TURN YOUR RADIO ON



TURN YOUR RADIO ON

and listen to the music in the air

Good evening

For his play, Private Lives, Noel Coward penned the wonderful line “extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”[?] I wish I’d written that. I’m going to stay this evening with the idea that ‘cheap music’, as Coward called it, is close to the heart of how we live, and how we think of ourselves within the society we inhabit.

It’s extraordinary, too, how potent cheap radio is. For the past four decades at least, popular radio has provided the soundtrack for our lives. I want to explore how popular music and popular radio have interacted, and to see what that can tell us about radio in the UK today.

Let’s start with a tune.

[grams: Brumley Ray Stevens, Turn your radio on, 1972]

“Turn your radio on/and listen to the music in the air”. The rest of Ray Stevens’ words may be a bit too gospel for your taste – they are for mine – but you cannot deny that as a come-on for music on the radio, those two lines are unbeatable. More than that, it dates from 1972, just when independent radio was about to start in the UK, so – like all good pop music – it is a brilliant signalling of the zeitgeist. So it leads us well therefore into my theme this evening, which is the relationship between popular music and popular radio.

The main part of this lecture, then, will be a spin through the joint histories of popular radio and popular music, noting when they have intersected with particular effect. Next, I’ll use that history to examine just what music means to radio and vice versa. And last, I will conclude with a review of some of the great songs about the radio, which popular music writers have provided to be played on the radio.

From the start, radio and popular music were near contemporaries. They both had their origins at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Guiseppe Marconi first demonstrated the commercial potential of radio in August 1898, just along from here in the Eastern Solent. Twenty one years earlier, Thomas Edison had successfully made a recording of his voice which could be replayed. Edison sang ‘Mary had a little lamb’, so popular songs were right in there from the beginning. Once we had both sound recording and wireless transmission in the same crucible, popular radio was inevitable. It duly arrived on Christmas Eve 1906, with the first radio broadcast in Fessenden, Massachusetts. From that point onwards, the tension and mutuality between the music and radio industries was always present, as it is to this day.

Just before the history, though, a few definitions.

The BBC needs no definition. Naming its competition, though, is more complex. In the rest of Europe it would be simple; we would simply call it ‘private radio’. Here, though, there are two terms which tend to be used interchangeably, although they should not be: ‘commercial radio’, and ‘independent radio’. I will use the term ‘commercial radio’ for American radio; for the services beamed into the UK from the near Continent, such as Radios Normandy and Luxembourg; and for the largely free-market radio system which has operated in the UK since 1990. However, the licensed UK stations between 1973 and 1990 are more correctly referred to as ‘independent radio’; or as Independent Local Radio, ILR. ‘Pirate radio’ is unlicensed, illegal radio broadcasting, and the not quite illegal Sixties radio ships I’ll speak of as ‘offshore pirate stations’.

Next, what is ‘pop music’? That could be an entire lecture in itself. I am interested in the phenomenon of the last half of the Twentieth Century which was – and still is – commercially recorded popular music. So for this evening, I’m going to use the term fairly indiscriminately to subsume all the styles and genres from rock n roll to techno and beyond.

And lastly, I intend to use the two national words ‘Britain’ or ‘the UK’ fairly interchangeably. The distinction is of course highly important, but the music we’re concerned with is the product of what were once called the British Isles, in the sense that Bob Geldorf or the Undertones or U2 are wholly part of the mainland music scene as well. And, anyway, Radio Caroline was the brainchild of an Irishman.

Now for the history. Back in the Twenties, when the Great War had ended and the rise of mass production and the mass market had begun, radio in the UK and the USA had gone their separate ways. In America, an almost unrestricted rush to open commercial stations across the land was perfectly suited to the emerging record industry.With the same technology, however, the UK took a very different route. It chose the public corporation option offered by the BBC, rather than the free market creative chaos favoured in the States.

At that time, the British music industry was still chiefly concerned with selling sheet music, rather than any quantity of new fangled gramophone records, and that suited the BBC perfectly. It just about tolerated popular music. Dance bands were a staple feature of BBC radio output from the early Twenties, even though the dance halls took on the type of significance – and relative notoriety – that clubbing has in modern times. The BBC provided dance music through Henry Hall and the BBC Dance Orchestra, but John Reith was not going to pander to youth tastes for gramophone record programmes. This was not the type of Britain which he recognised as worthwhile, and certainly not one which he wanted to promote.

