue’; Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’; Dusty’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’; Lloyd Price’s ‘Stagger Lee’.

All of these records conjure hazy haphazard memories: sounds, faces, places, smells, emotions… otherwise random riffles through life’s photo albums.

Him looking through a carrier bag of his singles, getting wistful and enthusiastic, telling me - if push came to shove - ‘Stagger Lee’ was his favourite of them all, and it spinning on the turntable, Lloyd Price’s rich voice folding the decades, taking him back and filling me with wonder and time vertigo.

Some mad, saucer-eyed lad at the DJ booth in Telford’s… me being defensive because I’m expecting him to demand ‘The Roses’ again, but his cheeks wet with tears because it was his dad’s favourite song too, and he can’t quite string the right words together because he’s off his face, but grateful to the tune of buying me Guinness-after-Guinness for the rest of the night.

DJ’ing at Green Man Festival a couple of weeks after he died and placing the revered 7” on a turntable, teal and silver label evoking in the sun, me desperate to cry the pain away, for an emotional connection - a rhapsody to share my own kind of goodbye with the crowd in the Walled Garden - only for a gust of wind to catch the underneath of the slipmat, sending the record onto the grass below the stage.. A mischievous trick from the great beyond that has me laughing as I retrieve it (still intact, thank God! Those singles pressed in the 50’s and 60’s will outlast us all… become part of the 20th Century’s fossil record long after hard drives and digital files are obsolete).

So he would have had some justification in that expensive stereo… intoning a variation of the same flawed logic with which I failed to convince my ex-wife over the years, “it’s not that I want to spend our hard-earned money on this highly desirable hifi equipment, God no! It’s just that I need it. It’s for work. Tax deductible.”

He had a very nice cassette deck with proper up and down faders, and different coloured lights and gauges that looked like the control panel of the Millennium Falcon. Star Wars was everything to us kids in the late 70’s / early 80’s, way before it became a brow-beaten exhausted franchise.

He had a little microphone that plugged into the tape deck and curly lead headphones that kept the rest of the world at bay.

Radio started for me when I worked out how to record myself over my dad’s painfully compiled Cross Foxes’ tapes… Side One 9:30 - 10:15 BIG DANCE TUNES…

He told me that he’d re-used a couple of older tapes for a New Year’s Eve disco at The Cross Foxes… said that as Johnny and Gaye, Tony and Angie, Swell, Phil, Lynne, Russell and Joy, and god knows who else, were jiving between the tables to Red River Rock and Shakin’ All Over, the tape went a bit squelchy… there was a thump over the speaker as I switched the microphone on and started humming… no, BLASTING out my own acapella version of the Star Wars theme, replete with explosions, laser blasts, TIE fighter noises and commentary… "Luke, at that speed will you be able to pull out in time?” "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home” all to a bemused, half-pissed pub of revellers.

He had to leap to the tape deck and switch cassettes double quick, he said. I was mortally embarrassed by this anecdote when I was little but I hope it was true now. Probably the biggest audience I’ve ever broadcast to.

Round about ’77 or ’78 something catastrophic happened in our family. There was a lot of pain and shouting. The atmosphere in the house changed for what felt like an eternity. I thought our world was ending. It was horrible… tortuous… and the anxiety that made me sick with worry then became a familiar presence, and still is.

No crimes were committed. Life happened. People happened. I won’t say anymore than that. I only mention it now abstractedly because that period - all the pain and worry and sadness - is preserved - absolutely - in every note of Bob Dylan’s ‘Street Legal’ album. Even now, four and a half decades later, I find it very difficult to listen to that album. It feels so sad and prophetic. Is it strange / perverse that when I do listen to it, I think it’s incredibly beautiful? That the call and response vocals on ‘Baby Stop Crying’ emanate from the very centre of my soul?

I think a holiday driving to Italy, with that album a continuous presence on the Chevette’s cassette player, might have saved our family. No exaggeration.

I DJ’d for Georgia Ruth and Iwan Huws’ wedding a few years ago. They chose ‘Changing of the Guards’ as one of their songs at the reception. So it’s a song that now evokes happy memories too. Music’s ability to weave itself into the very fabric of our experiences is awesome and unmatched.

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Everyone from our generation had a similar sonic rite of passage: taping our favourite songs from the Top 40 rundown every Sunday so we could listen to them at our leisure. Most of my friends did their best to trim off the DJ’s intros and outros. I tried to do my own. I’m still trying, now.

Landscape’s ‘Einstein a Go Go’; Kiki Dee’s ‘Star’ (which made me feel existential and weird back then and - cues it up on Spotify… still does now); Adam And The Ants (who I pretended to hate on account of Julie’s fixation, but who I secretly loved as much as I resented them); Games Without Frontiers; D.I.S.C.O; Pass The Dutchie; Super Trouper; Oh… VIENNA! Dexy’s… of course ‘Come On Eileen’.

In the kind of cool retardant move that has been a thread throughout my life, I had become obsessed with my dad’s Dire Straits records. I had just started playing guitar, and that was about to become the all-encompassing fever in my life, and there was something in Mark Knopfler’s playing that I was desperate to emulate. Almost as much as I was obsessed with being able to play the Theme from The Deer Hunter (or the Take Hart gallery music, as I knew it).

I had a predilection towards being a “lovestruck Romeo”, even before big school, a finely attuned radar for falling hard for an unattainable girl. All girls are unattainable when your conversation revolves entirely around aliens in Bruce’s Wood; your mineral collection; Moh’s Scale of Hardness; BBC 6502 Assembly Code, and your favourite Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Forest of Doom… always Forest of Doom).

Danny, my little brother by a whole year and twelve days, was far cooler. A couple of inches shorter but far cooler. I’d have to storm into his adjoining bedroom on a daily basis to beat him up so he’d turn his Iron Maiden down… or Madness… or The Jam… just so the nuances of Private Investigations weren’t entirely lost to the ululations of Bruce ‘Air Raid Siren’ Dickenson.

The thing is, and don’t bloody tell him because I will never live it down, I remember his music more fondly than I remember my own loves back then (Don’t Pay The Ferryman and Moonlight Shadow or Highway To Hell? It’s a no brainer, isn’t it?) thus learning two more essential tools for the contemporary music broadcaster: hindsight and dilettantism.

So this is how it started for me, warts and all. Next everything goes a bit Youth Club; first band practises in terraced bedrooms and Village Halls; first live band experiences; Danny getting bigger than me and not being able to beat him into musical submission anymore; U2 and Woofer / Rich Holland’s compilation tapes changing everything.

Tune in next week. If you like…