Podcasts about Radio Luxembourg

John Waters is one of the best known faces and voices in Australian entertainment, thanks to his incredible and varied body of work over decades. His award winning acting in shows like Offspring, Rush and All the Rivers Run - plus his many years as one of the hosts of Play School - have made him a huge part of our lives. His other passion is music and he is currently touring Australia with his show Radio Luxembourg, performing the hits of the sixties. John chats about what was on the dinner table and the radio growing up in the UK and shares memories of his time doing Play School. Our Food Poll is the great Australian Cake Off, pitting the ever popular sponge up against the delectably decadent mud cake. Presented by Sarah Patterson & Kevin Hillier Broadcast each Sunday on the ACE Radio Network - https://aceradio.com.au/ Catch us also on: Radio 2DD - Easy Listening - On Line - https://www.2dd.online/ and Radio Bayside stream.radiobayside.com Follow us on Facebook...https://www.facebook.com/foodbyteswithsarahpatterson/ Twitter & Instagram - @sarahfoodbytes Post-production by Chris Gates for Howdy Partners Media | www.howdypartnersmedia.com.au/podcasts © 2025See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the golden era of radio, there was a bloke whose voice connected worlds – Australia, the UK, and little Luxembourg. Barry Alldis wasn't just any DJ. He turned Radio Luxembourg into a must-listen for music lovers across Europe. For many people at that time, Alldis was Radio Luxembourg. Back in the 50s and 60s, when the UK's airwaves were a bit... boring, Radio Luxembourg was the rebel, blasting the hottest tunes. And Barry? He was the smooth-talking legend behind the mic, making every song feel like a personal dedication. Want to know how an Aussie ended up as the voice of Europe? Tune in!

fWotD Episode 2816: Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.The featured article for Sunday, 19 January 2025 is Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh.Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh was a comedy show broadcast from 1944 to 1950 and 1951 to 1954 by BBC Radio and in 1950–1951 by Radio Luxembourg. It was written by and starred Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne as officers in a fictional RAF station coping with red tape and the inconveniences and incongruities of life in the Second World War. After the war the station became a country club and, for its last season, the show became the chronicle of a newspaper, The Weekly Bind.Among the supporting cast were Sam Costa as the officers' batman, Maurice Denham in a multitude of roles, Diana Morrison, Dora Bryan and Nicholas Parsons. Singers in the show's musical interludes included Gwen Catley, Maudie Edwards, Binnie Hale and Doris Hare. Among those appearing as guest stars were Phyllis Calvert, Richard Dimbleby, Glynis Johns, Alan Ladd and Jean Simmons.The show followed It's That Man Again as the most popular British radio comedy and was succeeded by Take It from Here and The Goon Show. After the show ended, its two stars returned to radio in several long-running series.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:30 UTC on Sunday, 19 January 2025.For the full current version of the article, see Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Matthew.

Bill speaks with aussie entertainment legend John Waters about his latest production - Radio Luxembourg.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Waters is an English-born Australian film, theatre and television actor,singer, guitarist, songwriter, and musician. He talked with Alan Field onMondav Drive about his life and his varied talents which have led up to hiscurrent production: Radio Luxembourg. [...]Read More... from Interview with John Waters

For teens across Western Europe, Radio Luxembourg was the station to get your fix for the music that changed a generation

"Rock Fm e Radio Luxembourg" episodio tratto dagli archivi di Radio Pirata la Radio nella Radio

Howard Pearce has spent the last five decades in Radio, working for many local and National stations across the country. These have included Radio Victory, Radio 210, Radio Luxembourg, Radio 2 and Virgin 1215 AM.In this weeks edition of Radio Greats, Howard sits down with Luke to share stories of his past five decades - which include getting the bug for radio. Joining Victory from its launch and presenting for Radio 210, how recording a demo at the Villa Louvingy in Luxembourg landed him trouble but also got him a job on Radio Luxembourg. Hosting a Syndicated show on ILR and presenting on BBC Radio 2, to spending most of the 90's on Virgin 1215 AM. Presenting on Thames Radio and Smooth and how old friends brought him back onto the radio with UDJ and Sunshine Radio Online.Thank you to Aircheck Downloads, Radio Moments and Howard for use of content.

Istoriniais pastebėjimais ir naujosios bangos muzikos grojaraščiu vėl prisiminsime radijo stotį „Radio Luxembourg“, praeito amžiaus 9 dešimtmetyje gal plačiau klausytą Europoje nei Jungtinėje Karalystėje, tiek pat uoliai „gaudytą“ ir Lietuvoje.Ved. Lukas Devita

C'était le 29 août 1966 : les Beatles donnaient leur dernier concert avant de se concentrer uniquement sur les albums studio, dernier concert donné a San Francisco. RTL, ou plutôt Radio Luxembourg, assistait ensuite à leur retour à Londres. Ecoutez Les pépites RTL avec Jérôme Florin du 29 août 2024.

Toliau kaupsime 1984 m. geriausių naujosios bangos dainų grojaraštį, o drauge pagerbsime visame 9 dešimtmetyje bene plačiausiai klausytą Europoje ir Jungtinėje Karalystėje muzikinę radijo stotį „Radio Luxembourg“, tapusią tiek pat kultine ir įtakinga Lietuvoje.Ved. Lukas Devita

Caroline Robinson - Jimmy Savile VictimSep 4, 2022In the 1970s in the UK, there can be few names which were as synonymous with childrens television than Jimmy Savile. Savile same to fame via Radio Luxembourg and Tyne Tees Television, eventually appearing on the BBC radio and television networks. He was lauded by politicians and other celebrities for his ‘tireless' charity work, but beneath the veneer of an eccentric show business DJ and philanthropist, lay a vicious and depraved pervert. Something which only came to wider public attention after his death.Ed's guest is Caroline Robinson, great niece to Savile. She tells how it was known what Savile was in the family, and she herself was victim to the abuse Savile dished out to others. Unlike others, though, Ms Robinson's silence was bought by both Savile lavishing gifts and support on her and the wish not to have the association to someone so famous suddenly removed from her family. ‘It made me proud to tell others my Great Uncle was Jimmy Savile' she said.Following Savile's passing in 2011, a sleuth of accusers – many unknown to each other – surfaced. Savile had allegedly sexually abused children in theatres, cars, private homes, BBC dressing rooms and almost no area was safe for him to be left alone with a child of either sex. His access to places like Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville Hospital also gave suspicion that Savile may have abused patients and there is some evidence to suggest Savile indulged in necrophilia.The legacy of filth lives on; did the BBC mandarins know about Savile? Was his presentation from a distant studio in Manchester a move to make staff feel safer whilst not acknowledging complicity?This interview is about family. It's about having a secret; but it's also about how a slick, protected paedophile fooled a nation, how he betrayed parents, abused vulnerable and/or impressionable children and adults and how he was in plain sight all the time.Books: In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Savile - The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History: Singing with "Iron Maiden" - the Drugs, the Groupies...the Whole Story Victim Zero: Jimmy Savile tried to ruin my life. I was the first victim to fight back.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

The curtain lifted, and on September 12, 2005, Radio Luxembourg made a soft comeback in English at the crack of dawn. The airwaves were alive with the promise of a new era. At one point, Radio Luxembourg grooved at 7295 kHz in the DRM realm, but alas, RTL pulled the plug on that frequency, leaving the fate of the DRM station hanging in the radio air. The plot thickened as local DRM broadcasts continued to echo in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, keeping the dream alive, at least locally. Find out more at www.bourgmeisterin.com!

Thanks to this newfound competition with pirate radios, Radio Luxembourg had to do a quick wardrobe change. Out with the pre-recorded sponsored programs, in with a more flexible vibe. Picture Radio Luxembourg in a mid-life crisis, swapping its scripted lines for the thrill of the live, featuring spot advertising within record programs presented by disc jockeys who probably had a sea breeze in their hair. Some even sailed over from those rebellious offshore stations. It was like a radio soap opera where Luxembourg tried to keep up with the cool kids on the high seas, and let's just say, hilarity ensued. Oh, the radio drama of it all! Find out more at www.bourgmeisterin.com!

On continu avec l'histoire de Radio Luxembourg quoi! After World War II, when the Allied forces left Radio Luxembourg, the English-language service tried to kickstart transmissions as a full-time commercial radio station targeting the UK. They aimed to use the European long-wave band, with Stephen Williams back in the driver's seat. Find out more at www.bourgmeisterin.com!

Once upon a time in the magical land of Luxembourg, there was a linguistic wizard named Radio Luxembourg, who spoke in tongues that echoed far beyond the realm of English. NOT to be mistaken for RTL, that came in the picture much later

Episode 254: It's time for Part Two of our look at the British Top 30, innit? You may remember that in Episode 249, Joe and Kari discussed one of Kari's recent record store finds: The British Top 30 from June 23, 1985, brought to you by Dave Eastwood and Radio Luxembourg. They are picking it up at number 15, a song by Gary Moore, and will discuss songs from Loose Ends, Freddy Mercury, the Style Council, and others on the way to the number one song! Don't be cheeky, tune in now!!!

pirate radio, Radio Caroline, Ronan O'Rahilly, Radio Luxembourg, Lord Haw-Haw, propaganda, John Amery, Julian Amery, Leopold Amery, MI5, William Joyce, 1964 General Election in UK, Harold Macmillan, Profumo scandal, Harold Wilson, Tory party, Lord Boothby, Kray Twins, organized crime, Mayfair Set, Clermont Club, Thomas Corbally, Philadelphia mob, Meyer Lansky, gambling, Caroline Kennedy, IRA, Herbert W. Armstrong, British Israelism, Christian Identity theology, Worldwide Church of God, The World Tomorrow, William Potter Gale, LA area, "The Puppets," oil rights, offshore drilling, Radio London, Radio Atlanta, Gordon McLendon, Jack Ruby, Candy Barr, Office of Naval Intelligence, Columbia pictures, John Peel, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, 1968 King/Mountbatten plot, MC5s, James Bond, The Beatles, Apple, Cool Britannia, rebranding of British EmpireMusic by: Keith Allen Dennishttps://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/Additional Music: Albert Bouchardhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DHX6JH7/ref=sr_1_1?crid=36R7HC0QEYY1A&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.o9R-tsCJXZyBV46YP1RAWrYWjMmVz8-WLQpDcHz06JD0wN3-C0TXj85XDXFLTj30-68sOqffWLxAzCD-e3akPN7oNVdBbhWKOZEwR-aTR6qwJFofIMDNvqcwV5WTizUSzHAHKJJDpFlLMVLJYKQqvs6O02X9qxtmLAiabbqDiJlN8osc8PrVLbS-3wBnXnKt1UFGEah7EqqlrrdjMNl8XXwqdxFG1nYC_tLeeRLx_Ms.M1Zp0mrAQp1xllebZQ3jvh58rfr05AQomIqVrZzcKOA&dib_tag=se&keywords=albert+bouchard&qid=1714960524&s=dmusic&sprefix=%2Cdigital-music%2C289&sr=1-1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Buchanan has been a well known voice on British Radio and TV for the past four decades, working on Radio Luxembourg, Capital Gold, BBC World Service, Magic 105.4 and BBC Radio Kent.Speaking in this weeks edition of Radio Greats, he chats to Luke about his life on the wireless, and also about TV - from work at Radio 210, to being on Musicbox, presenting shows for Luxembourg and sitting in for David Hamilton on Capital Gold. Presenting for BBC Radio Kent and Sunshine Online and working on Documentaries for the wireless.Big Thanks to Aircheck Downloads for the use of audio.

Episode 249: This episode is inspired by Kari's trip to the record store, where she uncovered a set called "The British Top 30 Show." The countdown is from June 16, 1985, but is it based on the official UK Charts? Definitely not, but the jury is still out on where these rankings really came from. What can be confirmed is that you'll hear discussion about songs from Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy, Skipworth and Turner, U2 and others.More on our ongoing quiz series, but this time with a voice you may have not heard before! Find out if Joe can catch up to Kari before the final round!!

Ireland native and radio geek, Enda Caldwell, has been heard on Atlantic 252, Radio Luxembourg, Today FM and Radio Nova in Ireland, Kiss in The UK, and many other radio stations worldwide, like 106.5 Rivera Radio in Monaco. He's currently the afternoon drive host at New York's EDM station, Pulse 87. However, in this episode, Enda steps into the way-back machine to talk about his career, and to review some of the music played on The World Famous KROQ in Los Angeles from the year 1987. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ireland native and radio geek, Enda Caldwell, has been heard on Atlantic 252, Radio Luxembourg, Today FM and Radio Nova in Ireland, Kiss in The UK, and many other radio stations worldwide, like 106.5 Rivera Radio in Monaco. He's currently the afternoon drive host at New York's EDM station, Pulse 87. However, in this episode, Enda steps into the way-back machine to talk about his career, and to review some of the music played on The World Famous KROQ in Los Angeles from the year 1987. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forrás: Fortepan 222309 Panxnotded Miklós vasárnap délutáni nosztalgiavonatán ezúttal a Luxemburgba kalauzolta a Klubrádió hallgatóit. Az Anno Budapest rádiótörténeti adásában az RTL elődjét, a Radio Luxembourgot idézzük meg, amely hivatalosan 1930-ban alakult és egy olyan angol nyelvű kereskedelmi rádió volt, ahová még a Beatles is ellátogatott, és ami a magyar könnyűzenére is meghatározó hatással bírt, … Az RTL elődje, a Radio Luxembourg olvasásának folytatása →

Löken, grabben som trakterar basen i Rövsvett sedan 1983 slog sig ner i ett soligt Tranås för att snacka om Radio Luxembourg, Ny Våg, ZTV, 120 Minutes och 16 Blåsare Utan Hjärna. Vidare till Identity, Striker, Nasty Boys, Fetvadd, Kloakens Alternativa Antistudio, totalvägran, speedway, Linköping HC-filmen, Rocksyndikatet, Poison Idea, Dag Nasty, Dead Kennedys, Discharge, Still The Same, Disfornicate och Brasilien.

A Cuba con Radio Ciudad Monumento - Un attore bolognese nei panni di Marconi - Radio Luxembourg progetti di storia --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiopirata/message

Saison 1 - épisode 4 : Début 1954, la France a froid. Dans la nuit du 3 au 4 janvier, un bébé meurt de froid dans un vieux bus. L'abbé Pierre, bouleversé, écrit une lettre ouverte au ministre du logement, qui assiste à l'enterrement du bébé, cérémonie que l'abbé qualifie de « funérailles de la honte nationale ». Alors que le ministre de l'Intérieur durcit les arrêtés d'expulsion, l'abbé et ses compagnons arpentent les rues de Paris, distribuant couvertures, soupes et cafés chauds aux sans-logis. Malgré ces efforts, l'abbé Pierre apprend, le lundi 1er février 1954 au matin, la mort d'une femme. Elle a été expulsée l'avant-veille de son logement et est morte de froid dans la rue. Avec son ami journaliste Georges Verpraet, il rédige un appel, qui sera lu sur Radio Luxembourg, cet appel, le voici… Chaque jour, le mouvement de l'abbé Pierre, Emmaüs, a plus que jamais besoin de nous.Prochain épisode, le 12 février 2024 : Robert Badinter - "L'abolition de la peine de mort" Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Le 1er février 1954, on relève jusqu'à -15 dans Paris. On meurt de froid et dans les rues. On manque de logements. Un abbé se précipite à Radio Luxembourg pour y lancer un vibrant appel qui va marquer la naissance d'un grand mouvement de solidarité : l'insurrection de la bonté. En compagnie de Laurent Desmard, président d'honneur de la fondation abbé Pierre et dernier secrétaire particulier de l'abbé, Laurent Marsick revient sur cet appel, ses conséquences, les combats de l'abbé Pierre et ce qu'il reste à faire. Du lundi au vendredi, la rédaction de RTL revient sur un fait marquant de l'actualité avec les reporters, les correspondants et les experts de RTL. Et chaque dimanche, dans "Focus Dimanche" Mohamed Bouhafsi donne la parole à ceux qui la font.

A smorgasbord of Euro-sounds, from the archives of Radio Luxembourg to Athen's centenary tribute to Maria Callas, via an intimate exploration of music and morals. Then: the weird and wacky world of Zagreb's museums for just about anything, life on a gelato jury, and Portugal plays host to Afghanistan's pioneering music school in exile.