However, Sean Street, in his splendid work on the period, Crossing the Ether,[?] has demonstrated how the “huge enthusiasm among the young…fed the emergent record and gramophone industry, which in turn was to significantly fuel the public appetite for popular music radio as home-centred entertainment grew”.[?] Record sales by the late Twenties numbered in the millions, but the BBC remained determined to go down the dance band route, rather than play commercially recorded discs. It developed close relationships with the bands just around the corner, at the Savoy Hotel; the Savoy Havana Band, and The Savoy Orpheans. Even here, for all the Reithian reluctance, the inescapable interplay between radio and records was very evident, with the Orpheans winning a lucrative recording deal with HMV on the back of their work for the BBC. [?]

At that point, however, popular music took a hand and promptly changed the popular radio scene, just as was to do regularly over the coming years. The public wanted to hear gramophone records, and that provided an opening for the new commercial radio competition, most obviously the arrival of Radio Luxembourg in 1933. The continental stations won tens of millions of listeners, especially when they provided record programmes up against the BBC’s Reithian Sunday output.[?]

John Reith’s BBC was never going to be very keen on gramophone records, and it was confirmed in that prejudice by the use made of them by Radio Luxembourg and the rest between the wars. Radio Paris employed the skilled Christopher Stone to host record programmes, which clearly got right up the BBC’s nose. Sean Street quotes the BBC’s first Director of Programmes, Arthur Burrows, reporting on “two programmes of gramophone records ‘sponsored’ by an establishment in Brixton Road. A more disgusting display of musical depravity could not be conceived.”[?] You will spot at once a clear parallel in these events with the arrival of offshore pirate radio in the Sixties.

Actually, even if the pre-war BBC had felt inclined to provide listeners with the music they wanted, as distinct from what they ought to want, the Musicians Union (MU) was there to keep them on the path of virtue. They were supported also, bizarrely you may think, by the record companies’ association. Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) was established in 1934 to exploit the performing right in its members’ recordings established in the Cawardine case.[?] Stephen Barnard notes that “the BBC, at the request of PPL and the MU, agreed to limit the number of records it played and to pay for their use”[?], and this also set the tone for how popular radio was to work in the second half of the century.

Far from welcoming their discs being played on the radio, record companies feared that too much airplay would damage the sale of their products. They set out to limit the time which broadcasters could use records, known as ‘needletime’. The emerging record industry had gone to court in 1928 to seek a limit on the amount of any particular musical work which could be broadcast, prohibiting therefore any complete Gilbert and Sullivan opera! This ready recourse to lawyers is another feature which has conditioned the interplay between popular music and popular radio ever since.[?]

[grams: Heartbreak Hotel, Elvis Presley]

Pop music came to Britain in the Fifties. Rock ‘n’ roll took little time to catch on in Britain, and by the mid Fifties it had a growing following. More than that, Britain started to develop its own, home-based rock tradition. Wee Willie Harris and Tommy Steele both made their mark with more than just imitations of US rock ‘n’ roll. However, it was Lonnie Donegan who produced something uniquely British and pop; skiffle. It was short-lived but genuinely influential, and when more mainstream UK bands started to make their mark – Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Tornados – they were building on a very successful UK adaptation of an imported musical culture.

What Britain did not import, however, were the radio stations to play the new pop music. In the USA, top forty radio, first introduced in 1949 by the Mid-Continent Broadcasting Company, had met the case for American youth. But the UK had lost commercial radio, beamed in from Luxembourg and Normandy, when the Second World War broke out, and there was no real prospect of reviving that as a major force in the Fifties. The BBC was now all-powerful in radio. It was facing the end of its television monopoly, and perhaps in response to the success of ITV, it was ever more Reithian in its approach to radio. Rock ‘n’ roll, and pop music as a whole, were not welcome.

