Sunday Night is Music Night here on Radio Free Radnorshire
For a few months now, I’ve been chatting with my pal Mark Williams about setting up an internet streaming radio station, based here in my sophisticated apartment in downtown Presteigne. Mark is a top geezer. He’s done loads of jobs in the music biz, including being Press Officer for Stiff Records, and, unimaginably far back in the day, music editor for The International Times. Oddly, Chris Brook, who came with Perry and me on the Islay/Jura leg of the trip for The Longest Crawl, was the last editor of IT.
Mark and I are going to call our station Radio Free Radnorshire, and we’re hoping to go out on Sunday nights; a problematic radio night, in my view. We’d start at 19.15, the same time as ‘Go For It’ starts. ‘Go For It’ is a radio programme, on Radio Four, designed for pre-teen listeners. It makes me want to spit. Spit at the children who go on it, to be honest. The mere idea of getting Charley or Minnie to sit and listen to the wireless even now seems laughable. When they were 10, they would have cried if I’d made them listen to ‘Go For It’, and it would now be yet another issue for them to take along to therapy.
We’ll finish at 23.00, so our listeners can tune into the David Jacobs show on Radio Two, which I like listening to in the bath. As Nick Lezard perspicaciously asked in one of his radio reviews recently, who will play us this stuff when David Jacobs goes?
But for those few hours between seven and eleven, we’re hoping that alternative Presteigne, at least, will tune in, turn on, and drop out.
With this in mind, (and with Mark not here), I knocked about Youtube to find a representitive playlist… welcome to Radio Free Radnorshire…
From the sixties… some punk doo wop/surf
From the seventies… the guys who invented punk
From the eighties… some guys who were clearly not that interested in punk…
From the nineties… more New York magic, more doo wop, but on the other side of town from punk.
From the noughties… Punk is dead! Prog returns! Very ‘eavy!
Thank you for listening to Sunday Night is Music Night here on Radio Free Radnorshire…
Must go – bath is running and the wireless is warming up for Mr. Jacobs.
By the way – Malcolm Laycock – top man!
Re: German Pop: who knew it could be this good?
And for completists here’s Doug doing it his own hairy way..
Loving the Bernd Cluver – especially how they make you wait almost 2 minutes before the titular mundharmonika makes its appearance – talk about delayed gratification…
It’s also struck me that singing surrounded by hordes of people seems to have been very much the thing circa 1972/3. Even this reclusive chap was at it:
Enter Shikari! That’s just magnificent. Well spotted.
Give me the Amen Corner any day. Honest to God, the words just popped out of my mouth, I didn’t mean anything by it.
Beautiful. Here’s some more of what German teenagers were listening to in 1973
while our girls were digging David..
Tell me; which was healthier? Hmmm? Some of the girls swaying to Bernd probably went on to join the Red Army Faction, which was just about to take off big time; and little wonder. What’s worse, some of the boys probably went on to form Scorpions. By the time of these recordings, our own Angry Brigade were all in prison – for who can be angry in a world which gave us David?
Ooh, don’t don’t let Pete M hear you say that!
Somewhere in Britain there must be a small town with a corresponding glut of German schlager music…
Thanks to Lonesomedepot for his anti-indie rant, which I’d want to heartily endorse. The problem round here is not so much indie, though, as bloody Gypsy Jazz…
Very nice stuff , thanks for sharing dude . It really show me a new sense 🙂
Do you do requests?
Adam Walton on Radio Wales starts at 10pm. I usually listen to his show on the iPlayer on Monday mornings, mind.
Ah, if only you’d had such a genius idea during my tenure in Presteigne I’d have been glad to ‘help out’ as well. But I’ll be listening. (I can always Iplayer Malcolm Laycock.) And yes, that’s a salient point about D Jacobs. I’ve not read N Lezard’s piece yet, but it’s pretty clear that in a world where you can hear Coldplay, Oasis etc without even trying to, the music he plays has become the most ‘alternative’ there is (and probably the most likely to get an adverse reaction if played to a cross section of ‘ver public’). Yet the myth persists that listening to ‘indie’ rock music denotes some edginess of taste.
Love the idea of yr radio prog: go for it. I agree about that terrible Radio Tarquin nonsense on Radio 4, and I speak as a) a professional radio broadcaster and b) mother of any number of children. Have you sampled Radio Wales at all?