GB2RS News Sunday the 19th of November 2023 The news headlines: World Radio Conference WRC-23 VHF Contest Committee survey “Taking Amateur Radio into schools” RSGB presentation released   World Radio Conference WRC-23 opens on Monday the 20th of November. Over the coming four weeks, a wide variety of agenda items will be considered, of which the 23cm band is a high-priority item for amateur radio. IARU volunteers have worked hard over the past four years in preparation for this. The RSGB will be attending as part of the Ofcom UK delegation. The RSGB's social media and special focus page at rsgb.org/wrc-23 will feature regular postings whilst the conference is underway.  Following a really productive contest forum at the RSGB Convention, and a number of suggestions generated by the committee or raised in discussions with contesters, the VHF Contest Committee would like feedback to help finalise the VHF Contest rules for next year. The survey doesn't have many questions so it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes of your time to fill it out, but the committee would really appreciate your views. Of course, there is also an opportunity for you to give feedback outside of those specific questions. You'll find the survey at tinyurl.com/VHFCC and it will remain open until the end of the month. As part of its commitment to outreach and the growth of amateur radio, the RSGB has released a presentation from its 2023 Convention, called “Taking amateur radio into schools”. Lyall Smith GM4XID, Chris Leviston M0KPW, and Simon Harris G4WQG, share their experiences of inspiring school pupils to explore and have fun with amateur radio. Lyall set up an amateur radio club in his school whilst Chris started an afterschool club at his daughter's primary school. Simon, with the help of friends at his amateur radio club, created links with his son's technical college that have snowballed to other schools in the area. The presentation shows how individual radio amateurs and clubs can make positive and productive links with schools and will give you tips and encouragement for getting involved with your local schools. The Bath Based Distance Learning team has helped over a thousand students to pass UK amateur radio exams with pass rates consistently above the national average. The next Intermediate course will run from January to May 2024. Students will receive weekly work packages via a virtual classroom. There will be no charge for the training, but students will need to provide their own textbook, scientific calculator, electronic parts and tool kit. Students will also have to arrange their own exam at the end of the course, but advice will be provided at the appropriate time. As part of the application process, there will be some pre-course work to ensure students are able to use the online learning systems and to be sure they are ready to study in January. To receive course application details, please email Bath Based Distance Learning Team Leader Steve, G0FUW, via g0fuw@bbdl.org.uk The RSGB National Radio Centre at Bletchley Park will be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. There will be reduced hours on New Year's Eve when the Centre will be closing at 2 pm. Following the seasonal closures, the RSGB National Radio Centre will also be closed for essential maintenance works between the 2nd and 5th of January 2024. Outside of these times, volunteers look forward to welcoming visitors as usual. Remember that RSGB Members can download a free entry voucher for Bletchley Park from the RSGB website rsgb.org/bpvoucher Please send details of your news and events to radcom@rsgb.org.uk  The deadline for submissions is 10 am on Thursday before the Sunday broadcast.   And now for details of rallies and events The Coulsdon Amateur Transmitting Society Bazaar is taking place today, Sunday the 19th of November. The venue is Oasis Academy, Homefield Road, Old Coulsdon, CR5 1ES. Doors are open to the public from 10am to 2pm and the entrance fee is £3. Traders, bring and buy, club tables and car parking are available. Please forward general enquiries to bazaar@catsradio.org.uk The Wiltshire Winter Radio Rally will take place on Saturday the 25th of November from 9am to 1pm. The venue is Kington Langley Village Hall and Playing Field, Kington Langley, Wiltshire, SN15 5NJ. Entry costs £3. There is no charge for under 16s. For further information please contact chairman@chippenhamradio.club Bishop Auckland Radio Amateur Club Rally will take place on Sunday the 3rd of December. The event will be held at Spennymoor Leisure Centre, High Street, Spennymoor, County Durham, DL16 6DB. The doors open at 10.30am for visitors, with disabled access from 10 am. For more information, contact bdingle@hotmail.co.uk   Now the Special Event News Radio Club de Nice is active as TM8AB to commemorate the anniversary of the first transatlantic amateur two-way contact between Leon Deloy, 8AB and Fred Schnell, 1MO in November 1923. Listen for activity on the 80 to 10m bands using SSB, CW, FT8 and SSTV until the 10th of December. QSL via F4KJQ. Special callsign LX90RTL is in use to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Radio Luxembourg's first long-wave broadcast. It will be used by various LX operators until the end of the year. Look for activity on the HF bands using SSB, CW, digital modes, and satellite. All QSOs will be confirmed automatically via the DARC bureau. The logs will be uploaded to Club Log, Logbook of the World and eQSL on a regular basis. See QRZ.com for more information.   Now the DX news Pierre, VK3KTB and Alexey, VE1RUS are active as VY0ERC from the Eureka Amateur Radio Club station on Ellesmere Island, NA-008, until the 22nd of November. QSL via OQRS. Maurizio, IK2GZU is active again from Tanzania as 5H3MB until the 8th of December. He is operating using SSB, CW and digital modes on the 80 to 10m bands. QSL via OQRS, Logbook of the World, eQSL or via IK2GZU.   Now the contest news On Tuesday the 21st of November, the 1.3GHz UK Activity Contest runs from 2000 to 2230UTC. Using all modes on the 23cm band, the exchange is signal report, serial number and locator. On Thursday the 23rd of November, the Autumn Series CW Contest runs from 2000 to 2130UTC. Using CW on the 80m band, the exchange is signal report and serial number. The CQ World Wide DX CW Contest runs from 0000UTC on Saturday the 25th of November to 2359UTC on Sunday the 26th of November. Using CW on the 160 to 10m bands, where contests are permitted, the exchange is signal report and CQ zone. The UK is in zone 14.   Now the radio propagation report, compiled by G0KYA, G3YLA, and G4BAO on Thursday the 16th of November 2023 We had another roller-coaster week with periods of reasonably settled geomagnetic conditions followed by more unsettled times. Luckily, it didn't get too bad, as it did when the Kp index hit seven the week before. This, coupled with a lower solar flux index of 119 on Thursday, has meant HF conditions have not been outstanding. However, we are still buoyed by the seasonal HF conditions, which are generally good in Autumn. Propquest shows that the F2-layer critical frequency is still maxing out at more than 12MHz around noon. The F2-layer critical frequency is the highest at which radio waves are returned back to Earth when sent directly up into the ionosphere. This gives us a maximum usable frequency, or MUF, over a 3,000km path of more than 40MHz. Interestingly, it also gives us an MUF over a 500km path of more than 14.7MHz. So, look out for long-distance inter-G signals around noon, or thereabouts, on the 20m band. The 30m band remains a pretty solid inter-G band from late morning to mid-afternoon. Getting back to the geomagnetic conditions, the Bz component of the interplanetary magnetic field or IMF has been pointing south for long periods which is why the Kp index has been higher than normal. This means the IMF more easily couples to the Earth's magnetic field, just like two bar magnets aligned north against south. Next week, NOAA predicts the solar flux index will rise again, perhaps reaching 140 by the end of the week. However, it also forecasts unsettled geomagnetic conditions from the 22nd  to the 25th, with a forecast Kp index of up to 5. So, get your HF DXing in early next week!   And now the VHF and up propagation news The seemingly never-ending period of unsettled weather is likely to continue into the coming week. This means another week with only a limited chance of Tropo for most parts of the country. As something of a longshot, it's worth noting that southern parts of England, especially along the Channel coast, may have access to higher pressure over Biscay after the middle of next week for chance Tropo paths south into western France or northern Spain. For the rest of us, the weather pattern is rather changeable with a tendency for north-westerly winds. At this time of year, this can often mean that showers form over the surrounding seas. Rain scatter options could be worth checking for stations around the Irish and North Sea coasts. Meteor scatter is also worth considering, in view of the peak of the Leonids, on Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th, at the beginning of this first weekend. It's quite a broad period of activity and, with the minor Moncerotids shower peaking on the 22nd, conditions could still be good throughout the new week. Lastly a thought about the chances of aurora and the busy solar activity: it's worth keeping a check on the planetary Kp index for signs of aurora – look for a Kp above six. For EME operators, Moon declination starts at a minimum but rises all week, going positive again late on Wednesday. Losses are at their lowest with Moon perigee on Tuesday the 21st. 144MHz sky noise is low all week. Perigee is when the Moon is at its closest point to Earth. And that's all from the propagation team this week.

Paris, 1er février 1954, aux environs de 13h. Température extérieure : -15°C. Au volant de sa Renault 4, l'abbé Pierre fonce vers les studios de Radio Luxembourg, accompagné de son ami journaliste Georges Verpraet. Il faut arriver avant la fin du journal. Les français doivent savoir et ils doivent réagir. C'est une question de vie ou de mort. Il se gare en trombe devant un panneau « stationnement interdit », près des studios. Depuis son point de départ à Courbevoie, il a grillé tous les feux rouges. Le texte qu'ils ont préparé est court, ils sont allés à l'essentiel : l'urgence. Depuis l'arrivée du froid, avec ses compagnons, il déploie tout ce qui est en son pouvoir pour sauver des centaines d'hommes, de femmes et d'enfants sans-abris. Hier, une nouvelle victime est morte gelée dans Paris, une femme de 66 ans, à même le trottoir. Elle serrait contre elle un acte d'expulsion. Combien en faudra-t-il d'autres pour que l'Etat se mobilise enfin ? Les gens ne se rendent pas compte. Alors il va leur ouvrir les yeux. Texte : Marine Guez Vernin Voix : Sophie Kaufmann Encore plus de Podcast à écouter ici sur PODCAST STORY

Martial You nous ramène au 1er février 1954. Date à laquelle l'Abbé Pierre lance un appel sur Radio Luxembourg (aujourd'hui RTL), pour alerter de la situation des personnes à la rue en plein hiver. Suite à cela, plusieurs inventions ont été mises en place pour aider l'Abbé. Chaque week-end, retrouvez les meilleurs moments de l'émission "Ça va faire des histoires" diffusée cet été sur RTL. Jean-Michel Zecca et Stéphane Rotenberg avaient réuni les meilleurs experts de RTL pour un grand concours d'anecdotes. Les épisodes sont disponibles sur RTL.fr et sur toutes nos plateformes partenaires.

Listening to Radio Luxembourg on his family's transistor as a teen in the British countryside, Simon Kirke  heard the siren song of The Beatles and was instantly hooked. Determined to make music his career, he spent two years in London before a fateful meeting with guitarist Paul Kossoff put him on a course to make his rock 'n' roll fantasy a reality. Along with Andy Fraser and Paul Rodgers, they formed the band Free which led to the mega hit/classic song All Right Now and Free becoming one of England's hottest bands. Then, in 1973, Simon, along with Free-mate Paul Rodgers, co-founded legendary hard rock supergroup Bad Company, a monster band that sold out record bins and stadiums worldwide. Their anthemic hits, Shooting Star, Feel Like Making Love, Can't Get Enough and Rock and Roll Fantasy remain among the most played songs in radio history.Simon joins us to share (mostly PG!) rock n' roll stories featuring his iconic bandmates and management and the music venues, record companies and recording studios where so much of his classic rock history played out. Simon tells us the story of Free and how All Right Now was written in desperation, to get the crowd dancing. Simon also details their legendary performance at the Isle of Wight Festival, and how Free stood up to the label that wanted to rebrand them the Heavy Metal Kids.He shares the backstage/pre-show moment when Bad Company's manager gifted them with platinum albums and we discuss the personality types drawn to each instrument. And, a quarter century sober, Simon considers whether productivity and creation may be the greatest high off all.Simon has written a possibly too spicy memoir. He is now scoring films and his pathway to sobriety has inspired an upcoming musical called Rock Bottom.Plus, Fritz and Weezy are recommending the Max doc series, Smartless: On The Road and The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th by Denver Riggleman and Hunter Walker.Path Points of Interest:Simon KirkeSimon Kirke on WikipediaBad Company on WikipediaSimon Kirke FacebookBad Company InstagramRoad RecoveryThe Breach - The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6th by Denver Riggleman and Hunter WalkerSmartless On The RoadSmartless Podcast

One of the first projects Orson Welles undertook after moving to Europe was a film version of Othello. Despite Macbeth's criticism, he was still confident he could produce a successful Shakespearean film. However, filming was erratic. Its original Italian producer announced on one of the first days of shooting that he was bankrupt. Instead of abandoning filming altogether, Welles as director began pouring his own money into the project. He took acting jobs to ensure continued production. He also raised money by going on the stage. In the summer of 1950 Welles appeared in Paris in his own play called The Blessed and The Damned, which consisted of a short film, called The Miracle of St. Anne, and two one-act plays. It received positive reviews. In August he traveled to Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich, where he starred in An Evening With Orson Welles. Filming of Othello stopped for months at a time to raise money. It took more than two years to complete and was shot in Morocco, Venice, Tuscany and Rome. Before the film's release, Welles played the Shakespearean drama on stage to audiences in Newcastle and London. A dubbed version of Othello premiered in Rome In November of 1951. Welles' original English-language version premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1952. It won the Grand Prix and was released in Europe thereafter. When David O'Selznick got word that Harry Alan Towers had distributed The Adventures of Harry Lime to MGM, he refused to air it, so Towers took the series elsewhere. He quickly found out that MGM was now contractually obligated to provide a series with Welles to the Mutual Broadcasting System. So, in 1951 Towers went to Welles with another radio series. He'd already produced a series called The Secrets of Scotland Yard with Clive Brook. The new series would be called The Black Museum. It was based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard. Walking through the museum, Welles would pause at one of the exhibits, describing an artifact that led into a dramatized tale of a brutal murder or a vicious crime. Towers visited Australia in the late 1940s and set up production facilities in Sydney. The Black Museum was produced there by Creswick Jenkinson. Ira Marion was scriptwriter and music for the series was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch. Orson Welles's introductions were recorded on tape in London, then flown to Australia to be added to the locally recorded performances. This was the first series to be produced in Australia in this way. The program was transcribed in 1951. In the U.S. Mutual Broadcasting carried the series, with more than five-hundred stations airing it. In New York it began airing Tuesdays at 8PM on New Year's Day, 1952. Episode twenty-seven was called “The Notes” or “Kilroy Was Here.” “Kilroy Was Here” is a graffiti scrawl or meme of debated origin that became popular during World War II. It was associated with GIs stationed in Europe, depicting a bald-headed man with prominent nose clutching at and peeking over a wall. Next to him was the phrase. Robert Rietti played leads and Keith Pyott was often in the cast. Beginning In May of 1953, The Black Museum was also broadcast over Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not broadcast by the BBC until 1991. The Black Museum aired for the calendar year of 1952 over Mutual. It was rebroadcast on KABC, Los Angeles, in 1963 and 1964, and on KUAC—FM in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1967. In 2002, Harry Alan Towers produced The Black Museum for TV, hiring Gregory Mackenzie to be director and showrunner. The anthology series used Welles' original narration. The adaptation was shot on location in London in a film noir style and the pilot starred Michael York as Scotland Yard Inspector Russell.

Vintage Classic Radio presents a thrilling double bill of captivating radio plays on "Friday Night Noir." In the first feature, "The 22 Caliber Pistol" from the renowned radio show "The Black Museum," Orson Welles takes center stage as the narrator, unraveling a haunting murder case. Originally broadcasted on the Mutual Broadcasting System in the United States and Radio Luxembourg in Europe, this suspenseful tale will keep you on the edge of your seat. Following that, prepare yourself for "Terror by Night" from the gripping series "Inner Sanctum," where the incomparable Agnes Moorehead narrates a shocking story of a mad killer on the loose. With a dead body in the trunk and a surprise ending, this atmospheric thriller will leave you breathless. Tune in to experience the mesmerizing performances and twists that define the golden age of radio dramas. "The Black Museum" was a popular radio series that delved into the world of crime and murder. Hosted by Orson Welles, each episode explored a different artifact or item from Scotland Yard's infamous Black Museum, a collection of objects associated with notorious criminal cases. Through dramatic reenactments, the series offered captivating insights into the minds of criminals and the detectives who pursued them, providing an intriguing glimpse into the dark side of human nature. "The Inner Sanctum" was a radio series that specialized in psychological suspense and horror. Hosted by Raymond Edward Johnson, the series took listeners on chilling journeys into the realm of the macabre. Each episode featured stories of suspense, often with supernatural or psychological elements, designed to keep audiences on the edge of their seats. With its trademark creaking door and ominous atmosphere, "The Inner Sanctum" delivered spine-tingling tales that explored the depths of fear and the human psyche. Immerse yourself in the enthralling world of "Friday Night Noir" on Vintage Classic Radio. Tune in to experience the timeless allure of these radio plays, featuring the legendary performances of Orson Welles and Agnes Moorehead. Don't miss this unforgettable journey into the heart of suspense and mystery. Join us as we rediscover the magic of the golden age of radio dramas.

In the 1970s in the UK, there can be few names which were as synonymous with childrens television than Jimmy Savile. Savile same to fame via Radio Luxembourg and Tyne Tees Television, eventually appearing on the BBC radio and television networks. He was lauded by politicians and other celebrities for his ‘tireless' charity work, but beneath the veneer of an eccentric show business DJ and philanthropist, lay a vicious and depraved pervert. Something which only came to wider public attention after his death.Ed's guest is Caroline Robinson, great niece to Savile. She tells how it was known what Savile was in the family, and she herself was victim to the abuse Savile dished out to others. Unlike others, though, Ms Robinson's silence was bought by both Savile lavishing gifts and support on her and the wish not to have the association to someone so famous suddenly removed from her family. ‘It made me proud to tell others my Great Uncle was Jimmy Savile' she said.Following Savile's passing in 2011, a sleuth of accusers – many unknown to each other – surfaced. Savile had allegedly sexually abused children in theatres, cars, private homes, BBC dressing rooms and almost no area was safe for him to be left alone with a child of either sex. His access to places like Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville Hospital also gave suspicion that Savile may have abused patients and there is some evidence to suggest Savile indulged in necrophilia.The legacy of filth lives on; did the BBC mandarins know about Savile? Was his presentation from a distant studio in Manchester a move to make staff feel safer whilst not acknowledging complicity?This interview is about family. It's about having a secret; but it's also about how a slick, protected paedophile fooled a nation, how he betrayed parents, abused vulnerable and/or impressionable children and adults and how he was in plain sight all the time.Books: In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Savile - The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History: Singing with "Iron Maiden" - the Drugs, the Groupies...the Whole Story Victim Zero: Jimmy Savile tried to ruin my life. I was the first victim to fight back.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

The Black Museum - The Car Tire 1951-episode 9 Narrator-Orson Welles First aired on Radio Luxembourg, The Black Museum was a 1951 crime drama series. Orson Welles as the narrator tells murder stories of artifacts stored in Scotland Yard's Black Museum.