The BBC attempted to keep rock ‘n’ roll in particular “at arm’s length”[?], although it was prepared to air a little of the more wholesome skiffle. Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel wasn’t exactly banned, it just didn’t get played very much. This was in line with the mentality which required one obligatory piece of classical music in each Light Programme popular record request show – Family Favourites, Children’s Favourites, Housewives’ Choice – but decreed that it must only be played at the end of the show, where it would not be ‘contaminated’ by popular songs.[?]

Alan Freeman joined the BBC from Radio Luxembourg in 1960, and made a real success of Pick of the Pops on Sunday afternoons on the Light Programme. From January 1964, Top of the Pops had featured pop musicians as mime artists on BBC TV. And that was as far as the Corporation intended to go.

But the social and political changes of the Sixties, new transistor technology, youth affluence and empowerment, made the radio status quo unsupportable. Pop music was becoming ever more significant in Britain, where the Sixties were to be seminal for both the music and the radio industries. The use by British guitar bands of traditional songs, expressed in a rock/blues idiom, was producing a distinctive British sound. Eric Clapton was a pioneer, and the Animals’ version of The House of the Rising Sun reached number one in the UK and the US charts. Where they led, what came to be called the ‘British invasion’ followed. The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, The Yardbirds, The Who, gave rock ‘n’ roll a wholly new urgency. Merseybeat fused skiffle, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues, and with it the Beatles took over the world.

And still the BBC would not change enough to accommodate what popular music had become. So once again popular music changed what radio was to be in the UK. The growth of, and demand for, pop music had encouraged those who were arguing for the introduction of commercial radio, but the 1964 General Election put an end to that hope for a while. UK radio had to change, so the commercial force of popular music created a radio phenomenon which was outside the law; offshore pirate radio.

[grams Rolling Stones, Not fade away]

It was Ronan O’Rahilly who first took matters into his own hands. He launched Radio Caroline, from a former Baltic ferryboat called the Frederica, on Easter Saturday 1964, and the music-driven radio revolution had begun.[?] The first record was the Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away. Next, Allan Crawford started Radio Atlanta, broadcasting from the Mi Amigo, on 12 May. That was followed by Radio London from the Galaxy on 23 December. By 1967, there were eight offshore pirate stations broadcasting into almost all parts of Britain,[?] playing the music which young people wanted to hear, but which the authorities were denying them. Both Radio Caroline and Radio London were able to claim audiences of 8 million (interestingly, with Luxembourg also matching that)[?]. It was one of the greatest social revolutions of the Sixties, and it was driven not by a reforming government but by a popular upwelling of demand.

For young people with a new appetite for pop music, and faced by the indifference of the authorities, offshore pirate radio was one of the crowning assertions of their new identity and potency. For the mass audience of British teenagers, it was the ‘top forty’ sounds of the offshore stations which were the sounds of their lives for those three years, and which created an expectation of what ought to be provided by legitimate stations. Top forty radio in the US involved “round the clock playing of a carefully selected and programmed mixture of the highest placed hits on Billboard magazine’s Hot Hundred chart, newly released discs which were expected to reach the chart, and a sprinkling of past hits”[?]. That is broadly what the pirate ships offered, and it set an expectation for what commercial radio might sound like in the UK.

The ships weren’t around long enough to prove the durability of the format, although their huge audiences indicated that it worked at least as a start. The British authorities tried a series of diplomatic, policing and legislative efforts, culminating in the Marine, Etc., Broadcasting (Offences) Act in 1967, which effectively ended the era of wide-ranging offshore pirate radio. Public opinion was largely opposed to the forced closures. An ORC poll in August 1967 indicated only 20 per cent support, as against 47 per cent disapproval.[?] However, all but one of the ships went off-air once they were made illegal. Only Radio Caroline remained, as an intermittent rebel for the next 40 years. However, in their three years the ships had changed the nature of public perception of popular radio. It was no longer true that ‘radio is what the BBC does’. It was partly that people enjoyed a greater informality of tone on the air, but overwhelmingly because the BBC had refused to play the popular music that most younger people wanted. Now, something else had to take the place of the pirates.