Black Museum | episode 03, Bath Tub | This episode aired in 1952. There are no known month and day dates for the series, but this episode aired in 1951.The Black Museum was based on real-life murder cases from the files of the actual Black Museum, a part of Scotland Yard. The program was aired from 1951 to 1952 and broadcast in the United States on the Mutual Broadcasting System and on Radio Luxembourg in Europe.: : : : :My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- DRAMA X THEATER -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES.Subscribing is free and you'll receive new post notifications. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot.Thank you for your support.https://otr.duane.media | Instagram @duane.otr

This week, Janet Alldis joins us to talk about her famous father, radio presenter Barry Alldis. Benny Brown describes the history of Radio Luxembourg and its importance. Janet Alldis is rightly proud of her father, Barry Alldis, who was a DJ on Radio Luxembourg 208. Unfortunately he died too young, very suddenly at 51 and it was only then than Janet saw the influence he had had on his listeners. The family were inundated with boxes of tributes. From then on, Janet has worked hard to keep the memory of her father alive; firstly publishing a book full of interviews, and now with a song, 'Under The Covers', which she wrote and is co-produced by Freddy Cannon. You can vote for the song on the Heritage Charts in the UK - please do so! The song is also available on Spotify. "Dad's life was all about music and so I too had the urge to express my feelings and childhood memories into a song. It is my story," says Janet. Benny Brown has worked on radio in Luxembourg for so many years, one might think of him as 'the last man standing' in radio here. Born in San Francisco, Benny obtained his first job in radio as a teenager in Hawaii, by mowing the grass at the local radio station in return for "free" records! He's been enamored with radio all his life, and as a teen listened to lots of faraway radio stations late at night. Benny came to Europe after military service in Vietnam. He was on the air with AFN in Frankfurt, and then lured to Radio Luxembourg in 1979 by their Programme Director in London (Tony Prince.) At the time, Radio Luxembourg 208 was the world's most powerful commercial radio station, and Benny was working with their medium and short wave broadcasts, as well as with Luxembourg's 'Community Radio' every afternoon. Benny Brown was twice selected by Billboard Magazine as the 'International Radio Personality of the Year.' Later, while based in London, Benny worked with European syndicated radio programming. In the German language, Benny hosted the weekly 'American Top 40', which was the world's most-listened-to radio program. Benny was on the radio at RTL's Radio Letzebuerg from 8 to 11pm for eight years from 2008 thru 2015. And since 2015, he's regularly heard on Luxembourg's Radio 100,7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Alldis https://open.spotify.com/album/41lsEEToFMPXsacumu6rlj?si=hoeAbsCPRLG-yxpwERA9Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHyqvVUoFhE heritagechart.co.uk

My guest in this episode is renowned UK illustrator Ian Wright. His work as a commercial illustrator has spanned four decades, starting with his illustrative cover of The Undertones' Teenage Kicks 7” single in the late 1970s, progressing with his illustrative artwork in The Face magazine in their 1980s heyday and his famous weekly black and white portraits for the New Musical Express (NME).Ian's subsequent work has involved collaboration with many famous names and brands including Issy Miyake, Givenchy and portraits of Sun Ra, Motorhead and Grandmaster Flash. In a delightfully wide-ranging chat, in both musical choices and subject matter, amongst other things we talk about: ·        Ian's love of Radio, initially inspired by his dad ‘streaming' Radio Luxembourg into his bedroom on a Friday night ·        The life-changing impact of Hendrix's appearance on the Happening for Lulu         show in January 1969 ·        The influence of Bob Harris and John Peel·        Developing a passion for Reggae in the 70's that continues to this day ·        What is was like orking on NME & The Face in the 80's ·        Pete Townsend making him a coffee (Ian doesn't drink coffee) ·        Moving to New York in the 00's & working to a soundtrack of the (then unreleased) Beatles Remasters ·        Coming full circle and in March last year getting his own Radio show on Charlie Bones Do!! You!! Radio (https://doyouworld/) Ian's song choices are appropriately wide ranging and were: 50's      Summertime                             Ella Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong       60's      If 6 Was 9                                    The Jimi Hendrix Experience70's      Dub With A Difference       Harry Mudie 80's      Kalimankou Denkou              The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir90's      All Is Full Of Love                      Bjork00's      King In My Empire                    Rhythm & Sound10's      Rock The Machine                    Lisa O'Neill 20's      Time Is Precious                         SAULT             If you would like to be on the show then please contact me at musictalkspod@outlook.com Please follow and like Music Talks on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/musictalkspod . You can also find me on Twitter @musictalkspod .