That ‘something else’ was first of all Radio One, which was launched by the BBC on 30 September 1967. Mike Baron has told how “DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Cash, John Peel, Keith Skues, Ed Stewart, Emperor Rosko, Stuart Henry and Duncan Johnson all came ashore to work for the Corporation’s new pop radio station. Even the Radio One is One-derful jingles and station identifications were similar to the Wonderful Radio London set.”[?] Yet those huge audiences for the ships still sensed that their high hopes were unfulfilled; this was just Auntie BBC lifting her skirts a little. Radio One wasn’t even full-time, but shared output and wavelengths with the Light Programme. The political lobbying resumed, stimulated by the success of the pirates, and had a huge stroke of luck when Edward Heath unexpectedly won the 1970 General Election. Now, at last, there could be genuine pop music radio.

Except that, by then, official understanding of what commercial radio might comprise had changed. Unalloyed top forty radio was never a real prospect for ILR. Those who ended up running this curious amalgam of commercial radio and public service didn’t want to provide it, and the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the regulator which radio had inherited from ITV, would never have permitted it anyway.[?]

Once more, the interplay between popular music and popular radio was not far away. These changed perceptions of popular radio were matched by changes in the popular music scene. There had been some signs of musical diversification at the end of the Sixties, with psychedelic rock and progressive rock invading the more comfortable certainties of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. As the Seventies dawned, and the new Government started to work out what form independent radio might take, so the Strawbs and Pink Floyd were making progressive rock mainstream. Blues rock had evolved into heavy metal, with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin providing uncomfortable sounds for an older generation which had only just come to terms with sanitised rock ‘n’ roll. Pop music was becoming more diverse, and needed diversity in its radio provision too.

ILR, when it arrived, took the form of independent stations, serving individual localities. The stations each selected their own music, sometimes through a committee of the presenters, sometimes by the dictat of the programme controller. Even once the playlist was agreed, by no means all the music played came from it. On many stations, for many of the DJs, what they played was what they liked, plus – often, reluctantly –whatever percentage of playlist tracks they were made to include. That made ILR music quite imaginative and unpredictable. Usefully, that militated against the establishment of a single music ‘sound’, which commercial radio in the US and Australia deployed when seeking highest audiences in the target demographics. ILR was to get to that state, but it did not start there.

It’s probably wrong to see greater diversity in pop music genres as directly impacting upon the structural arrangements for ILR, which were the result of broader socio-political conditions. However, the breaking up of the monolith of popular music culture has close echoes in the very disparate form which independent radio took at the start. If there had been – as for a while seemed likely – a single national commercial pop channel, it would have been largely a clone of Radio One. ILR though was able to try and be a range of different things in its early years. It had as many different approaches to playlists as there were music stations – eighteen between 1973 and 1980 – and its obligation to undertake support of live music sessions, and to offer specialist music programmes, gave different popular music genres a positive place in the schedules.

Through the Seventies, just as independent radio offered greater diversity, so independent music labels – the ‘indies’ – were making waves within the record industry. Given the close relationship between popular music and popular radio, is unlikely to be only co-incidence that indie music and independent radio showed up at about the same time. It is more likely that the breaking of the BBC monopoly opened the way for new approaches to providing popular recorded music, at just the time when the music industry was ready for that. More than that, the same social forces which were behind the overturning of the state monopoly on the provision of radio, were surely also at work to undermine the near cartel which had long dominated the record business[?].

[grams: The Undertones, Teenage kicks, 1978]

Then punk arrived. The deliberately subversive nature of punk posed a particular problem to UK popular radio. The BBC’s approach to punk music on the radio was to be deeply nervous ILR tried largely to ignore it. Yet punk drove forward two key changes for popuar radio. One was mainly mechanistic. As punk records began to feature extensively in the charts, so these become less valuable as a source of data for playlisting. That was to tie in with the general sidelining of the national charts, which was a seminal change at the end of the Eighties. In the mid Seventies though, it just made the on-air mix ever less predictable.

The second effect was once again to challenge popular radio. If younger listeners were demanding The Damned, The Clash, Buzzcocks and The Undertones, how could ILR stations – which were intended to be all things to all listeners – then cope with adult distaste for this music? Generally, as ILR stations built mass audiences, they did so with a reasonable diversity of pop music, but they couldn’t match the aspirations of the progressive wing British music scene as a whole.[?] This is probably the point where ILR lost the support of those aficionados who had hoped it might be the natural heir to the offshore pirates. The fact that radio even its new, expanded guise, could not keep up with the more outré offerings of the music industry, marks the moment when ILR itself became part of the broadcasting establishment.

CUE HERE

At the start of the Eighties, mainstream commercial music, and mainstream popular radio, seemed somehow short of energy, waiting for change. Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, locked himself in a room in Los Angeles and wrote down his frustration with contemporary music radio.

[grams: Queen, Radio GaGa, 1984]

“My only friend through teenage nights/And everything I had to know/I heard it on my radio/So don't become some background noise/A backdrop for the girls and boys/Who just don't know or just don't care…”[?]

It would have been a pretty powerful indictment, if it had been true. However, what was actually going on was another concatenation of approaches by music and radio. Both were coming to terms with a period of change. There was now a rush of new ILR stations coming on air, the BBC was re-organising its national services and expanding its local stations too. In music, New Wave was coming with Adam & the Ants. ‘Madchester’ had arisen, led by Stone Roses, mixing psychedelic with alternative rock. Punk had spawned gothic rock of Souxsie & the Banshees, folk rock had split off into a range of independent labels. Those who were to be key artists were about to leap from their own genres into mainstream pop, as Michael Jackson and Madonna were to do with such great effect.

The Eighties actually turned out to be a fruitful period for both radio and popular music. That was most apparent in the invention of modern Contemporary Hits Radio (CHR) by Richard Park at Capital Radio in 1987. His innovation was to dominate ILR for the next twenty years, and to allow it to lord it over the BBC for the next ten – until the reinvention of Radio Two by Jim Moir in 1997. ILR had also begun to kick against the regulatory constraints to some effect. The IBA consented to the introduction of a network chart show in September 1984, with Kid Jensen going head to head with Alan Freeman. The first mergers between ILR stations were permitted, although initially only as ‘rescues’ of failing stations. Generally, this was the time when the obligations which came with ILR’s public service role accorded started to be loosened. To drive that further, at least some parts of the music industry began to support a new breed of radio pirate. Pre-eminent among the newcomers was Kiss FM, where Gordon McNamee demonstrated the possibility – indeed the demand for – a new relationship between radio and popular music. This time it centred upon genre music – in this instance dance.[?]

1990 saw the end of independent radio as originally conceived, and the arrival of something closer to genuine UK commercial radio. Of particular relevance for the music industry, there were for the first time competing music-based stations in many localities. This reflected again the way in which pop music now had several mainstreams, with dance and adult contemporary music now selling as strongly as top forty. With the heritage ILRs also splitting their medium wave and FM services, popular radio and popular music once again found themselves travelling along parallel paths.

This was also the time of the death of the Charts as a meaningful measure for popular radio programming. Sales of singles had fallen dramatically, and the multi-mainstream output of even the major record companies hastened the demise of charts based solely on sales – not least because it was becoming so easy to ‘cook the books’, when a mere 100,000 sales nationwide were enough to make a number one hit.

Just as the established music industry faced new competition from stronger indies, so it was with radio. Given demand for a multiplicity of outlets, to match the multiplicity of music styles, groups competed furiously for the new licences. From 1989, the regulator started to license new legal stations, providing competition within existing ILR areas by offering specific genres of output. Kiss FM became legitimate, and acquired a brother station in Manchester, as several dance licences were awarded. [?]

As the century neared its end, however, the greatest unsatisfied public demand seemed to come from indie fans. They championed the applications of XFM for a London-wide indie station and were outraged by its series of failures. It was eventually awarded a licence in 1997, but this was too late. The indie music boom was ending. Niche stations were always going to be challenged by changing taste, especially in a regulatory climate which enforced formats. The station struggled to keep solvent, but eventually was bought out by of all companies Capital Radio, the so-called ‘mainstream’ station which XFM’s advocates had regarded as its foremost enemy.