Episode 160 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flowers in the Rain" by the Move, their transition into ELO, and the career of Roy Wood. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "The Chipmunk Song" by Canned Heat. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Note I say "And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record." -- I should point out that after Martin's theme fades, Blackburn talks over a brief snatch of a piece by Johnny Dankworth. Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one . I had problems uploading part two, but will attempt to get that up shortly. There are not many books about Roy Wood, and I referred to both of the two that seem to exist -- this biography by John van der Kiste, and this album guide by James R Turner.  I also referred to this biography of Jeff Lynne by van der Kiste, The Electric Light Orchestra Story by Bev Bevan, and Mr Big by Don Arden with Mick Wall.  Most of the more comprehensive compilations of the Move's material are out of print, but this single-CD-plus-DVD anthology is the best compilation that's in print. This is the one collection of Wood's solo and Wizzard hits that seems currently in print, and for those who want to investigate further, this cheap box set has the last Move album, the first ELO album, the first Wizzard album, Wood's solo Boulders, and a later Wood solo album, for the price of a single CD. Transcript Before I start, a brief note. This episode deals with organised crime, and so contains some mild descriptions of violence, and also has some mention of mental illness and drug use, though not much of any of those things. And it's probably also important to warn people that towards the end there's some Christmas music, including excerpts of a song that is inescapable at this time of year in the UK, so those who work in retail environments and the like may want to listen to this later, at a point when they're not totally sick of hearing Christmas records. Most of the time, the identity of the party in government doesn't make that much of a difference to people's everyday lives.  At least in Britain, there tends to be a consensus ideology within the limits of which governments of both main parties tend to work. They will make a difference at the margins, and be more or less competent, and more or less conservative or left-wing, more or less liberal or authoritarian, but life will, broadly speaking, continue along much as before for most people. Some will be a little better or worse off, but in general steering the ship of state is a matter of a lot of tiny incremental changes, not of sudden u-turns. But there have been a handful of governments that have made big, noticeable, changes to the structure of society, reforms that for better or worse affect the lives of every person in the country. Since the end of the Second World War there have been two UK governments that made economic changes of this nature. The Labour government under Clement Atlee which came into power in 1945, and which dramatically expanded the welfare state, introduced the National Health Service, and nationalised huge swathes of major industries, created the post-war social democratic consensus which would be kept to with only minor changes by successive governments of both major parties for decades. The next government to make changes to the economy of such a radical nature was the Conservative government which came to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which started the process of unravelling that social democratic consensus and replacing it with a far more hypercapitalist economic paradigm, which would last for the next several decades. It's entirely possible that the current Conservative government, in leaving the EU, has made a similarly huge change, but we won't know that until we have enough distance from the event to know what long-term changes it's caused. Those are economic changes. Arguably at least as impactful was the Labour government led by Harold Wilson that came to power in 1964, which did not do much to alter the economic consensus, but revolutionised the social order at least as much. Largely because of the influence of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary for much of that time, between 1964 and the end of the sixties, Britain abolished the death penalty for murder, decriminalised some sex acts between men in private, abolished corporal punishment in prisons, legalised abortion in certain circumstances, and got rid of censorship in the theatre. They also vastly increased spending on education, and made many other changes. By the end of their term, Britain had gone from being a country with laws reflecting a largely conservative, authoritarian, worldview to one whose laws were some of the most liberal in Europe, and society had started changing to match. There were exceptions, though, and that government did make some changes that were illiberal. They brought in increased restrictions on immigration, starting a worrying trend that continues to this day of governments getting ever crueler to immigrants, and they added LSD to the list of illegal drugs. And they brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, banning the pirate stations. We've mentioned pirate radio stations very briefly, but never properly explained them. In Britain, at this point, there was a legal monopoly on broadcasting. Only the BBC could run a radio station in the UK, and thanks to agreements with the Musicians' Union, the BBC could only play a very small amount of recorded music, with everything else having to be live performances or spoken word. And because it had a legal obligation to provide something for everyone, that meant the tiny amount of recorded music that was played on the radio had to cover all genres, meaning that even while Britain was going through the most important changes in its musical history, pop records were limited to an hour or two a week on British radio. Obviously, that wasn't going to last while there was money to be made, and the record companies in particular wanted to have somewhere to showcase their latest releases. At the start of the sixties, Radio Luxembourg had become popular, broadcasting from continental Europe but largely playing shows that had been pre-recorded in London. But of course, that was far enough away that it made listening to the transmissions difficult. But a solution presented itself: [Excerpt: The Fortunes, "Caroline"] Radio Caroline still continues to this day, largely as an Internet-based radio station, but in the mid-sixties it was something rather different. It was one of a handful of radio stations -- the pirate stations -- that broadcast from ships in international waters. The ships would stay three miles off the coast of Britain, close enough for their broadcasts to be clearly heard in much of the country, but outside Britain's territorial waters. They soon became hugely popular, with Radio Caroline and Radio London the two most popular, and introduced DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett, and John Peel to the airwaves of Britain. The stations ran on bribery and advertising, and if you wanted a record to get into the charts one of the things you had to do was bribe one of the big pirate stations to playlist it, and with this corruption came violence, which came to a head when as we heard in the episode on “Here Comes the Night”, in 1966 Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-wing politician and one of the directors of Radio Caroline, got a gang of people to board an abandoned sea fort from which a rival station was broadcasting and retrieve some equipment he claimed belonged to him. The next day, Reginald Calvert, the owner of the rival station, went to Smedley's home to confront him, and Smedley shot him dead, claiming self-defence. The jury in Smedley's subsequent trial took only a minute to find him not guilty and award him two hundred and fifty guineas to cover his costs. This was the last straw for the government, which was already concerned that the pirates' transmitters were interfering with emergency services transmissions, and that proper royalties weren't being paid for the music broadcast (though since much of the music was only on there because of payola, this seems a little bit of a moot point).  They introduced legislation which banned anyone in the UK from supplying the pirate ships with records or other supplies, or advertising on the stations. They couldn't do anything about the ships themselves, because they were outside British jurisdiction, but they could make sure that nobody could associate with them while remaining in the UK. The BBC was to regain its monopoly (though in later years some commercial radio stations were allowed to operate). But as well as the stick, they needed the carrot. The pirate stations *had* been filling a real need, and the biggest of them were getting millions of listeners every day. So the arrangements with the Musicians' Union and the record labels were changed, and certain BBC stations were now allowed to play a lot more recorded music per day. I haven't been able to find accurate figures anywhere -- a lot of these things were confidential agreements -- but it seems to have been that the so-called "needle time" rules were substantially relaxed, allowing the BBC to separate what had previously been the Light Programme -- a single radio station that played all kinds of popular music, much of it live performances -- into two radio stations that were each allowed to play as much as twelve hours of recorded music per day, which along with live performances and between-track commentary from DJs was enough to allow a full broadcast schedule. One of these stations, Radio 2, was aimed at older listeners, and to start with mostly had programmes of what we would now refer to as Muzak, mixed in with the pop music of an older generation -- crooners and performers like Englebert Humperdinck. But another, Radio 1, was aimed at a younger audience and explicitly modelled on the pirate stations, and featured many of the DJs who had made their names on those stations. And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record. At different times Blackburn has said either that he was just desperately reaching for whatever record came to hand or that he made a deliberate choice because the record he chose had such a striking opening that it would be the perfect way to start a new station: [Excerpt: Tony Blackburn first radio show into "Flowers in the Rain" by the Move] You may remember me talking in the episode on "Here Comes the Night" about how in 1964 Dick Rowe of Decca, the manager Larry Page, and the publicist and co-owner of Radio Caroline Phil Solomon were all trying to promote something called Brumbeat as the answer to Merseybeat – Brummies, for those who don't know, are people from Birmingham. Brumbeat never took off the way Merseybeat did, but several bands did get a chance to make records, among them Gerry Levene and the Avengers: [Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"] That was the only single the Avengers made, and the B-side wasn't even them playing, but a bunch of session musicians under the direction of Bert Berns, and the group split up soon afterwards, but several of the members would go on to have rather important careers. According to some sources, one of their early drummers was John Bohnam, who you can be pretty sure will be turning up later in the story, while the drummer on that track was Graeme Edge, who would later go on to co-found the Moody Blues.  But today it's the guitarist we'll be looking at. Roy Wood had started playing music when he was very young -- he'd had drum lessons when he was five years old, the only formal musical tuition he ever had, and he'd played harmonica around working men's clubs as a kid. And as a small child he'd loved classical music, particularly Tchaikovsky and Elgar. But it wasn't until he was twelve that he decided that he wanted to be a guitarist. He went to see the Shadows play live, and was inspired by the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, which he later described as sounding "like it had been dipped in Dettol or something": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] He started begging his parents for a guitar, and got one for his thirteenth birthday -- and by the time he was fourteen he was already in a band, the Falcons, whose members were otherwise eighteen to twenty years old, but who needed a lead guitarist who could play like Marvin. Wood had picked up the guitar almost preternaturally quickly, as he would later pick up every instrument he turned his hand to, and he'd also got the equipment. His friend Jeff Lynne later said "I first saw Roy playing in a church hall in Birmingham and I think his group was called the Falcons. And I could tell he was dead posh because he had a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier. The business at the time. I mean, if you've got those, that's it, you're made." It was in the Falcons that Wood had first started trying to write songs, at first instrumentals in the style of the Shadows, but then after the Beatles hit the charts he realised it was possible for band members to write their own material, and started hesitantly trying to write a few actual songs. Wood had moved on from the Falcons to Gerry Levene's band, one of the biggest local bands in Birmingham, when he was sixteen, which is also when he left formal education, dropping out from art school -- he's later said that he wasn't expelled as such, but that he and the school came to a mutual agreement that he wouldn't go back there. And when Gerry Levene and the Avengers fell apart after their one chance at success hadn't worked out, he moved on again to an even bigger band. Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders had had two singles out already, both produced by Cliff Richard's producer Norrie Paramor, and while they hadn't charted they were clearly going places. They needed a new guitarist, and Wood was by far the best of the dozen or so people who auditioned, even though Sheridan was very hesitant at first -- the Night Riders were playing cabaret, and all dressed smartly at all times, and this sixteen-year-old guitarist had turned up wearing clothes made by his sister and ludicrous pointy shoes. He was the odd man out, but he was so good that none of the other players could hold a candle to him, and he was in the Night Riders by the time of their third single, "What a Sweet Thing That Was": [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, "What a Sweet Thing That Was"] Sheridan later said "Roy was and still is, in my opinion, an unbelievable talent. As stubborn as a mule and a complete extrovert. Roy changed the group by getting us into harmonies and made us realize there was better material around with more than three chords to play. This was our turning point and we became a group's group and a bigger name." -- though there are few other people who would describe Wood as extroverted, most people describing him as painfully shy off-stage. "What a  Sweet Thing That Was" didn't have any success, and nor did its follow-up, "Here I Stand", which came out in January 1965. But by that point, Wood had got enough of a reputation that he was already starting to guest on records by other bands on the Birmingham scene, like "Pretty Things" by Danny King and the Mayfair Set: [Excerpt: Danny King and the Mayfair Set, "Pretty Things"] After their fourth single was a flop, Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders changed their name to Mike Sheridan's Lot, and the B-side of their first single under the new name was a Roy Wood song, the first time one of his songs was recorded. Unfortunately the song, modelled on "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones, didn't come off very well, and Sheridan blamed himself for what everyone was agreed was a lousy sounding record: [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan's Lot, "Make Them Understand"] Mike Sheridan's Lot put out one final single, but the writing was on the wall for the group. Wood left, and soon after so did Sheridan himself. The remaining members regrouped under the name The Idle Race, with Wood's friend Jeff Lynne as their new singer and guitarist. But Wood wouldn't remain without a band for long. He'd recently started hanging out with another band, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, who had also released a couple of singles, on Pye: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "What's the Matter Baby"] But like almost every band from Birmingham up to this point, the Vikings' records had done very little, and their drummer had quit, and been replaced by Bev Bevan, who had been in yet another band that had gone nowhere, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, who had released one single under the name of their lead singer Nicky James, featuring the Breakaways, the girl group who would later sing on "Hey Joe", on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Nicky James, "My Colour is Blue"] Bevan had joined Carl Wayne's group, and they'd recorded one track together, a cover version of "My Girl", which was only released in the US, and which sank without a trace: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "My Girl"] It was around this time that Wood started hanging around with the Vikings, and they would all complain about how if you were playing the Birmingham circuit you were stuck just playing cover versions, and couldn't do anything more interesting.  They were also becoming more acutely aware of how successful they *could* have been, because one of the Brumbeat bands had become really big. The Moody Blues, a supergroup of players from the best bands in Birmingham who featured Bev Bevan's old bandmate Denny Laine and Wood's old colleague Graeme Edge, had just hit number one with their version of "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] So they knew the potential for success was there, but they were all feeling trapped. But then Ace Kefford, the bass player for the Vikings, went to see Davy Jones and the Lower Third playing a gig: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] Also at the gig was Trevor Burton, the guitarist for Danny King and the Mayfair Set. The two of them got chatting to Davy Jones after the gig, and eventually the future David Bowie told them that the two of them should form their own band if they were feeling constricted in their current groups. They decided to do just that, and they persuaded Carl Wayne from Kefford's band to join them, and got in Wood.  Now they just needed a drummer. Their first choice was John Bonham, the former drummer for Gerry Levene and the Avengers who was now drumming in a band with Kefford's uncle and Nicky James from the Diplomats. But Bonham and Wayne didn't get on, and so Bonham decided to remain in the group he was in, and instead they turned to Bev Bevan, the Vikings' new drummer.  (Of the other two members of the Vikings, one went on to join Mike Sheridan's Lot in place of Wood, before leaving at the same time as Sheridan and being replaced by Lynne, while the other went on to join Mike Sheridan's New Lot, the group Sheridan formed after leaving his old group. The Birmingham beat group scene seems to have only had about as many people as there were bands, with everyone ending up a member of twenty different groups). The new group called themselves the Move, because they were all moving on from other groups, and it was a big move for all of them. Many people advised them not to get together, saying they were better off where they were, or taking on offers they'd got from more successful groups -- Carl Wayne had had an offer from a group called the Spectres, who would later become famous as Status Quo, while Wood had been tempted by Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a group who at the time were signed to Immediate Records, and who did Beach Boys soundalikes and covers: [Excerpt: Tony Rivers and the Castaways, "Girl Don't Tell Me"] Wood was a huge fan of the Beach Boys and would have fit in with Rivers, but decided he'd rather try something truly new. After their first gig, most of the people who had warned against the group changed their minds. Bevan's best friend, Bobby Davis, told Bevan that while he'd disliked all the other groups Bevan had played in, he liked this one. (Davis would later become a famous comedian, and have a top five single himself in the seventies, produced by Jeff Lynne and with Bevan on the drums, under his stage name Jasper Carrott): [Excerpt: Jasper Carrott, "Funky Moped"] Most of their early sets were cover versions, usually of soul and Motown songs, but reworked in the group's unique style. All five of the band could sing, four of them well enough to be lead vocalists in their own right (Bevan would add occasional harmonies or sing novelty numbers) and so they became known for their harmonies -- Wood talked at the time about how he wanted the band to have Beach Boys harmonies but over instruments that sounded like the Who. And while they were mostly doing cover versions live, Wood was busily writing songs. Their first recording session was for local radio, and at that session they did cover versions of songs by Brenda Lee, the Isley Brothers, the Orlons, the Marvelettes, and Betty Everett, but they also performed four songs written by Wood, with each member of the front line taking a lead vocal, like this one with Kefford singing: [Excerpt: The Move, "You're the One I Need"] The group were soon signed by Tony Secunda, the manager of the Moody Blues, who set about trying to get the group as much publicity as possible. While Carl Wayne, as the only member who didn't play an instrument, ended up the lead singer on most of the group's early records, Secunda started promoting Kefford, who was younger and more conventionally attractive than Wayne, and who had originally put the group together, as the face of the group, while Wood was doing most of the heavy lifting with the music. Wood quickly came to dislike performing live, and to wish he could take the same option as Brian Wilson and stay home and write songs and make records while the other four went out and performed, so Kefford and Wayne taking the spotlight from him didn't bother him at the time, but it set the group up for constant conflicts about who was actually the leader of the group. Wood was also uncomfortable with the image that Secunda set up for the group. Secunda decided that the group needed to be promoted as "bad boys", and so he got them to dress up as 1930s gangsters, and got them to do things like smash busts of Hitler, or the Rhodesian dictator Ian Smith, on stage. He got them to smash TVs on stage too, and in one publicity stunt he got them to smash up a car, while strippers took their clothes off nearby -- claiming that this was to show that people were more interested in violence than in sex. Wood, who was a very quiet, unassuming, introvert, didn't like this sort of thing, but went along with it. Secunda got the group a regular slot at the Marquee club, which lasted several months until, in one of Secunda's ideas for publicity, Carl Wayne let off smoke bombs on stage which set fire to the stage. The manager came up to try to stop the fire, and Wayne tossed the manager's wig into the flames, and the group were banned from the club (though the ban was later lifted). In another publicity stunt, at the time of the 1966 General Election, the group were photographed with "Vote Tory" posters, and issued an invitation to Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and a keen amateur musician, to join them on stage on keyboards. Sir Edward didn't respond to the invitation. All this publicity led to record company interest. Joe Boyd tried to sign the group to Elektra Records, but much as with The Pink Floyd around the same time, Jac Holzman wasn't interested. Instead they signed with a new production company set up by Denny Cordell, the producer of the Moody Blues' hits. The contract they signed was written on the back of a nude model, as yet another of Secunda's publicity schemes. The group's first single, "Night of Fear" was written by Wood and an early sign of his interest in incorporating classical music into rock: [Excerpt: The Move, "Night of Fear"] Secunda claimed in the publicity that that song was inspired by taking bad acid and having a bad trip, but in truth Wood was more inspired by brown ale than by brown acid -- he and Bev Bevan would never do any drugs other than alcohol. Wayne did take acid once, but didn't like it, though Burton and Kefford would become regular users of most drugs that were going. In truth, the song was not about anything more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected sound and then being unable to get back to sleep because you're scared of what might be out there. The track reached number two on the charts in the UK, being kept off the top by "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and was soon followed up by another song which again led to assumptions of drug use. "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" wasn't about grass the substance, but was inspired by a letter to Health and Efficiency, a magazine which claimed to be about the nudist lifestyle as an excuse for printing photos of naked people at a time before pornography laws were liberalised. The letter was from a reader saying that he listened to pop music on the radio because "where I live it's so quiet I can hear the grass grow!" Wood took that line and turned it into the group's next single, which reached number five: [Excerpt: The Move, "I Can Hear the Grass Grow"] Shortly after that, the group played two big gigs at Alexandra Palace. The first was the Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream, which we talked about in the Pink Floyd episode. There Wood had one of the biggest thrills of his life when he walked past John Lennon, who saluted him and then turned to a friend and said "He's brilliant!" -- in the seventies Lennon would talk about how Wood was one of his two favourite British songwriters, and would call the Move "the Hollies with balls". The other gig they played at Alexandra Palace was a "Free the Pirates" benefit show, sponsored by Radio Caroline, to protest the imposition of the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act.  Despite that, it was, of course, the group's next single that was the first one to be played on Radio One. And that single was also the one which kickstarted Roy Wood's musical ambitions.  The catalyst for this was Tony Visconti. Visconti was a twenty-three-year-old American who had been in the music business since he was sixteen, working the typical kind of jobs that working musicians do, like being for a time a member of a latter-day incarnation of the Crew-Cuts, the white vocal group who had had hits in the fifties with covers of "Sh'Boom" and “Earth Angel”. He'd also recorded two singles as a duo with his wife Siegrid, which had gone nowhere: [Excerpt: Tony and Siegrid, "Up Here"] Visconti had been working for the Richmond Organisation as a staff songwriter when he'd met the Move's producer Denny Cordell. Cordell was in the US to promote a new single he had released with a group called Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale", and Visconti became the first American to hear the record, which of course soon became a massive hit: [Excerpt: Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"] While he was in New York, Cordell also wanted to record a backing track for one of his other hit acts, Georgie Fame. He told Visconti that he'd booked several of the best session players around, like the jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry, and thought it would be a fun session. Visconti asked to look at the charts for the song, out of professional interest, and Cordell was confused -- what charts? The musicians would just make up an arrangement, wouldn't they? Visconti asked what he was talking about, and Cordell talked about how you made records -- you just got the musicians to come into the studio, hung around while they smoked a few joints and worked out what they were going to play, and then got on with it. It wouldn't take more than about twelve hours to get a single recorded that way. Visconti was horrified, and explained that that might be how they did things in London, but if Cordell tried to make a record that way in New York, with an eight-piece group of session musicians who charged union scale, and would charge double scale for arranging work on top, then he'd bankrupt himself. Cordell went pale and said that the session was in an hour, what was he going to do? Luckily, Cordell had a copy of the demo with him, and Visconti, who unlike Cordell was a trained musician, quickly sat down and wrote an arrangement for him, sketching out parts for guitar, bass, drums, piano, sax, and trumpets. The resulting arrangement wasn't perfect -- Visconti had to write the whole thing in less than an hour with no piano to hand -- but it was good enough that Cordell's production assistant on the track, Harvey Brooks of the group Electric Flag, who also played bass on the track, could tweak it in the studio, and the track was recorded quickly, saving Cordell a fortune: [Excerpt: Georgie Fame, "Because I Love You"] One of the other reasons Cordell had been in the US was that he was looking for a production assistant to work with him in the UK to help translate his ideas into language the musicians could understand. According to Visconti he said that he was going to try asking Phil Spector to be his assistant, and Artie Butler if Spector said no.  Astonishingly, assuming he did ask them, neither Phil Spector nor Artie Butler (who was the arranger for records like "Leader of the Pack" and "I'm a Believer" among many, many, others, and who around this time was the one who suggested to Louis Armstrong that he should record "What a Wonderful World") wanted to fly over to the UK to work as Denny Cordell's assistant, and so Cordell turned back to Visconti and invited him to come over to the UK. The main reason Cordell needed an assistant was that he had too much work on his hands -- he was currently in the middle of recording albums for three major hit groups -- Procol Harum, The Move, and Manfred Mann -- and he physically couldn't be in multiple studios at once. Visconti's first work for him was on a Manfred Mann session, where they were recording the Randy Newman song "So Long Dad" for their next single. Cordell produced the rhythm track then left for a Procol Harum session, leaving Visconti to guide the group through the overdubs, including all the vocal parts and the lead instruments: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "So Long Dad"] The next Move single, "Flowers in the Rain", was the first one to benefit from Visconti's arrangement ideas. The band had recorded the track, and Cordell had been unhappy with both the song and performance, thinking it was very weak compared to their earlier singles -- not the first time that Cordell would have a difference of opinion with the band, who he thought of as a mediocre pop group, while they thought of themselves as a heavy rock band who were being neutered in the studio by their producer.  In particular, Cordell didn't like that the band fell slightly out of time in the middle eight of the track. He decided to scrap it, and get the band to record something else. Visconti, though, thought the track could be saved. He told Cordell that what they needed to do was to beat the Beatles, by using a combination of instruments they hadn't thought of. He scored for a quartet of wind instruments -- oboe, flute, clarinet, and French horn, in imitation of Mendelssohn: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] And then, to cover up the slight sloppiness on the middle eight, Visconti had the wind instruments on that section recorded at half speed, so when played back at normal speed they'd sound like pixies and distract from the rhythm section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] Visconti's instincts were right. The single went to number two, kept off the top spot by Englebert Humperdinck, who spent 1967 keeping pretty much every major British band off number one, and thanks in part to it being the first track played on Radio 1, but also because it was one of the biggest hits of 1967, it's been the single of the Move's that's had the most airplay over the years. Unfortunately, none of the band ever saw a penny in royalties from it. It was because of another of Tony Secunda's bright ideas. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, was very close to his advisor Marcia Williams, who started out as his secretary, rose to be his main political advisor, and ended up being elevated to the peerage as Baroness Falkender. There were many, many rumours that Williams was corrupt -- rumours that were squashed by both Wilson and Williams frequently issuing libel writs against newspapers that mentioned them -- though it later turned out that at least some of these were the work of Britain's security services, who believed Wilson to be working for the KGB (and indeed Williams had first met Wilson at a dinner with Khrushchev, though Wilson was very much not a Communist) and were trying to destabilise his government as a result. Their personal closeness also led to persistent rumours that Wilson and Williams were having an affair. And Tony Secunda decided that the best way to promote "Flowers in the Rain" was to print a postcard with a cartoon of Wilson and Williams on it, and send it out. Including sticking a copy through the door of ten Downing St, the Prime Minister's official residence. This backfired *spectacularly*. Wilson sued the Move for libel, even though none of them had known of their manager's plans, and as a result of the settlement it became illegal for any publication to print the offending image (though it can easily be found on the Internet now of course), everyone involved with the record was placed under a permanent legal injunction to never discuss the details of the case, and every penny in performance or songwriting royalties the track earned would go to charities of Harold Wilson's choice. In the 1990s newspaper reports said that the group had up to that point lost out on two hundred thousand pounds in royalties as a result of Secunda's stunt, and given the track's status as a perennial favourite, it's likely they've missed out on a similar amount in the decades since. Incidentally, while every member of the band was banned from ever describing the postcard, I'm not, and since Wilson and Williams are now both dead it's unlikely they'll ever sue me. The postcard is a cartoon in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, and shows Wilson as a grotesque naked homunculus sat on a bed, with Williams naked save for a diaphonous nightgown through which can clearly be seen her breasts and genitals, wearing a Marie Antoinette style wig and eyemask and holding a fan coquettishly, while Wilson's wife peers at them through a gap in the curtains. The text reads "Disgusting Depraved Despicable, though Harold maybe is the only way to describe "Flowers in the Rain" The Move, released Aug 23" The stunt caused huge animosity between the group and Secunda, not only because of the money they lost but also because despite Secunda's attempts to associate them with the Conservative party the previous year, Ace Kefford was upset at an attack on the Labour leader -- his grandfather was a lifelong member of the Labour party and Kefford didn't like the idea of upsetting him. The record also had a knock-on effect on another band. Wood had given the song "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree" to his friends in The Idle Race, the band that had previously been Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, and they'd planned to use their version as their first single: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree"] But the Move had also used the song as the B-side for their own single, and "Flowers in the Rain" was so popular that the B-side also got a lot of airplay. The Idle Race didn't want to be thought of as a covers act, and so "Lemon Tree" was pulled at the last minute and replaced by "Impostors of Life's Magazine", by the group's guitarist Jeff Lynne: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Impostors of Life's Magazine"] Before the problems arose, the Move had been working on another single. The A-side, "Cherry Blossom Clinic", was a song about being in a psychiatric hospital, and again had an arrangement by Visconti, who this time conducted a twelve-piece string section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic"] The B-side, meanwhile, was a rocker about politics: [Excerpt: The Move, "Vote For Me"] Given the amount of controversy they'd caused, the idea of a song about mental illness backed with one about politics seemed a bad idea, and so "Cherry Blossom Clinic" was kept back as an album track while "Vote For Me" was left unreleased until future compilations. The first Wood knew about "Cherry Blossom Clinic" not being released was when after a gig in London someone -- different sources have it as Carl Wayne or Tony Secunda -- told him that they had a recording session the next morning for their next single and asked what song he planned on recording. When he said he didn't have one, he was sent up to his hotel room with a bottle of Scotch and told not to come down until he had a new song. He had one by 8:30 the next morning, and was so drunk and tired that he had to be held upright by his bandmates in the studio while singing his lead vocal on the track. The song was inspired by "Somethin' Else", a track by Eddie Cochran, one of Wood's idols: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Somethin' Else"] Wood took the bass riff from that and used it as the basis for what was the Move's most straight-ahead rock track to date. As 1967 was turning into 1968, almost universally every band was going back to basics, recording stripped down rock and roll tracks, and the Move were no exception. Early takes of "Fire Brigade" featured Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum on piano, but the final version featured just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, plus a few sound effects: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] While Carl Wayne had sung lead or co-lead on all the Move's previous singles, he was slowly being relegated into the background, and for this one Wood takes the lead vocal on everything except the brief bridge, which Wayne sings: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] The track went to number three, and while it's not as well-remembered as a couple of other Move singles, it was one of the most influential. Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols has often said that the riff for "God Save the Queen" is inspired by "Fire Brigade": [Excerpt: The Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"] The reversion to a heavier style of rock on "Fire Brigade" was largely inspired by the group's new friend Jimi Hendrix. The group had gone on a package tour with The Pink Floyd (who were at the bottom of the bill), Amen Corner, The Nice, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had become good friends with Hendrix, often jamming with him backstage. Burton and Kefford had become so enamoured of Hendrix that they'd both permed their hair in imitation of his Afro, though Burton regretted it -- his hair started falling out in huge chunks as a result of the perm, and it took him a full two years to grow it out and back into a more natural style. Burton had started sharing a flat with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Burton and Wood had also sung backing vocals with Graham Nash of the Hollies on Hendrix's "You Got Me Floatin'", from his Axis: Bold as Love album: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "You Got Me Floatin'"] In early 1968, the group's first album came out. In retrospect it's arguably their best, but at the time it felt a little dated -- it was a compilation of tracks recorded between late 1966 and late 1967, and by early 1968 that might as well have been the nineteenth century. The album included their two most recent singles, a few more songs arranged by Visconti, and three cover versions -- versions of Eddie Cochran's "Weekend", Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma", and the old standard "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", done copying the Coasters' arrangement with Bev Bevan taking a rare lead vocal. By this time there was a lot of dissatisfaction among the group. Most vocal -- or least vocal, because by this point he was no longer speaking to any of the other members, had been Ace Kefford. Kefford felt he was being sidelined in a band he'd formed and where he was the designated face of the group. He'd tried writing songs, but the only one he'd brought to the group, "William Chalker's Time Machine", had been rejected, and was eventually recorded by a group called The Lemon Tree, whose recording of it was co-produced by Burton and Andy Fairweather-Low of Amen Corner: [Excerpt: The Lemon Tree, "William Chalker's Time Machine"] He was also, though the rest of the group didn't realise it at the time, in the middle of a mental breakdown, which he later attributed to his overuse of acid. By the time the album, titled Move, came out, he'd quit the group. He formed a new group, The Ace Kefford Stand, with Cozy Powell on drums, and they released one single, a cover version of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love", which didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Ace Kefford Stand, "For Your Love"] Kefford recorded a solo album in 1968, but it wasn't released until an archival release in 2003, and he spent most of the next few decades dealing with mental health problems. The group continued on as a four-piece, with Burton moving over to bass. While they thought about what to do -- they were unhappy with Secunda's management, and with the sound that Cordell was getting from their recordings, which they considered far wimpier than their live sound -- they released a live EP of cover versions, recorded at the Marquee. The choice of songs for the EP showed their range of musical influences at the time, going from fifties rockabilly to the burgeoning progressive rock scene, with versions of Cochran's "Somethin' Else", Jerry Lee Lewis' "It'll Be Me", "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" by the Byrds, "Sunshine Help Me" by Spooky Tooth, and "Stephanie Knows Who" by Love: [Excerpt: The Move, "Stephanie Knows Who"] Incidentally, later that year they headlined a gig at the Royal Albert Hall with the Byrds as the support act, and Gram Parsons, who by that time was playing guitar for the Byrds, said that the Move did "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" better than the Byrds did. The EP, titled "Something Else From the Move", didn't do well commercially, but it did do something that the band thought important -- Trevor Burton in particular had been complaining that Denny Cordell's productions "took the toughness out" of the band's sound, and was worried that the group were being perceived as a pop band, not as a rock group like his friends in the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream. There was an increasing tension between Burton, who wanted to be a heavy rocker, and the older Wayne, who thought there was nothing at all wrong with being a pop band. The next single, "Wild Tiger Woman", was much more in the direction that Burton wanted their music to go. It was ostensibly produced by Cordell, but for the most part he left it to the band, and as a result it ended up as a much heavier track than normal. Roy Wood had only intended the song as an album track, and Bevan and Wayne were hesitant about it being a single, but Burton was insistent -- "Wild Tiger Woman" was going to be the group's first number one record: [Excerpt: The Move, "Wild Tiger Woman"] In fact, it turned out to be the group's first single not to chart at all, after four top ten singles in a row.  The group were now in crisis. They'd lost Ace Kefford, Burton and Wayne were at odds, and they were no longer guaranteed hitmakers. They decided to stop working with Cordell and Secunda, and made a commitment that if the next single was a flop, they would split up. In any case, Roy Wood was already thinking about another project. Even though the group's recent records had gone in a guitar-rock direction, he thought maybe you could do something more interesting. Ever since seeing Tony Visconti conduct orchestral instruments playing his music, he'd been thinking about it. As he later put it "I thought 'Well, wouldn't it be great to get a band together, and rather than advertising for a guitarist how about advertising for a cellist or a French horn player or something? There must be lots of young musicians around who play the... instruments that would like to play in a rock kind of band.' That was the start of it, it really was, and I think after those tracks had been recorded with Tony doing the orchestral arrangement, that's when I started to get bored with the Move, with the band, because I thought 'there's something more to it'". He'd started sketching out plans for an expanded lineup of the group, drawing pictures of what it would look like on stage if Carl Wayne was playing timpani while there were cello and French horn players on stage with them. He'd even come up with a name for the new group -- a multi-layered pun. The group would be a light orchestra, like the BBC Light Orchestra, but they would be playing electrical instruments, and also they would have a light show when they performed live, and so he thought "the Electric Light Orchestra" would be a good name for such a group. The other band members thought this was a daft idea, but Wood kept on plotting. But in the meantime, the group needed some new management. The person they chose was Don Arden. We talked about Arden quite a bit in the last episode, but he's someone who is going to turn up a lot in future episodes, and so it's best if I give a little bit more background about him. Arden was a manager of the old school, and like several of the older people in the music business at the time, like Dick James or Larry Page, he had started out as a performer, doing an Al Jolson tribute act, and he was absolutely steeped in showbusiness -- his wife had been a circus contortionist before they got married, and when he moved from Manchester to London their first home had been owned by Winifred Atwell, a boogie piano player who became the first Black person to have a UK number one -- and who is *still* the only female solo instrumentalist to have a UK number one -- with her 1954 hit "Let's Have Another Party": [Excerpt: WInifred Atwell, "Let's Have Another Party"] That was only Atwell's biggest in a long line of hits, and she'd put all her royalties into buying properties in London, one of which became the Ardens' home. Arden had been considered quite a promising singer, and had made a few records in the early 1950s. His first recordings, of material in Yiddish aimed at the Jewish market, are sadly not findable online, but he also apparently recorded as a session singer for Embassy Records. I can't find a reliable source for what records he sang on for that label, which put out budget rerecordings of hits for sale exclusively through Woolworths, but according to Wikipedia one of them was Embassy's version of "Blue Suede Shoes", put out under the group name "The Canadians", and the lead vocal on that track certainly sounds like it could be him: [Excerpt: The Canadians, "Blue Suede Shoes"] As you can tell, rock and roll didn't really suit Arden's style, and he wisely decided to get out of performance and into behind-the-scenes work, though he would still try on occasion to make records of his own -- an acetate exists from 1967 of him singing "Sunrise, Sunset": [Excerpt: Don Arden, "Sunrise, Sunset"] But he'd moved first into promotion -- he'd been the promoter who had put together tours of the UK for Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Brenda Lee and others which we mentioned in the second year of the podcast -- and then into management. He'd first come into management with the Animals -- apparently acting at that point as the money man for Mike Jeffries, who was the manager the group themselves dealt with. According to Arden -- though his story differs from the version of the story told by others involved -- the group at some point ditched Arden for Allen Klein, and when they did, Arden's assistant Peter Grant, another person we'll be hearing a lot more of, went with them.  Arden, by his own account, flew over to see Klein and threatened to throw him out of the window of his office, which was several stories up. This was a threat he regularly made to people he believed had crossed him -- he made a similar threat to one of the Nashville Teens, the first group he managed after the Animals, after the musician asked what was happening to the group's money. And as we heard last episode, he threatened Robert Stigwood that way when Stigwood tried to get the Small Faces off him. One of the reasons he'd signed the Small Faces was that Steve Marriott had gone to the Italia Conti school, where Arden had sent his own children, Sharon and David, and David had said that Marriott was talented. And David was also a big reason the Move came over to Arden. After the Small Faces had left him, Arden had bought Galaxy Entertaimnent, the booking agency that handled bookings for Amen Corner and the Move, among many other acts. Arden had taken over management of Amen Corner himself, and had put his son David in charge of liaising with Tony Secunda about the Move.  But David Arden was sure that the Move could be an albums act, not just a singles act, and was convinced the group had more potential than they were showing, and when they left Secunda, Don Arden took them on as his clients, at least for the moment. Secunda, according to Arden (who is not the most reliable of witnesses, but is unfortunately the only one we have for a lot of this stuff) tried to hire someone to assassinate Arden, but Arden quickly let Secunda know that if anything happened to Arden, Secunda himself would be dead within the hour. As "Wild Tiger Woman" hadn't been a hit, the group decided to go back to their earlier "Flowers in the Rain" style, with "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] That track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who was producing the Rolling Stones and Traffic around this time, and featured the group's friend Richard Tandy on harpsichord. It's also an example of the maxim "Good artists copy, great artists steal". There are very few more blatant examples of plagiarism in pop music than the middle eight of "Blackberry Way". Compare Harry Nilsson's "Good Old Desk": [Excerpt: Nilsson, "Good Old Desk"] to the middle eight of "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] "Blackberry Way" went to number one, but that was the last straw for Trevor Burton -- it was precisely the kind of thing he *didn't* want to be doing,. He was so sick of playing what he thought of as cheesy pop music that at one show he attacked Bev Bevan on stage with his bass, while Bevan retaliated with his cymbals. He stormed off stage, saying he was "tired of playing this crap". After leaving the group, he almost joined Blind Faith, a new supergroup that members of Cream and Traffic were forming, but instead formed his own supergroup, Balls. Balls had a revolving lineup which at various times included Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, Jackie Lomax, a singer-songwriter who was an associate of the Beatles, Richard Tandy who had played on "Blackberry Way", and Alan White, who would go on to drum with the band Yes. Balls only released one single, "Fight for My Country", which was later reissued as a Trevor Burton solo single: [Excerpt: Balls, "Fight For My Country"] Balls went through many lineup changes, and eventually seemed to merge with a later lineup of the Idle Race to become the Steve Gibbons Band, who were moderately successful in the seventies and eighties. Richard Tandy covered on bass for a short while, until Rick Price came in as a permanent replacement. Before Price, though, the group tried to get Hank Marvin to join, as the Shadows had then split up, and Wood was willing to move over to bass and let Marvin play lead guitar. Marvin turned down the offer though. But even though "Blackberry Way" had been the group's biggest hit to date, it marked a sharp decline in the group's fortunes.  Its success led Peter Walsh, the manager of Marmalade and the Tremeloes, to poach the group from Arden, and even though Arden took his usual heavy-handed approach -- he describes going and torturing Walsh's associate, Clifford Davis, the manager of Fleetwood Mac, in his autobiography -- he couldn't stop Walsh from taking over. Unfortunately, Walsh put the group on the chicken-in-a-basket cabaret circuit, and in the next year they only released one record, the single "Curly", which nobody was happy with. It was ostensibly produced by Mike Hurst, but Hurst didn't turn up to the final sessions and Wood did most of the production work himself, while in the next studio over Jimmy Miller, who'd produced "Blackberry Way", was producing "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones. The group were getting pigeonholed as a singles group, at a time when album artists were the in thing. In a three-year career they'd only released one album, though they were working on their second. Wood was by this point convinced that the Move was unsalvageable as a band, and told the others that the group was now just going to be a launchpad for his Electric Light Orchestra project. The band would continue working the chicken-in-a-basket circuit and releasing hit singles, but that would be just to fund the new project -- which they could all be involved in if they wanted, of course. Carl Wayne, on the other hand, was very, very, happy playing cabaret, and didn't see the need to be doing anything else. He made a counter-suggestion to Wood -- keep The Move together indefinitely, but let Wood do the Brian Wilson thing and stay home and write songs. Wayne would even try to get Burton and Kefford back into the band. But Wood wasn't interested. Increasingly his songs weren't even going to the Move at all. He was writing songs for people like Cliff Bennett and the Casuals. He wrote "Dance Round the Maypole" for Acid Gallery: [Excerpt: Acid Gallery, "Dance Round the Maypole"] On that, Wood and Jeff Lynne sang backing vocals. Wood and Lynne had been getting closer since Lynne had bought a home tape recorder which could do multi-tracking -- Wood had wanted to buy one of his own after "Flowers in the Rain", but even though he'd written three hit singles at that point his publishing company wouldn't give him an advance to buy one, and so he'd started using Lynne's. The two have often talked about how they'd recorded the demo for "Blackberry Way" at Lynne's parents' house, recording Wood's vocal on the demo with pillows and cushions around his head so that his singing wouldn't wake Lynne's parents. Lynne had been another person that Wood had asked to join the group when Burton left, but Lynne was happy with The Idle Race, where he was the main singer and songwriter, though their records weren't having any success: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "I Like My Toys"] While Wood was writing material for other people, the only one of those songs to become a hit was "Hello Suzie", written for Amen Corner, which became a top five single on Immediate Records: [Excerpt: Amen Corner, "Hello Suzie"] While the Move were playing venues like Batley Variety Club in Britain, when they went on their first US tour they were able to play for a very different audience. They were unknown in the US, and so were able to do shows for hippie audiences that had no preconceptions about them, and did things like stretch "Cherry Blossom Clinic" into an eight-minute-long extended progressive rock jam that incorporated bits of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", the Nutcracker Suite, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited (live at the Fillmore West)"] All the group were agreed that those shows were the highlight of the group's career. Even Carl Wayne, the band member most comfortable with them playing the cabaret circuit, was so proud of the show at the Fillmore West which that performance is taken from that when the tapes proved unusable he kept hold of them, hoping all his life that technology would progress to the point where they could be released and show what a good live band they'd been, though as things turned out they didn't get released until after his death. But when they got back to the UK it was back to the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and back to work on their much-delayed second album. That album, Shazam!, was the group's attempt at compromise between their different visions. With the exception of one song, it's all heavy rock music, but Wayne, Wood, and Price all co-produced, and Wayne had the most creative involvement he'd ever had. Side two of the album was all cover versions, chosen by Wayne, and Wayne also went out onto the street and did several vox pops, asking members of the public what they thought of pop music: [Excerpt: Vox Pops from "Don't Make My Baby Blue"] There were only six songs on the album, because they were mostly extended jams. Other than the three cover versions chosen by Wayne, there was a sludge-metal remake of "Hello Suzie", the new arrangement of "Cherry Blossom Clinic" they'd been performing live, retitled "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited", and only one new original, "Beautiful Daughter", which featured a string arrangement by Visconti, who also played bass: [Excerpt: The Move, "Beautiful Daughter"] And Carl Wayne sang lead on five of the six tracks, which given that one of the reasons Wayne was getting unhappy with the band was that Wood was increasingly becoming the lead singer, must have been some comfort. But it wasn't enough. By the time Shazam! came out, with a cover drawn by Mike Sheridan showing the four band members as superheroes, the band was down to three -- Carl Wayne had quit the group, for a solo career. He continued playing the cabaret circuit, and made records, but never had another hit, but he managed to have a very successful career as an all-round entertainer, acting on TV and in the theatre, including a six-year run as the narrator in the musical Blood Brothers, and replacing Alan Clarke as the lead singer of the Hollies. He died in 2004. As soon as Wayne left the group, the three remaining band members quit their management and went back to Arden. And to replace Wayne, Wood once again asked Jeff Lynne to join the group. But this time the proposition was different -- Lynne wouldn't just be joining the Move, but he would be joining the Electric Light Orchestra. They would continue putting out Move records and touring for the moment, and Lynne would be welcome to write songs for the Move so that Wood wouldn't have to be the only writer, but they'd be doing it while they were planning their new group.  Lynne was in, and the first single from the new lineup was a return to the heavy riff rock style of "Wild Tiger Woman", "Brontosaurus": [Excerpt: The Move, "Brontosaurus"] But Wayne leaving the group had put Wood in a difficult position. He was now the frontman, and he hated that responsibility -- he said later "if you look at me in photos of the early days, I'm always the one hanging back with my head down, more the musician than the frontman." So he started wearing makeup, painting his face with triangles and stars, so he would be able to hide his shyness. And it worked -- and "Brontosaurus" returned the group to the top ten. But the next single, "When Alice Comes Back to the Farm", didn't chart at all. The first album for the new Move lineup, Looking On, was to finish their contract with their current record label. Many regard it as the group's "Heavy metal album", and it's often considered the worst of their four albums, with Bev Bevan calling it "plodding", but that's as much to do with Bevan's feeling about the sessions as anything else -- increasingly, after the basic rhythm tracks had been recorded, Wood and Lynne would get to work without the other two members of the band, doing immense amounts of overdubbing.  And that continued after Looking On was finished. The group signed a new contract with EMI's new progressive rock label, Harvest, and the contract stated that they were signing as "the Move performing as The Electric Light Orchestra". They started work on two albums' worth of material, with the idea that anything with orchestral instruments would be put aside for the first Electric Light Orchestra album, while anything with just guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and horns would be for the Move. The first Electric Light Orchestra track, indeed, was intended as a Move B-side. Lynne came in with a song based around a guitar riff, and with lyrics vaguely inspired by the TV show The Prisoner, about someone with a number instead of a name running, trying to escape, and then eventually dying.  But then Wood decided that what the track really needed was cello. But not cello played in the standard orchestral manner, but something closer to what the Beatles had done on "I am the Walrus". He'd bought a cheap cello himself, and started playing Jimi Hendrix riffs on it, and Lynne loved the sound of it, so onto the Move's basic rhythm track they overdubbed fifteen cello tracks by Wood, and also two French horns, also by Wood: [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "10538 Overture"] The track was named "10538 Overture", after they saw the serial number 1053 on the console they were using to mix the track, and added the number 8 at the end, making 10538 the number of the character in the song. Wood and Lynne were so enamoured with the sound of their new track that they eventually got told by the other two members of the group that they had to sit in the back when the Move were driving to gigs, so they couldn't reach the tape player, because they'd just keep playing the track over and over again. So they got a portable tape player and took that into the back seat with them to play it there. After finishing some pre-existing touring commitments, the Move and Electric Light Orchestra became a purely studio group, and Rick Price quit the bands -- he needed steady touring work to feed his family, and went off to form another band, Mongrel. Around this time, Wood also took part in another strange project. After Immediate Records collapsed, Andrew Oldham needed some fast money, so he and Don Arden put together a fake group they could sign to EMI for ten thousand pounds.  The photo of the band Grunt Futtock was of some random students, and that was who Arden and Oldham told EMI was on the track, but the actual performers on the single included Roy Wood, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, and Andy Bown, the former keyboard player of the Herd: [Excerpt: Grunt Futtock, "Rock 'n' Roll Christian"] Nobody knows who wrote the song, although it's credited to Bernard Webb, which is a pseudonym Paul McCartney had previously used -- but everyone knew he'd used the pseudonym, so it could very easily be a nod to that. The last Move album, Message From The Country, didn't chart -- just like the previous two hadn't. But Wood's song "Tonight" made number eleven, the follow-up, "Chinatown", made number twenty-three, and then the final Move single, "California Man", a fifties rock and roll pastiche, made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Move, "California Man"] In the US, that single was flipped, and the B-side, Lynne's song "Do Ya", became the only Move song ever to make the Hot One Hundred, reaching number ninety-nine: [Excerpt: The Move, "Do Ya"] By the time "California Man" was released, the Electric Light Orchestra were well underway. They'd recorded their first album, whose biggest highlights were Lynne's "10538 Overture" and Wood's "Whisper in the Night": [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "Whisper in the Night"] And they'd formed a touring lineup, including Richard Tandy on keyboards and several orchestral instrumentalists. Unfortunately, there were problems developing between Wood and Lynne. When the Electric Light Orchestra toured, interviewers only wanted to speak to Wood, thinking of him as the band leader, even though Wood insisted that he and Lynne were the joint leaders. And both men had started arguing a lot, to the extent that at some shows they would refuse to go on stage because of arguments as to which of them should go on first. Wood has since said that he thinks most of the problems between Lynne and himself were actually caused by Don Arden, who realised that if he split the two of them into separate acts he could have two hit groups, not one. If that was the plan, it worked, because by the time "10538 Overture" was released as the Electric Light Orchestra's first single, and made the top ten -- while "California Man" was also still in the charts -- it was announced that Roy Wood was now leaving the Electric Light Orchestra, as were keyboard playe