[grams Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles]

Popular music and popular radio found themselves at a fork in the road in the mid Nineties, one made all the more critical because of the growth of music television and music videos. To the right, or perhaps I should say the centre – anyway the road most travelled by – the Britpop of Blur, Suede, Oasis and Pulp offered a revived version of traditional pop. It was widely acceptable, politically attractive as part of ‘Cool Britannia’. It appealed to the ILR stations which were increasingly now super-serving the centre ground, much as the music industry was to do with Britpop. Once again, while neither caused the other to take this route, their joint choice is hardly co-incidental. Multiple providers in a busy free market will always tend towards the centre, the so-called ‘Hotelling’ effect.

Manufactured pop music, from the middle of the Nineties, went hand in hand with manufactured popular radio. As ILR began to think of itself as a series of national ‘brands’, so it drifted more and more into arid radio formatting. The same phenomenon was to be observed in popular music. The wide popularity of Take That, and then the extraordinary sales achieved by the Spice Girls, led the music industry down the same path. Get the formula right, and riches can be yours. But listeners to radio and to music quickly become aware when they are being fed mere formula products, and they turned away. By the end of 2006, commercial radio’s share of radio listening was down to only 43 per cent, compared with 51 per cent in 1998.[?] Singles sales had halved in five years,[?] and the record industry was seemingly in perpetual crisis. The middle road led both industries over a cliff into irrelevance.

Actually, the left fork – the road less travelled by – had offered a route more truly into the heart of dynamic popular music, but commercial radio was too caught up with its stock market prices and share options to notice. Dance had split and split, again and again. There was electronic and techno dance from Massive Attack, Paul Oakenfield; melodic dance from Radiohead and Coldplay. The rave scene produced hardcore techno, downtempo and trance, and then split again into drum and bass, happy hardcore and the rest. Succeeding dance, at the end of the decade, came rap/hip hop and contemporary R&B, with Eminem and Snoop Doggy Dog creating their own mild punk-style outrages. Commercial radio never really got a handle on what was happening, and when East London produced grime music, it left the radio companies almost speechless.

The Buggles, you see, had got it wrong. Video did not kill the commercial radio star. Its own loss of creative nerve, and financial self-obsession, did that, in combination with the iPod and the internet. The interplay between popular music and what we must now call different ‘platforms’ within electronic media continues, but commercial radio has now largely quit that field. Its belief that it could be solely music radio, without any more spoken substance, left it fatally exposed. If your radio station does only what your iPod can do, and does it less well, then why listen to the radio? The BBC understood that point from quite early on, and had the resources to construct several platforms at the same time – digital radio, podcasting, internet streaming – while continuing to support full service, quality analogue radio as well. Commercial radio did not see the danger until it was too late; if indeed, it has seen it even now.

[grams: Carpenters, Yesterday Once More, 1973]

What then has been the role of music on the radio? First of all, it has been quite literally the medium within which popular radio existed. Pop music has been the vehicle which has carried the totality of what we understand by radio of widespread appeal, and in this country it has long been unthinkable that it could take any other form. To distort Marshall McLuhan, the music is the medium is the message.[?]

Second, it is in the language of popular music that radio presenters engage with their listeners, that marketeers sell radio, and that the audience thinks about radio.

Third, music is the true profession of popular radio. To be a real popular radio personality, you have to be immersed in popular music, indeed synonymous with it; think Wogan, Tarrant, Evans, Wright, even Ross.

And fourth, popular music has enabled popular radio to offer the listener a peer-group identity, a tribe to belong to, which has been central to the marketing of radio almost from the beginning.

With all this powerful interaction, it is little wonder that the shape of popular radio has been significantly affected by the way in which the popular music industry has evolved, and by public responses to that. There has been a return path as well, with music being affected by the nature of radio, the content is has favoured and the opportunities for airplay and promotion which it has offered.

Yet music on the radio is something still more. It was in 1973, just as ILR was starting, that Richard Carpenter wrote these words for Karen to sing:

“When I was young/I'd listened to the radio/Waitin' for my favorite songs/

When they played I'd sing along/It made me smile…” [?]

This was about personal identity, not a marketing construct. Good popular radio offered the music which helped listeners to locate themselves in time. These were the feelings, the memories, the sounds of their lives. Music on the radio provided the key to interpret the listener what was happening around them; it supplied a vocabulary of the day to day; it even helped reconcile you to your life and times. That was one the privileges of living in the less technological times from the Sixties onwards. Where, I wonder, will the iPod generation locate their yesterdays?