Le 10 septembre 1944, les Américains libèrent le Luxembourg. À l'époque, l'émetteur de RTL, baptisé Radio Luxembourg, tient encore debout et les Américains relancent assez rapidement la radio pour diffuser de la propagande blanche. En parallèle, un bureau secret de l'armée américaine, le bureau de la guerre psychologique de la 12ᵉ armée, lance l'opération "Annie". Une fausse radio pirate qui utilise l'émetteur grandes ondes de RTL, la nuit entre 2h et 6h du matin. Du lundi au jeudi, Marion Calais revient sur un fait marquant de l'actualité avec les reporters, les correspondants et les experts de RTL. Le vendredi, c'est "Focus Culture" avec Anthony Martin et l'équipe de "Laissez-vous tenter". Et chaque dimanche, dans "Focus Dimanche" Mohamed Bouhafsi donne la parole à ceux qui la font.

Le 10 septembre 1944, les Américains libèrent le Luxembourg. À l'époque, l'émetteur de RTL, baptisé Radio Luxembourg, tient encore debout et les Américains relancent assez rapidement la radio pour diffuser de la propagande blanche. En parallèle, un bureau secret de l'armée américaine, le bureau de la guerre psychologique de la 12ᵉ armée, lance l'opération "Annie". Une fausse radio pirate qui utilise l'émetteur grandes ondes de RTL, la nuit entre 2h et 6h du matin. Du lundi au jeudi, Marion Calais revient sur un fait marquant de l'actualité avec les reporters, les correspondants et les experts de RTL. Le vendredi, c'est "Focus Culture" avec Anthony Martin et l'équipe de "Laissez-vous tenter". Et chaque dimanche, dans "Focus Dimanche" Mohamed Bouhafsi donne la parole à ceux qui la font.

Orson host and narrates, The Black Museum, this is the second episode, A .32 Caliber Bullet. There are no known month and day dates for the series, but this episode aired in 1951. The Black Museum was based on real-life murder cases from the files of the actual Black Museum, a part of Scotland Yard. The program was aired from 1951 to 1952 and broadcast in the United States on the Mutual Broadcasting System and on Radio Luxembourg in Europe. : : : : : My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- DRAMA X THEATER -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES. Subscribing is free and you'll receive new post notifications. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot. Thank you for your support. https://otr.duane.media/ (https://otr.duane.media) | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/duane.otr/ (@duane.otr)

Brian "The Guv'nor" Reader met his criminal downfall with the Hatton Garden Heist. But that wasn't his first attempt at breaking into a vault. Decades before, he and a crack crew dug a tunnel in search of riches, but were foiled by a guy who just wanted to listen to Radio Luxembourg in peace.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Orson host and narrates, The Black Museum, this first episode of the series is, The .22 Caliber Pistol AKA Little Blue 22. There are no known month and day dates for the series, but this episode aired in 1951. The Black Museum was based on real-life murder cases from the files of the actual Black Museum, a part of Scotland Yard. The program was aired from 1951 to 1952 and broadcast in the United States on the Mutual Broadcasting System and on Radio Luxembourg in Europe. : : : : : My other podcast channels include: MYSTERY x SUSPENSE -- DRAMA X THEATER -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES. Subscribing is free and you'll receive new post notifications. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot. Thank you for your support. https://otr.duane.media/ (https://otr.duane.media) | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/duane.otr/ (@duane.otr)

It's the return of our occasional series, We Can't Have Nice Things. This week, we look at radio contest and promotions that went badly wrong, often at the draft stage. Free nude wedding anyone? 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch  02:45 Radio Luxembourg's Ice Block Challenge 06:02 Bait & switch 10:12 Rules are rules 17:36 Review and news 20:40 No accounting for taste 22:15 Library of Chaos 27:27 Good, better, breast 30:08 Playing matchmaker  Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Bobby Richards .  

It's the return of our ocassional series, We Can't Have Nice Things.  This week, we look at radio contest and promotions that went badly wrong, often at the draft stage.  Free nude wedding anyone? 1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch 02:45 Radio Luxembourg's Ice Block Challenge 06:02 Bait & switch 10:12 Rules are rules 17:36 Review and news 20:40 No accounting for taste 22:15 Library of Chaos 27:27 Good, better, breast 30:08  Playing matchmaker  Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Bobby Richards . Canadian radio station AMP Radio in Calgary, caused a lot of buzz with a promotion called “Bank it or Burn it” which asked listeners to vote whether they should #BANK C$5,000 and give it away to a listener, or #BURN the money, literally. With 54% of the votes, the option to #BURN emerged victorious, and AMP Radio burned C$5,000 and put it on YouTube.   A YouTube video was posted of the station's morning show hosts throwing the bills into an incinerator.  AMP Radio defended their actions noting that businesses can easily spend C$5,000 on marketing in a week, and that their promotion has garnered a lot of talk, but at what price?  While this promotion received a lot of attention, the vast majority of it came from outraged Calgarians claiming that they would no longer be listening to station. However, that hasn't stopped AMP Radio from continuing the promotion.  The second phase is currently underway, and this time C$10,000 is at stake.   Radio stunts, and their shifty cousins, radio hoaxes, have been with us since the early days of broadcasting as a favorite marketing tool to gain listeners and advertising sponsors. Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds," caused widespread panic among listeners, who actually believed Martians were invading.  The fallout can range from disappointment to embarassment to property damage, crimes against the person, and even deaths.  You probably recall the incident in California in 2007 where a contest called Hold Your Wee for a Wii, where contestants had to drink a large volume of water and the last person to go to the bathroom would win a video game console, resulted in a woman's death from acute water intoxication.  New Yorkers are unlikely to forget the day "shock jocks" Opie and Anthony finally went too far with a contest that encouraged people to have sex in public, with one couple opting to have their dalience in St. Patrick's Cathedral.     Today's topic was voted on by our patrons, including our newest member Paul D and Pigeon and our All that and Brain Too supporters, David N and EmicationLikely, who just got a bonus mini dealing specifically with radio pranks while I struggle, and struggle it is, to confine this episode to promotions and contests.  The pranks go way, way worse.  Patrons get early, ad-free episodes, but you can also get a glimpse of next week's show and what it's like hanging out in the booth with me by following my tiktok; I've start live-streaming *some of the recording process.     There's nothing new under the sun and that applies to radio contests as much as anything else in life.  Take Radio Luxembourg's and the ice block expedition of 1958.  The challenge: to transport three metric tonnes of ice from the arctic circle to the equator, without the benefit of any form of refrigeration.  The prize was set at 100,000 francs per kilo of ice that made it to its destination as a solid, or about a million bucks per tonne in today's money.  Radio Luxembourg felt they could put their money where their mouth is since who could transport ice that far without refrigeration?  The contest drew fewer hopefuls than your average ‘say the phrase that pays' call-in, but the Norwegian company Glassvatt took them up on it.  A company that produced fiberglass insulation, incidentally, and is still in business today.     Ice was cut out of the Svartisen glacier in 200kg blocks, flown to the nearest town, and melted together into a single 3,050kg block of ice.  It was then wrapped in the company's signature glass wool and placed in an iron container on a truck donated by the Scania company and fueled with with gas donated by Shell.  This was an opportunity for publicity for everyone involved, not just the radio station.  Together with a film crew and a van full of equipment, they  expedition set off from the Norwegian city of Mo i Rana on February 22, 1959, stopping in Oslo to pick up over 600 lbs/300kg of medicine to schlep along to a hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, because when else was so much cold storage going to be going that way?   They made stops in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, which was the comparatively easy bit, then on to Algeria, Niger, and finally Gabon.  That's when the going got tough.  Not a lot of paved roads across the desert, plus Algeria was in the midst of a civil war for independence from France.  Getting stuck in the sand was a frequent occurrence that cost them hours of digging-out time in the 120degF/50C heat, and their supply of water ironically rather limited.   It took a month a day, but they did it!  And the giant block of ice had only lost about 11% of its weight to melting, so even if Radio Luxemborg didn't pro-rate for partial tons, Glassvatt was still looking to collect about $2mil.  Except.  Radio Luxembourg had withdrawn the offer.  When an insulation company stepped up to their ‘move ice without refrigeration' challenge, Radio Luxembourg got cold feet, npi.  The cancellation wasn't the jerk move it sounds like; they actually called it off before the Glassvatt truck even set out.  Glassvatt decided to continue anyway, because even without the prize, it still seemed like good publicity.     That's really the name of the game, the whole reason radio stations do these things.  It's the aural equivalent of butts in seats.  You've got to entice the public to listen to your station over all their other options.  They can be cheaply run, these contests.  Folks my age probably won a bumper sticker, which costs the station very little, or some concert tickets, which often cost the station nothing since they come from the promoter.  But a constant need for contests means you've got to keep them interesting while not blowing through the promotions budget.  This leads some DJs to get creative and not in a good way.  Oh and a word about DJ.  My mom really wants me to refer to radio DJs as “on-air radio personalities” such as when I reference her background in FM radio in NY and FL in the 70's, because these days “DJ” means Skrillex types, but I can't be asked, so for today, they're all DJs.   In 2005, a Bakersfield, CA station announced they were giving away a Hummer to the person who could correctly guess the number of miles that two Hummers the station had had supposedly driven around the town during the course of a week.  The answer was 103.9, the same as the radio station's frequency, which one Shannon Castillo cleverly guessed.  She must have been on cloud 9 to have won herself a $60k vehicle, which if I were her I would sell because it would cost $60k in gas, so you can imagine her disappointment when she went to collect her prize and was handed a remote control car.  Castillo hired an attorney, and I don't blame her, who pointed out that the station had indicated that the vehicle had 22” rims, so either they were claiming it was a real vehicle or that was one jacked-up RC car.  Castillo sued the station for $60k, but as if often the case, lot of news outlets carry the initial story about the lawsuit, but nobody cared to report how it came out.  That's my research bug-bear.  Well, one of them.   A similar but 166% worse frustration was felt by that same year by Norreasha Gill, a KY woman who was the to the lucky tenth caller in a contest to win “100 grand.”  This was going to be life-changing!  She told her kids how they could finally buy a home of their own and have financial stability, so she probably saw red when she turned up at the station to collect her prize, only to be handed a 100 Grand candy bar.  I like caramel, rice crispies, and chocolate as much as the next person, probably more than a lot of next persons, but I totally agree with Gill suing the radio station for 100,000 actual dollars.   Pulling the wool over peoples' eyes is not only mean-spirited; it can also land businesses into all manner of trouble.  You can't say “it was just a joke” and go about your business.  A FL Hooters, not a radio station, I grant you, learned that lesson in 2001 when they held a contest among their waitstaff for most drinks sold, with the prize being a Toyota.  The winner was blindfolded and led out into the parking lot to discover her Toyota was a toy Yoda, a foot-tall figure of the puppet from Star Wars.  She quit and sued the owners of the franchise, settling out of court a year later.   Radio stations operate under the auspices of the Federal Communication Commission, and they have some pretty firm opinions about what shenanigans you can get up to if you want to do it on the broadcast airwaves.  The rules require a radio station fully and accurately disclose the material terms, aka the relevant details of the contest, which cannot be deceptive, misleading, or patently false, and then to follow through with those terms.  If you're talking about a contest on the air, you have to give the material terms on the air.  It's not good enough to say “we're giving away a hundred grand, see the website for more info” and on the website, admit that it's a candy bar, no siree.  No claiming it was just a joke if you made it out to be a legit contest.     The FCC fined a Kansaa station $4,000 for failing to announce all material terms of a contest, even though it was on the website, and for failure to comply with the terms for their Santa's Sack contest.  Listeners were to call in and guess what was in Santa's Sack and you'd win what was in the sack plus a teddy bear; seems simple enough.  A listener who guessed the sack held $1,000 was told she was wrong, but the next day, she heard someone else guess $1k and that person was proclaimed the winner.  The first caller complained to the station and when that went nowhere, filed a complaint with the FCC.  With the feds breathing down their necks –don't forget, the FCC isn't just about issuing fines, they can yank your broadcast license– the radio station claimed it was an innocent mix-up among the staff, some of whom included the value of the $10 teddy bear and some didn't, and that the rules were on their website.  The radio station then sent a check for $1,000 to the complainant, meaning they were out $5k over a $10 teddy bear and for want of a memo.     The FCC issued KDKA in Pennsylvania with a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture, a scary-sounding document that says “Look what you did!  I should take away your license for that.”  On Thanksgiving day 2007, a DJ, I assumed bored or annoyed at having to work a holiday, said that he'd give away $1,000,000 to the thirteenth caller and he'd do it once an hour.  A listener called and was told he was the thirteenth caller and was then placed on hold for 43 minutes before being put through to the DJ and immediately hung up on.  The station claimed that the on-air contest rules did not apply here because listeners should have realized it was a joke.  The FCC disagreed, since the DJ never said anything to indicate he wasn't serious, at one point saying it was “the real deal,” and he announced the “contest” *several times during his 3-hour show.  After finding that the on-air contest rules applied, the FCC smited them–smote?-- for the tag team of failure to announce the material terms *and failure to comply with said terms, i.e. pony up the dough, and fined the station $6,000.   An LA station got their own Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture and $6k fine after they held a contest online with a drawing for tickets to the musical Les Miserables.  Their web site said the contest would run from 3:50 pm on May 29 to 8:50 pm on June 2.  A listener complained to the FCC after the station awarded the prize to three people at only 3:00.  Yer man must really have wanted to see Les Mis.  The radio station responded that the on-air contest rules didn't apply to its contest because the contest was exclusively online.  The FCC disagreed.  The rules apply to "all contests conducted by the licensee and broadcast to the public" and since the radio station had announced the contest several times on-air and told listeners who entered the contest to stay tuned, it was an on-air contest.   You don't necessarily need the FCC in your stable to hold a radio station's feet to the fire.  Just ask the folks at Singapore's Gold 905 after their big-money game “The Celebrity Name Drop.”  They made a montage of 14 celebrity voices, edited so that each celebrity said one word of “Gold 9-0-5, the station that sounds good, and makes you feel good.”  I couldn't find a clip of it, but if you do, hit up the soc meds or post it in soc.   To win $10,000, the caller had to correctly identify each voice in order.  It took a skilled ear, as well as listening out for other people's right and wrong guesses.  Muhammad Shalehan thought he had it after a month of puzzling and repeatedly trying to get through the phone lines, but when he read his list of names, the DJ said he got one wrong.  A few weeks later, Gold905 declared they had their winner, one Jerome Tan, and that was a wrap.     Except.  Listeners jumped on the station's FB page, pointing out that Shalehan had given the right answer more than two weeks earlier.  Mediacorp, the station;s parent company, said that Shalehan's attempt was invalidated because he failed to pronounce the string of celebrity names accurately, specifically that of Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet.  So Muhammad went to the mountain or in this case, the internet, whereby Shelahan was able to locate Hadley's management and ask if they could help.  He then got a video from Hadley himself, confirming that, while Muhammad Shalehan has a “slight accent,” he had, in fact, “pronounced my name absolutely correctly.”   Armed now with some pretty bitchin' evidence, Shalehan went back to the station again.  After viewing Hadley's video, Mediacorp …. still refused to pay out. [sfx]  But they offered to make a “goodwill gesture” of $5,000.  By then, the online community, a barely-controlled and badly-tempered beast on the best of days, was having none of it, making for some long work-days for the PR department.  Finally, Mediacorp relented and paid Muhammad Shalehan the full $10k.     MIDROLL  don't forget ad sting   If these stories haven't made you face-palm and ask “what were they thinking,” I'd bet my mortgage one of these will.  Strap in, kids.  The tragic Hold Your Wee for a Wii contest wasn't the first or only radio station promotion to involve urine.   In 1999, KOMP 92.3-FM of Las Vegas DJ Greg McFarlane was trying to think up a novel approach to give away some Mötley Crüe tickets.  His first idea was to have contestants re-enact the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape live on-air, fully clothes of course; wouldn't want to be in bad taste.  Idea number 2: make contestants drink their own urine.  Y'all 1999.  What was the value in seeing Motley Crue in 1999?  That cheese had been moldy for years.  Three die-hard fans actually came into the studio, then lost their nerve when confronted with the fact that McFarlane was in no way kidding.  Then, in McFarlane's own words, “The fourth guy walks in, pushes everyone out of the way and throws it down like it was Pepsi.”  So concert tickets for guy #4 and an empty cardboard box to McFarlane, to gather his personal effects because he's just been sacked.   Hey, remind me to check my stats and see how many people jumped ship in the last 60 seconds.  For those still with me, we go now to a library in Ft Worth, TX, where the staff suddenly found themselves terrorized by crowds of people ransacking the stacks.  Unbeknownst to them, a KYNG DJ thought it would be a keen idea to announce that he had hidden $100 in $5 and $10 bills between pages of books in the library's fiction section.  Even adjusted for inflation, that's just under $200 to try to outcompete hundreds of other people for.   "People started climbing the bookshelves; they started climbing on each other, and books became airborne," library spokeswoman Marsha Anderson said, adding that 3k books had been thrown on the floor and some ended up ripped and with broken spines.  Count the books on your nearest bookcase or shelf.  How many of those would need to get to 3k?  That's a lot of damage!   Do I need to say that the library has an amount of heads-up from the radio station and that amount was none, or did you just assume because what librarian would agree to that?  More than 500 people stampeded through the Fort Worth Central Library looking for the money.  There was money in the library – the station claimed it was $100 and that was the only amount it was ever said to be, whereas a number of people in the money-mob thought it was as high as $10k.  A KYNG spokesman said the DJ was only trying to boost public interest in the library by giving away about $100, and they had no idea where people got the $10k idea.  That was after the fact of course.  In the moment, it was the librarians who had to handle the situation...because they couldn't get ahold of anyone at the radio station.  They told the crowd the only thing that could possibly make them stop looking – that someone already found the money and had just left.     Sometimes it's not judgment that's wobbly; it's taste, subjective as that may be.  BRMB in Birmingham, England ran a contest where they would pay for the winner's wedding, which as anyone less clever than my hillbilly butt getting married in my own yard both times can tell you can really run into money.  There was, of course, a catch.  The station reserved one creative right for the wedding that the station paid for.  This wedding had to be conducted au naturale.  In the buff.  Nude.  At a minimum, the happy couple had to be in all their glory; don't know if there was a maximum.  The lucky couple, who won by listener vote, had been together for eleven years, attributing their long engagement to the cost of the wedding.  Again, back yard, it's free.  The station paid all the expenses and the bride and groom held up their end…as it were, though the bride had her veil and the groom used a top hat as a fig leaf.   Your other why-is-this-so-expensive life event would come just after the end of your life, your funeral.  It costs as much as a decent used car and you don't even get to enjoy it.  Half of that would be handled if you won the contest offered by Radio Galaxy in Germany – they'd pay for your funeral, provided your funeral cost less than 3000 Euro and a modest one could.  Listeners sent in their own epitaphs, that being the words on their tombstone, like how Winston Churchill's says “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”  But you can't have a party without a party-pooper and the radio station was hit was a lawsuit from the Association of German Undertakers.  Also in Germany, station RTL 89.0 wanted to give away a Mini Cooper, but couldn't apparently be asked to put a lot of effort, or forethought, into it.  They just said, pull off the most amazing stunt.  Because that's safe.  Whatever the other entries were paled in comparison to the stunt submitted by the eventual winner – he would have the word mini tattooed on … how to put this delicately?... onto an appendage which most gentlemen would find distressing to have labeled “mini.”  The winner, Andreas Muller, went through with it, live on air with the female host looking on.  Can you imagine if the station refused to give him the car though?   That kind of personal touch would have been right up the alley of the folks at WDVE 102.5 in Pittsburgh.  Every year, for the festive holiday season, they hold a "Breast Christmas Ever."  Yep, they foot the bill for breast enhancement surgery.  To the surprise of no one, the event has come under fire from both feminist groups and health care advocates, who should like us to remember a boob job is surgery and surgery carries risk.  But sometimes, even the tackiest contest isn't as bad as it seems - there's always a silver lining if we look for it.  A Calgary station did a similar give-away and the winner, by popular vote, was a 19 year old trans-female listener who was quotes as saying having breast implants would mean she wouldn't "have to face so much bigotry on a daily basis."   Ottawa radio station Hot 89.9 looked at all that and said Hold My Molson's.  They put on a “Win a baby!” contest.  Specifically, they would pay for up to three rounds of in-vitro fertility treatment up to $35,000.  The contest drew criticism like jellowjackets at a cook-out, but it wasn't without redemption – it brought attention to the issue of IVF funding in Ontario just before voters head to the polls to vote if the provincial government should be required to pay it like other health care.   Said Beverly Hanck, executive director of the Infertility Awareness Association of Canada, “The station is clearly, clearly capitalizing on vulnerable patients that are desperate to have a family.”  The fact that couples have to turn to a radio contest at all points to a “sad state of affairs” in Ontario, she added.   Morning show host Jeff Mauler said the contest was intended to appeal to the station's 24 to 54 year old demographic, but that it has opened up a dialogue about an issue that is “more common than you think.”  “Anyone who complains is lucky enough to have kids or doesn't want kids,” Mauler said. “Anyone in the struggle doesn't slam the contest.” Common enough that more than 400 couples applied for the contest, which they launched on Labor Day.  Because of course they did.   If babies aren't your thing, how about a full-grown human woman?  Edmonton's the Bear FM also poked the bear with their contest to win a Russian bride.  The Bear partnered with an on-line matchmaking service that connects Russian women with foreign husbands.  Problem the first: eww.  Problem the close second: it's not uncommon for women you can meet through such services being exploited.  Employment and Immigration Minister Thomas Lukaszuk found the contest so offensive, he pulled his ministry's advertising from the station.  The prize included a free two-week trip to Russia, and $500 spending money.     New Zealand radio station The Rock FM sponsored their own contest in which the winner would be flown to the Ukraine to pick a bride from an agency, originally called “Win a Wife.”  When people complained, they changed it to “Win A Trip To Beautiful Ukraine For 12 Nights And Meet Eastern European Hot Lady Who Maybe One Day You Marry.”  Well, does what it says on the tin.  This is the same station that, when they needed a contest for Valentine's Day 2012, crab-walked around love and instead offered to cover all the costs of one lucky couple's divorce.  Asterisk, you had to drop the Big D bombshell on them live on the air.  Who says romance is dead?  No one who's watching OFMD on a binge loop for the last 9 days…not that I know anyone like that.  It's just a hypothetical.  An offly specific hypothetical   If you're thinking to yourself, it can't get worse than that, you haven't been paying attention.  Again in Canada (it's always the quiet ones), a Halifax radio station q104 put on a foreign bride contest.  The contest, which would send the winner to Prague, closed on March 8, International Women's Day.  The program director JC Douglad said firmly that there was no sexual connotatioin to the contest.  The men are promised dates with women in the Czech Republic, but they station made no warranty, express or implied, as to how those dates will go.  Okay, sure, but you've kind of undermined your position by calling it the "Male is in the Czech," didntcha?   And that's…AMP Radio defended their actions noting that businesses can easily spend C$5,000 on marketing in a week, and that their promotion has garnered a lot of talk, so it was kind of the same thing.  While a lot of Calgarians vowed to stop listening, then went on to do it again, this time with $10,000. this podcast remember thanks  