All the best music has a coda, so here is mine. To close this lecture, I am going back to the songs themselves. One of the great by-products of the relationship between music and the radio has been a whole range of great pop songs about radio. A while ago, the Guardian invited its readers to recommend such songs[?], and their list got me thinking.

There are some radio songs which seem hard-wired into our modern consciousness. I have played some of those to illustrate my talk this evening. Turn your radio on, Radio GaGa and Video killed the radio star are obvious examples. They each make a point, whether valid or not, about where radio has found itself at a given point in time. Subtler messages about the relationship between radio and its listeners come from tracks such as Karen Carpenter’s Yesterday once more, which precisely hit the spot of that nostalgia for time and place which good ‘gold’ radio can create. That is the same point as Noel Coward’s line about the potency of cheap music, with which this lecture improbably began. The role of popular music on mass-appeal radio, in bringing back together the disparate parts of each generation, is the point of Reunion’s song Life is a rock (but the radio rolled me).[?]

I like the songs which tell about the process of radio itself. Radioland from Kraftwerk “makes the act of turning a dial to produce music…seem as miraculous as it should”. The corporate character that radio has now acquired on both sides of the Atlantic is shown up in Elvis Costello’s Radio Radio. Still, those who write popular music about popular radio have mainly kept faith. They believe in the power of the DJ, as surely as Indeep’s anthem Last night a DJ saved my life: “there ain’t a problem that he can’t fix/‘cause he can do it in the mix”[?]. They know that radio is a story, just as it can tell a story. Take, for example, Regina Spektor’s song On my radio, and her “unlikely epiphany” on hearing a radio station play Guns n Roses’ November Rain; or Bryan Ferry’s Oh Yeah, “where he is ambushed by a song pouncing out of the car radio to remind him of a lost love”.[?]

Popular music and popular radio have marched together down the past seventy or eighty years, on and off. That infinitely productive relationship is now probably at an end, but it’s been great while it lasted. To close then, here is part of my favourite radio song.

[grams: Harry Chapin, W.o.l.d, 1974]

That was Harry Chapin’s W.o.l.d. It is great popular music, nostalgia, radio, living, heartbreak, all at once. I first heard it in 1979, so it is one of the sounds of my life. That was the time when each of us, at least briefly, could imagine being “the morning DJ/…playing all the hits for you/ wherever you may be”[?]. Extraordinary, isn’t it, how potent cheap music on the radio can be.

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[1] The BBC felt that the cachet provided by major hotels made it permissible to feature their dance bands, when some popular entertainment programming was called for. There was, of course, no suggestion that venues and broadcaster were in cahoots, but the bandleaders certainly found the arrangements commercially attractive. There are tales of them receiving payments from music publishers in return for featuring certain songs in their repertoire when they were being broadcast. The key bandleaders became household names: Teddy Brown at the Cafe de Paris; Ambrose at the Mayfair Hotel; Jack Payne, once the self-styled Director of Dance at the BBC, at the Hotel Cecil. The band leaders knew that broadcasting was the surest way to a lucrative contract with a record company. Similarly, when the BBC tried to ban the announcement of song titles, the publishers and writers body – the Performing Right Society (PRS) – threatened to suspend their agreement with the BBC, and the proposal was shelved. [2]

[3] The copyright deals struck between PPL and the BBC in the Twenties and Thirties, conditioned and were conditioned by UK copyright law, and their influence remains today. There were to be long and bitter copyright wars between ILR and PPL, which continued up to the mid Nineties, and their equivalents rage today over music videos and internet music. Since the BBC was anyway reluctant to play gramophone records, the two were able to strike a deal which had the effect – intentional of not – of harming the prospects for commercial radio in the Thirties, and lingering to affect ILR and other commercial broadcasters in the Seventies and beyond.

[4] O’Rahilly’s original impetus came from his failure, as the manager of singer Georgie Fame, to get airtime on the BBC (or Radio Luxembourg); see Barnard p 43

[5] It is wide of the mark to suggest, as Barnard does in his book (page 79) that when Capital Radio had to rescue its music policy – which it did almost seamlessly by going into Christmas 1973 with one approach and coming out of it with another – it emerged with top forty. There were much more populist elements than in the format it had started with, but the replacement was light years away from pure top forty radio, with its heavy repetition and the absence of any more specialist output.

[6] It is unlikely that the changes in the record industry in the late Sixties and early Seventies were a direct consequence of the offshore pirates, as Mike Baron suggests on page 55 of Independent Radio, simply “because of the tremendous amount of airplay given to new discs”. Similar changes in the music business were evident in the US, where pirate radio in that form would have been redundant.

[7] By one of those neat circularities which seem to characterise British life, quondam Derry tearaway Feargal Sharkey was to become a member of the board of the UK’s radio regulator, the Radio Authority, in December 1998. His song, Teenage Kicks, was given renewed fame with the death of John Peel in October 2004. Peel, a pirate DJ turned Radio Four stalwart, named the song as his all-time favourite and had its opening line engraved on his tombstone. “Teenage dreams so hard to beat” is actually not a bad summary of how we are influenced by the popular music of our youth.

[8] Laser 558 offered a new challenge from 1984. using mainly American DJs, the station was based aboard the ship the MV Communicator, which was based in international waters in the North Sea. Its programming format of one oldie followed by one current song won a large audience quickly, but poor management denied it longevity. It was the equivalent of a compilation CD sold in Woolworths, and as such offered a similar challenge to established popular radio.

[9] From 1989 also, Atlantic 252 broadcast a real top forty format, from the Republic of Ireland to the UK. Its programming was high-rotation mainstream pop and rock music, with influences borrowed heavily from American Radio and presenters similarly.

[10] In the USA, demotic speech on talk radio stations did that job, and still does to a degree on the AM stations. But the USA never had the BBC. It was deprived of John Reith, to tell them what could properly be said on the radio and in what vernacular. The supposed BBC tradition of announcers donning dinner jackets to read the news, ensured that talk radio in the UK could never have proper, vulgar appeal.

[11] There are many other US examples, but they tend to be tied more closely to the Amercian life-style than our own. Roadrunner’s song, The Modern Lover, is as much about driving at night along the US freeways, as it is about love. Left of the Dial by The Replacements is concerned with college radio, which has come only belatedly to Britain, and with none of the cultural resonances of America.

[i] Noel Coward, Private Lives

[ii] Sean Street, Crossing the Ether, John Libbey Publishing, 2006, p 142

[iii] Ibid, p 69

[iv] Stephen Barnard, On the Radio; Music Radio in Britain, Open University 1989, p 9

[v] Street, op cit, p 177

[vi] Gramophone Co Ltd v Stephen Cawardine [1934] Ch 450

[vii] Barnard op cit p 16

[viii] Barnard, op cit, p 38

[ix] Ibid, p 26

[x] Keith Skues, Pop went the pirates, p 95

[xi] Street, op cit, 203

[xii] Barnard op cit p 41

[xiii] Evening Standard 16 August 1967

[xiv] Mike Baron, Independent radio; the story of commercial radio in the United Kingdom, Terence Dalton Limited, Suffolk 1975 pps 54-5

[xv] Roger Taylor, Queen, Radio GaGa, 1984

[xvi] RAJAR/RSL/Hallett Arendt, comparing quarter 4 2006 with quarter two 1998

[xvii] Martin Wainwright, Guardian, 18 August 2003, quoting the British Phonographic Industry’s spokesman. He added that “the market which once proudly premiered the most famous songs of modern times was worth only 6.5% of the UK music industry's value in June 2002-3 - £75.1m out of £1,153m”.

[xviii] Richard Carpenter and John Bettis, Yesterday Once More from the album Now & Then, January 1973

[xix] Dorian Lynskey, ‘readers recommend: songs about radio’, Guardian, 31 August 2007

[xx] Indeep, Last night a DJ saved my life, Michael Cleveland 1982. The actual line is “cause I can do it in the mix”.

[xxi] Guardian, 31 August 2007, op cit

[xxii] Harry Chapin, W.o.l.d., 1974

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