Episode 141 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “River Deep Mountain High'”, and at the career of Ike and Tina Turner.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, this episode was recorded before the sad death of the great Ronnie Spector, whose records are featured a couple of times in this episode, which is partly about her abusive ex-husband. Her life paralleled Tina Turner's quite closely, and if you haven't heard the episode I did about her last year, you can find it at https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-110-be-my-baby-by-the-ronettes/. I wish I'd had the opportunity to fit a tribute into this episode too. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wild Thing" by the Troggs. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I referred to it for the material about Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Phil Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. Tina Turner has written two autobiographies. I Tina is now out of print but is slightly more interesting, as it contains interview material with other people in her life. My Love Story is the more recent one and covers her whole life up to 2019. Ike Turner's autobiography Takin' Back My Name is a despicable, self-serving, work of self-justification, and I do not recommend anyone buy or read it. But I did use it for quotes in the episode so it goes on the list. Ike Turner: King of Rhythm by John Collis is more even-handed, and contains a useful discography. That Kat Sure Could Play! is a four-CD compilation of Ike Turner's work up to 1957. The TAMI and Big TNT shows are available on a Blu-Ray containing both performances. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. There are sadly no good compilations of Ike and Tina Turner's career, as they recorded for multiple labels, and would regularly rerecord the hits in new versions for each new label, so any compilation you find will have the actual hit version of one or two tracks, plus a bunch of shoddy remakes. However, the hit version of "River Deep, Mountain High" is on the album of the same name, which is a worthwhile album to get,. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today's episode is unfortunately another one of those which will require a content warning, because we're going to be talking about Ike and Tina Turner. For those of you who don't know, Ike Turner was possibly the most famously abusive spouse in the whole history of music, and it is literally impossible to talk about the duo's career without talking about that abuse. I am going to try not to go into too many of the details -- if nothing else, the details are very readily available for those who want to seek them out, not least in Tina's two autobiographies, so there's no sense in retraumatising people who've experienced domestic abuse by going over them needlessly -- but it would be dishonest to try to tell the story without talking about it at all. This is not going to be an episode *about* Ike Turner's brutal treatment of Tina Turner -- it's an episode about the record, and about music, and about their musical career -- but the environment in which "River Deep, Mountain High" was created was so full of toxic, abusive, destructive men that Ike Turner may only be the third-worst person credited on the record, and so that abuse will come up. If discussion of domestic abuse, gun violence, cocaine addiction, and suicide attempts are likely to cause you problems, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the podcast. That said, let's get on with the story. One of the problems I'm hitting at this point of the narrative is that starting with "I Fought the Law" we've hit a run of incredibly intertangled stories  The three most recent episodes, this one, and nine of the next twelve, all really make up one big narrative about what happened when folk-rock and psychedelia hit the Hollywood scene and the Sunset Strip nightclubs started providing the raw material for the entertainment industry to turn into pop culture. We're going to be focusing on a small number of individuals, and that causes problems when trying to tell a linear narrative, because people don't live their lives sequentially -- it's not the case that everything happened to Phil Spector, and *then* everything happened to Cass Elliot, and *then* everything happened to Brian Wilson. All these people were living their lives and interacting and influencing each other, and so sometimes we'll have to mention something that will be dealt with in a future episode. So I'll say here and now that we *will* be doing an episode on the Lovin' Spoonful in two weeks. So when I say now that in late 1965 the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the biggest bands around, and possibly the hottest band in the country, you'll have to take that on trust. But they were, and in late 1965 their hit "Do You Believe in Magic?" had made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] Phil Spector, as always, was trying to stay aware of the latest trends in music, and he was floundering somewhat. Since the Beatles had hit America in 1964, the hits had dried up -- he'd produced a few minor hit records in 1964, but the only hits he'd made in 1965 had been with the Righteous Brothers -- none of his other acts were charting. And then the Righteous Brothers left him, after only a year. In late 1965, he had no hit acts and no prospect of having any. There was only one thing to do -- he needed to start making his own folk-rock records. And the Lovin' Spoonful gave him an idea how to do that. Their records were identifiably coming from the same kind of place as people like the Byrds or the Mamas and the Papas, but they were pop songs, not protest songs -- the Lovin' Spoonful weren't doing Dylan covers or anything intellectual, but joyous pop confections of a kind that anyone could relate to. Spector knew how to make pop records like that. But to do that, he needed a band. Even though he had been annoyed at the way that people had paid more attention to the Righteous Brothers, as white men, than they had to the other vocalists he'd made hit records with (who, as Black women, had been regarded by a sexist and racist public as interchangeable puppets being controlled by a Svengali rather than as artists in their own right), he knew he was going to have to work with a group of white male vocalist-instrumentalists if he wanted to have his own Lovin' Spoonful. And the group he chose was a group from Greenwich Village called MFQ. MFQ had originally named themselves the Modern Folk Quartet, as a parallel to the much better-known Modern Jazz Quartet, and consisted of Cyrus Faryar, Henry Diltz, Jerry Yester, and Chip Douglas, all of whom were multi-instrumentalists who would switch between guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass depending on the song. They had combined Kingston Trio style clean-cut folk with Four Freshmen style modern harmonies -- Yester, who was a veteran of the New Christy Minstrels, said of the group's vocals that "the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group", and  they had been taken under the wing of manager Herb Cohen, who had got them a record deal with Warner Brothers. They recorded two albums of folk songs, the first of which was produced by Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quartet, "Sassafras"] But after their second album, they had decided to go along with the trends and switch to folk-rock. They'd started playing with electric instruments, and after a few shows where John Sebastian, the lead singer of the Lovin' Spoonful, had sat in with them on drums, they'd got themselves a full-time drummer, "Fast" Eddie Hoh, and renamed themselves the Modern Folk Quintet, but they always shortened that to just MFQ. Spector was convinced that this group could be another Lovin' Spoonful if they had the right song, and MFQ in turn were eager to become something more than an unsuccessful folk group. Spector had the group rehearsing in his house for weeks at a stretch before taking them into the studio. The song that Spector chose to have the group record was written by a young songwriter he was working with named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson was as yet a complete unknown, who had not written a hit and was still working a day job, but he had a talent for melody, and he also had a unique songwriting sensibility combining humour and heartbreak. For example, he'd written a song that Spector had recorded with the Ronettes, "Here I Sit", which had been inspired by the famous graffito from public toilet walls -- "Here I sit, broken-hearted/Paid a dime and only farted": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Here I Sit"] That ability to take taboo bodily functions and turn them into innocent-sounding love lyrics is also at play in the song that Spector chose to have the MFQ record. "This Could be the Night" was written by Nilsson from the perspective of someone who is hoping to lose his virginity -- he feels like he's sitting on dynamite, and he's going to "give her some", but it still sounds innocent enough to get past the radio censors of the mid-sixties: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "This Could Be the Night (demo)"] Spector took that song, and recorded a version of it which found the perfect balance between Spector's own wall of sound and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Good Time Music" sound: [Excerpt: MFQ, "This Could be the Night"] Brian Wilson was, according to many people, in the studio while that was being recorded, and for decades it would remain a favourite song of Wilson's -- he recorded a solo version of it in the 1990s, and when he started touring solo for the first time in 1998 he included the song in his earliest live performances. He also tried to record it with his wife's group, American Spring, in the early 1970s, but was unable to, because while he could remember almost all of the song, he couldn't get hold of the lyrics. And the reason he couldn't get hold of the lyrics is that the record itself went unreleased, because Phil Spector had found a new performer he was focusing on instead. It happened during the filming of the Big TNT Show, a sequel to the TAMI Show, released by American International Pictures, for which "This Could Be the Night" was eventually used as a theme song. The MFQ were actually performers at the Big TNT Show, which Spector was musical director and associate producer of, but their performances were cut out of the finished film, leaving just their record being played over the credits. The Big TNT Show generally gets less respect than the TAMI Show, but it's a rather remarkable document of the American music scene at the very end of 1965, and it's far more diverse than the TAMI show. It opens with, of all people, David McCallum -- the actor who played Ilya Kuryakin on The Man From UNCLE -- conducting a band of session musicians playing an instrumental version of "Satisfaction": [Excerpt: David McCallum, "Satisfaction"] And then, in front of an audience which included Ron and Russel Mael, later of Sparks, and Frank Zappa, who is very clearly visible in audience shots, came performances of every then-current form of popular music. Ray Charles, Petula Clark, Bo Diddley, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Roger Miller, the Ronettes, and Donovan all did multiple songs, though the oddest contribution was from Joan Baez, who as well as doing some of her normal folk repertoire also performed "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with Spector on piano: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Phil Spector, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] But the headline act on the eventual finished film was the least-known act on the bill, a duo who had not had a top forty hit for four years at this point, and who were only on the bill as a last-minute fill-in for an act who dropped out, but who were a sensational live act. So sensational that when Phil Spector saw them, he knew he needed to sign them -- or at least he needed to sign one of them: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner with the Ikettes, "Please, Please, Please"] Because Ike and Tina Turner's performance at the Big TNT Show was, if anything, even more impressive than James Brown's performance on the TAMI Show the previous year. The last we saw of Ike Turner was way back in episode eleven. If you don't remember that, from more than three years ago, at the time Turner was the leader of a small band called the Kings of Rhythm. They'd been told by their friend B.B. King that if you wanted to make a record, the person you go to was Sam Phillips at Memphis Recording Services, and they'd recorded "Rocket '88", often cited as the first ever rock and roll record, under the name of their sax player and vocalist Jackie Brenston: [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] We looked at some of the repercussions from that recording throughout the first year and a half or so of the podcast, but we didn't look any more at the career of Ike Turner himself. While "Rocket '88" was a minor hit, the group hadn't followed it up, and Brenston had left to go solo. For a while Ike wasn't really very successful at all -- though he was still performing around Memphis, and a young man named Elvis Presley was taking notes at some of the shows. But things started to change for Ike when he once again turned up at Sam Phillips' studio -- this time because B.B. King was recording there. At the time, Sun Records had still not started as its own label, and Phillips' studio was being used for records made by all sorts of independent blues labels, including Modern Records, and Joe Bihari was producing a session for B.B. King, who had signed to Modern. The piano player on the session also had a connection to "Rocket '88" -- when Jackie Brenston had quit Ike's band to go solo, he'd put together a new band to tour as the Delta Cats, and Phineas Newborn Jr had ended up playing Turner's piano part on stage, before Brenston's career collapsed and Newborn became King's pianist. But Phineas Newborn was a very technical, dry, jazz pianist -- a wonderful player, but someone who was best suited to playing more cerebral material, as his own recordings as a bandleader from a few years later show: [Excerpt: Phineas Newborn Jr, "Barbados"] Bihari wasn't happy with what Newborn was playing, and the group took a break from recording to get something to eat and try to figure out the problem. While they were busy, Turner went over to the piano and started playing. Bihari said that that was exactly what they wanted, and Turner took over playing the part. In his autobiography, Turner variously remembers the song King was recording there as "You Know I Love You" and "Three O'Clock Blues", neither of which, as far as I can tell, were actually recorded at Phillips' studio, and both of which seem to have been recorded later -- it's difficult to say for sure because there were very few decent records kept of these things at the time. But we do know that Turner played on a lot of King's records in the early fifties, including on "Three O'Clock Blues", King's first big hit: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "Three O'Clock Blues"] For the next while, Turner was on salary at Modern Records, playing piano on sessions, acting as a talent scout, and also apparently writing many of the songs that Modern's artists would record, though those songs were all copyrighted under the name "Taub", a pseudonym for the Bihari brothers, as well as being a de facto arranger and producer for the company. He worked on many records made in and around Memphis, both for Modern Records and for other labels who drew from the same pool of artists and musicians. Records he played on and produced or arranged include several of Bobby "Blue" Bland's early records -- though Turner's claim in his autobiography that he played on Bland's version of "Stormy Monday" appears to be incorrect, as that wasn't recorded until a decade later. He did, though, play on Bland's “Drifting from Town to Town”, a rewrite of Charles Brown's “Driftin' Blues”, on which, as on many sessions run by Turner, the guitarist was Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who later found fame with the Blues Brothers: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, "Driftin' Blues"] Though I've also seen the piano part on that credited as being by Johnny Ace – there's often some confusion as to whether Turner or Ace played on a session, as they played with many of the same artists, but that one was later rereleased as by Bobby “Blue” Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, so it's safe to say that Ike's on that one. He also played on several records by Howlin' Wolf, including "How Many More Years", recorded at Sam Phillips' studio: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "How Many More Years?"] Over the next few years he played with many artists we've covered already in the podcast, like Richard Berry and the Flairs, on whose recordings he played guitar rather than piano: [Excerpt: The Flairs, "Baby Wants"] He also played guitar on records by Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Please Find My Baby"] and played with Little Junior Parker, Little Milton, Johnny Ace, Roscoe Gordon, and many, many more. As well as making blues records, he also made R&B records in the style of Gene and Eunice with his then-wife Bonnie: [Excerpt: Bonnie and Ike Turner, "My Heart Belongs to You"] Bonnie was his fourth wife, all of them bigamous -- or at least, I *think* she was his fourth. I have seen two different lists Turner gave of his wives, both of them made up of entirely different people, though it doesn't help that many of them also went by nicknames. But Turner started getting married when he was fourteen, and as he would often put it "you gave a preacher two dollars, the papers cost three dollars, that was it. In those days Blacks didn't bother with divorces." (One thing you will see a lot with Turner, unfortunately, is his habit of taking his own personal misbehaviours and claiming they were either universal, or at least that they were universal among Black people, or among men. It's certainly true that some people in the Southeastern US had a more lackadaisical attitude towards remarrying without divorce at the time than we might expect, but it was in no way a Black thing specifically -- it was a people-like-Ike-Turner thing -- see for example the very similar behaviour of Jerry Lee Lewis. I'm trying, when I quote him, not to include too many of these generalisations, but I thought it important to include that one early on to show the kind of self-justification to which he was prone throughout his entire life.) It's largely because Bonnie played piano and was singing with his band that Turner switched to playing guitar, but there was another reason – while he disliked the attention he got on stage, he also didn't want a repeat of what had happened with Jackie Brenston, where Brenston as lead vocalist and frontman had claimed credit for what Ike thought of as his own record. Anyone who saw Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm was going to know that Ike Turner was the man who was making it all happen, and so he was going to play guitar up front rather than be on the piano in the background. So Turner took guitar lessons from Earl Hooker, one of the great blues guitarists of the period, who had played with Turner's piano inspiration Pinetop Perkins before recording solo tracks like "Sweet Angel": [Excerpt: Earl Hooker, "Sweet Angel"] Turner was always happier in the studio than performing live -- despite his astonishing ego, he was also a rather shy person who didn't like attention -- and he'd been happy working on salary for Modern and freelancing on occasion for other labels like Chess and Duke. But then the Biharis had brought him out to LA, where Modern Records was based, and as Joel Bihari put it "Ike did a great job for us, but he was a country boy. We brought him to L.A., and he just couldn't take city life. He only stayed a month, then left for East St. Louis to form his own band. He told me he was going back there to become a star." For once, Turner's memory of events lined up with what other people said about him. In his autobiography, he described what happened -- "Down in Mississippi, life is slow. Tomorrow, you are going to plough this field. The next day, you going to cut down these trees. You stop and you go on about your business. Next day, you start back on sawing trees or whatever you doing. Here I am in California, and this chick, this receptionist, is saying "Hold on, Mr Bihari, line 2... hold line 3... Hey Joe, Mr Something or other on the phone for you." I thought "What goddamn time does this stop?"" So Turner did head to East St. Louis -- which is a suburb of St. Louis proper, across the Mississippi river from it, and in Illinois rather than Missouri, and at the time a thriving industrial town in its own right, with over eighty thousand people living there. Hardly the laid-back country atmosphere that Turner was talking about, but still also far from LA both geographically and culturally. He put together a new lineup of the Kings of Rhythm, with a returning Jackie Brenston, who were soon recording for pretty much every label that was putting out blues and R&B tracks at that point, releasing records on RPM, Sue, Flair, Federal, and Modern as well as several smaller labels. usually with either Brenston or the group's drummer Billy Gayles singing lead: [Excerpt: Billy Gayles with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "Just One More Time"] None of these records was a success, but the Kings of Rhythm were becoming the most successful band in East St. Louis. In the mid-fifties the only group that was as popular in the greater St. Louis metro area was the Johnny Johnson trio -- which soon became the Chuck Berry trio, and went on to greater things, while the Kings of Rhythm remained on the club circuit. But Turner was also becoming notorious for his temper -- he got the nickname "Pistol-Whippin' Ike Turner" for the way he would attack people with his gun, He also though was successful enough that he built his own home studio, and that was where he recorded "Boxtop". a calypso song whose middle eight seems to have been nicked from "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" and whose general feel owes more than a little to "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Ike Turner, Carlson Oliver, and Little Ann, "Boxtop"] The female vocals on that track were by Turner's new backing vocalist, who at the time went by the stage name "Little Ann". Anna Mae Bullock had started going to see the Kings of Rhythm regularly when she was seventeen, because her sister was dating one of the members of the band, and she had become a fan almost immediately. She later described her first experience seeing the group: "The first time I saw Ike on stage he was at his very best, sharply dressed in a dark suit and tie. Ike wasn't conventionally handsome – actually, he wasn't handsome at all – and he certainly wasn't my type. Remember, I was a schoolgirl, all of seventeen, looking at a man. I was used to high school boys who were clean-cut, athletic, and dressed in denim, so Ike's processed hair, diamond ring, and skinny body – he was all edges and sharp cheekbones – looked old to me, even though he was only twenty-five. I'd never seen anyone that thin! I couldn't help thinking, God, he's ugly." Turner didn't find Bullock attractive either -- one of the few things both have always agreed on in all their public statements about their later relationship was that neither was ever particularly attracted to the other sexually -- and at first this had caused problems for Anna Mae. There was a spot in the show where Turner would invite a girl from the audience up on stage to sing, a different one every night, usually someone he'd decided he wanted to sleep with. Anna Mae desperately wanted to be one of the girls that would get up on stage, but Turner never picked her. But then one day she got her chance. Her sister's boyfriend was teasing her sister, trying to get her to sing in this spot, and passed her the microphone. Her sister didn't want to sing, so Anna Mae grabbed the mic instead, and started singing -- the song she sang was B.B. King's "You Know I Love You", the same song that Turner always remembered as being recorded at Sun studios, and on which Turner had played piano: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "You Know I Love You"] Turner suddenly took notice of Anna Mae. As he would later say, everyone *says* they can sing, but it turned out that Anna Mae could. He took her on as an occasional backing singer, not at first as a full member of the band, but as a sort of apprentice, who he would teach how to use her talents more commercially. Turner always said that during this period, he would get Little Richard to help teach Anna Mae how to sing in a more uncontrolled, exuberant, style like he did, and Richard has backed this up, though Anna Mae never said anything about this. We do know though that Richard was a huge fan of Turner's -- the intro to "Good Golly Miss Molly": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] was taken almost exactly from the intro to "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] and Richard later wrote the introduction to Turner's autobiography. So it's possible -- but both men were inveterate exaggerators, and Anna Mae only joined Ike's band a few months before Richard's conversion and retirement from music, and during a point when he was a massive star, so it seems unlikely. Anna Mae started dating Raymond Hill, a saxophone player in the group, and became pregnant by him -- but then Hill broke his ankle, and used that as an excuse to move back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be with his family, abandoning his pregnant teenage girlfriend, and it seems to be around this point that Turner and Anna Mae became romantically and sexually involved. Certainly, one of Ike's girlfriends, Lorraine Taylor, seems to have believed they were involved while Anna Mae was pregnant, and indeed that Turner, rather than Hill, was the father. Taylor threatened Bullock with Turner's gun, before turning it on herself and attempting suicide, though luckily she survived. She gave birth to Turner's son, Ike Junior, a couple of months after Bullock gave birth to her own son, Craig. But even after they got involved, Anna Mae was still mostly just doing odd bits of backing vocals, like on "Boxtop", recorded in 1958, or on 1959's "That's All I Need", released on Sue Records: [Excerpt: Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "That's All I Need"] And it seemed that would be all that Anna Mae Bullock would do, until Ike Turner lent Art Lassiter eighty dollars he didn't want to pay back. Lassiter was a singer who was often backed by his own vocal trio, the Artettes, patterned after Ray Charles' Raelettes. He had performed with Turner's band on a semi-regular basis, since 1955 when he had recorded "As Long as I Have You" with his vocal group the Trojans, backed by "Ike Turner and his Orchestra": [Excerpt: The Trojans, Ike Turner and His Orchestra, "As Long as I Have You"] He'd recorded a few more tracks with Turner since then, both solo and under group names like The Rockers: [Excerpt: The Rockers, "Why Don't You Believe?"] In 1960, Lassiter needed new tyres for his car, and borrowed eighty dollars from Turner in order to get them -- a relatively substantial amount of money for a working musician back then. He told Turner that he would pay him back at a recording session they had booked, where Lassiter was going to record a song Turner had written, "A Fool in Love", with Turner's band and the Artettes. But Lassiter never showed up -- he didn't have the eighty dollars, and Turner found himself sat in a recording studio with a bunch of musicians he was paying for, paying twenty-five dollars an hour for the studio time, and with no singer there to record. At the time, he was still under the impression that Lassiter might eventually show up, if not at that session, then at least at a future one, but until he did, there was nothing he could do and he was getting angry. Bullock suggested that they cut the track without Lassiter. They were using a studio with a multi-track machine -- only two tracks, but that would be enough. They could cut the backing track on one track, and she could record a guide vocal on the other track, since she'd been around when Turner was teaching Lassiter the song. At least that way they wouldn't have wasted all the money. Turner saw the wisdom of the idea -- he said in his autobiography "This was the first time I got hip to two-track stereo" -- and after consulting with the engineer on the session, he decided to go ahead with Bullock's plan. The plan still caused problems, because they were recording the song in a key written for a man, so Bullock had to yell more than sing, causing problems for the engineer, who according to Turner kept saying things like "Goddammit, don't holler in my microphone". But it was only a demo vocal, after all, and they got it cut -- and as Lassiter didn't show up, Turner took Lassiter's backing vocal group as his own new group, renaming the Artettes to the Ikettes, and they became the first of a whole series of lineups of Ikettes who would record with Turner for the rest of his life. The intention was still to get Lassiter to sing lead on the record, but then Turner played an acetate of it at a club night where he was DJing as well as performing, and the kids apparently went wild: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] Turner took the demo to Juggy Murray at Sue Records, still with the intention of replacing Anna Mae's vocal with Lassiter's, but Murray insisted that that was the best thing about the record, and that it should be released exactly as it was, that it was a guaranteed hit. Although -- while that's the story that's told all the time about that record by everyone involved in the recording and release, and seems uncontested, there does seem to be one minor problem with the story, which is that the Ikettes sing "you know you love him, you can't understand/Why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man". I'm willing to be proved wrong, of course, but my suspicion is that Ike Turner wasn't such a progressive thinker that he was writing songs about male-male relationships in 1960. It's possible that the Ikettes were recorded on the same track as Tina's guide vocals, but if the intention was to overdub a new lead from Lassiter on an otherwise finished track, it would have made more sense for them to sing their finished backing vocal part. It seems more likely to me that they decided in the studio that the record was going to go out with Anna Mae singing lead, and the idea of Murray insisting is a later exaggeration. One thing that doesn't seem to be an exaggeration, though, is that initially Murray wanted the record to go out as by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm featuring Little Ann, but Turner had other ideas. While Murray insisted "the girl is the star", Turner knew what happened when other people were the credited stars on his records. He didn't want another Jackie Brenston, having a hit and immediately leaving Turner right back where he started. If Little Ann was the credited singer, Little Ann would become a star and Ike Turner would have to find a new singer. So he came up with a pseudonym. Turner was a fan of jungle women in film serials and TV, and he thought a wild-woman persona would suit Anna Mae's yelled vocal, and so he named his new star after Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a female Tarzan knock-off comic character created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in the thirties, but who Turner probably knew from a TV series that had been on in 1955 and 56. He gave her his surname, changed "Sheena" slightly to make the new name alliterative and always at least claimed to have registered a trademark on the name he came up with, so if Anna Mae ever left the band he could just get a new singer to use the name. Anna Mae Bullock was now Tina Turner, and the record went out as by "Ike and Tina Turner": [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and hit the top thirty on the pop charts, too. But there were already problems. After Ike had had a second son with Lorraine, he then got Tina pregnant with another of his children, still seeing both women. He had already started behaving abusively towards Tina, and as well as being pregnant, she was suffering from jaundice -- she says in the first of her two autobiographies that she distinctly remembered lying in her hospital bed, hearing "A Fool in Love" on the radio, and thinking "What's love got to do with it?", though as with all such self-mythologising we should take this with a pinch of salt. Turner was in need of money to pay for lawyers -- he had been arrested for financial crimes involving forged cheques -- and Juggy Murray wouldn't give him an advance until he delivered a follow-up to "A Fool in Love", so he insisted that Tina sneak herself out of the hospital and go into the studio, jaundiced and pregnant, to record the follow-up. Then, as soon as the jaundice had cleared up, they went on a four-month tour, with Tina heavily pregnant, to make enough money to pay Ike's legal bills. Turner worked his band relentlessly -- he would accept literally any gig, even tiny clubs with only a hundred people in the audience, reasoning that it was better for the band's image to play  small venues that had to turn people away because they were packed to capacity, than to play large venues that were only half full. While "A Fool in Love" had a substantial white audience, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was almost the epitome of the chitlin' circuit act, playing exciting, funky, tightly-choreographed shows for almost entirely Black audiences in much the same way as James Brown, and Ike Turner was in control of every aspect of the show. When Tina had to go into hospital to give birth, rather than give up the money from gigging, Ike hired a sex worker who bore a slight resemblance to Tina to be the new onstage "Tina Turner" until the real one was able to perform again. One of the Ikettes told the real Tina, who discharged herself from hospital, travelled to the venue, beat up the fake Tina, and took her place on stage two days after giving birth. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with the Kings of Rhythm backing Tina, the Ikettes, and male singer Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had solo spots, were an astonishing live act, but they were only intermittently successful on record. None of the three follow-ups to "A Fool in Love" did better than number eighty-two on the charts, and two of them didn't even make the R&B charts, though "I Idolize You" did make the R&B top five. Their next big hit came courtesy of Mickey and Sylvia. You may remember us talking about Mickey and Sylvia way back in episode forty-nine, from back in 2019, but if you don't, they were one of a series of R&B duet acts, like Gene and Eunice, who came up after the success of Shirley and Lee, and their big hit was "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] By 1961, their career had more or less ended, but they'd recorded a song co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, which had gone unreleased: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] When that was shelved they remade it as an Ike and Tina Turner record, with Mickey and Sylvia being Ike -- Sylvia took on all the roles that Ike would normally do in the studio, arranging the track and playing lead guitar, as well as joining the Ikettes on backing vocals, while Mickey did the spoken answering vocals that most listeners assumed were Ike, and which Ike would replicate on stage. The result, unsurprisingly, sounded more like a Mickey and Sylvia record than anything Ike and Tina had ever released before, though it's very obviously Tina on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That made the top twenty on the pop charts -- though it would be their last top forty hit for nearly a decade as Ike and Tina Turner. They did though have a couple of other hits as the Ikettes, with Ike Turner putting the girl group's name on the label so he could record for multiple labels. The first of these, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)" was a song Ike had written which would later go on to become something of an R&B standard. It featured Dolores Johnson on lead vocals, but Tina sang backing vocals and got a rare co-production credit: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] The other Ikettes top forty hit was in 1965, with a song written by Steve Venet and Tommy Boyce -- a songwriter we will be hearing more about in three weeks -- and produced by Venet: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches 'n' Cream"] Ike wasn't keen on that record at first, but soon came round to it when it hit the charts. The success of that record caused that lineup of Ikettes to split from Ike and Tina -- the Ikettes had become a successful act in their own right, and Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars wanted to book them, but that would have meant they wouldn't be available for Ike and Tina shows. So Ike sent a different group of three girls out on the road with Clark's tour, keeping the original Ikettes back to record and tour with him, and didn't pay them any royalties on their records. They resented being unable to capitalise on their big hit, so they quit. At first they tried to keep the Ikettes name for themselves, and got Tina Turner's sister Alline to manage them, but eventually they changed their name to the Mirettes, and released a few semi-successful records. Ike got another trio of Ikettes to replace them, and carried on with Pat Arnold, Gloria Scott, and Maxine Smith as the new Ikettes,. One Ikette did remain pretty much throughout -- a woman called Ann Thomas, who Ike Turner was sleeping with, and who he would much later marry, but who he always claimed was never allowed to sing with the others, but was just there for her looks. By this point Ike and Tina had married, though Ike had not divorced any of his previous wives (though he paid some of them off when Ike and Tina became big). Ike and Tina's marriage in Tijuana was not remembered by either of them as a particularly happy experience -- Ike would always later insist that it wasn't a legal marriage at all, and in fact that it was the only one of his many, many, marriages that hadn't been, and was just a joke. He was regularly abusing her in the most horrific ways, but at this point the duo still seemed to the public to be perfectly matched. They actually only ended up on the Big TNT Show as a last-minute thing -- another act was sick, though none of my references mention who it was who got sick, just that someone was needed to fill in for them, and as Ike and Tina were now based in LA -- the country boy Ike had finally become a city boy after all -- and would take any job on no notice, they got the gig. Phil Spector was impressed, and he decided that he could revitalise his career by producing a hit for Tina Turner. There was only one thing wrong -- Tina Turner wasn't an act. *Ike* and Tina Turner was an act. And Ike Turner was a control freak, just like Spector was -- the two men had essentially the same personality, and Spector didn't want to work with someone else who would want to be in charge. After some negotiation, they came to an agreement -- Spector could produce a Tina Turner record, but it would be released as an Ike and Tina Turner record. Ike would be paid twenty thousand dollars for his services, and those services would consist of staying well away from the studio and not interfering. Spector was going to go back to the old formulas that had worked for him, and work with the people who had contributed to his past successes, rather than leaving anything to chance. Jack Nitzsche had had a bit of a falling out with him and not worked on some of the singles he'd produced recently, but he was back. And Spector was going to work with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich again. He'd fallen out with Barry and Greenwich when "Chapel of Love" had been a hit for the Dixie Cups rather than for one of Spector's own artists, and he'd been working with Mann and Weill and Goffin and King instead. But he knew that it was Barry and Greenwich who were the ones who had worked best with him, and who understood his musical needs best, so he actually travelled to see them in New York instead of getting them to come to him in LA, as a peace offering and a sign of how much he valued their input. The only problem was that Spector hadn't realised that Barry and Greenwich had actually split up.  They were still working together in the studio, and indeed had just produced a minor hit single for a new act on Bert Berns' label BANG, for which Greenwich had written the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] We'll hear more about Neil Diamond, and about Jeff Barry's work with him, in three weeks. But Barry and Greenwich were going through a divorce and weren't writing together any more, and came back together for one last writing session with Spector, at which, apparently, Ellie Greenwich would cry every time they wrote a line about love. The session produced four songs, of which two became singles. Barry produced a version of "I Can Hear Music", written at these sessions, for the Ronettes, who Spector was no longer interested in producing himself: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] That only made number ninety-nine on the charts, but the song was later a hit for the Beach Boys and has become recognised as a classic. The other song they wrote in those sessions, though, was the one that Spector wanted to give to Tina Turner. "River Deep, Mountain High" was a true three-way collaboration -- Greenwich came up with the music for the verses, Spector for the choruses, and Barry wrote the lyrics and tweaked the melody slightly. Spector, Barry, and Greenwich spent two weeks in their writing session, mostly spent on "River Deep, Mountain High". Spector later said of the writing "Every time we'd write a love line, Ellie would start to cry. I couldn't figure out what was happening, and then I realised… it was a very uncomfortable situation. We wrote that, and we wrote ‘I Can Hear Music'…. We wrote three or four hit songs on that one writing session. “The whole thing about ‘River Deep' was the way I could feel that strong bass line. That's how it started. And then Jeff came up with the opening line. I wanted a tender song about a chick who loved somebody very much, but a different way of expressing it. So we came up with the rag doll and ‘I'm going to cuddle you like a little puppy'. And the idea was really built for Tina, just like ‘Lovin' Feelin” was built for the Righteous Brothers.” Spector spent weeks recording, remixing, rerecording, and reremixing the backing track, arranged by Nitzsche, creating the most thunderous, overblown, example of the Wall of Sound he had ever created, before getting Tina into the studio. He also spent weeks rehearsing Tina on the song, and according to her most of what he did was "carefully stripping away all traces of Ike from my performance" -- she was belting the song and adding embellishments, the way Ike Turner had always taught her to, and Spector kept insisting that she just sing the melody -- something that she had never had the opportunity to do before, and which she thought was wonderful. It was so different from anything else that she'd recorded that after each session, when Ike would ask her about the song, she would go completely blank -- she couldn't hold this pop song in her head except when she was running through it with Spector. Eventually she did remember it, and when she did Ike was not impressed, though the record became one of the definitive pop records of all time: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] Spector was putting everything on the line for this record, which was intended to be his great comeback and masterpiece. That one track cost more than twenty thousand dollars to record -- an absolute fortune at a time when a single would normally be recorded in one or two sessions at most. It also required a lot of work on Tina's part. She later estimated that she had sung the opening line of the song a thousand times before Spector allowed her to move on to the second line, and talked about how she got so hot and sweaty singing the song over and over that she had to take her blouse off in the studio and sing the song in her bra. She later said "I still don't know what he wanted. I still don't know if I pleased him. But I never stopped trying." Spector produced a total of six tracks with Tina, including the other two songs written at those Barry and Greenwich sessions, "I'll Never Need More Than This", which became the second single released off the "River Deep, Mountain High" album, and "Hold On Baby", plus cover versions of Arthur Alexander's "Every Day I Have to Cry Some", Pomus and Shuman's "Save the Last Dance", and "A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)" a Holland-Dozier-Holland song which had originally been released as a Martha and the Vandellas B-side. The planned album was to be padded out with six tracks produced by Ike Turner, mostly remakes of the duo's earlier hits, and was planned for release after the single became the hit everyone knew it would. The single hit the Hot One Hundred soon after it was released: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] ...and got no higher up the charts than number eighty-eight. The failure of the record basically destroyed Spector, and while he had been an abusive husband before this, now he became much worse, as he essentially retired from music for four years, and became increasingly paranoid and aggressive towards the industry that he thought was not respectful enough of his genius. There have been several different hypotheses as to why "River Deep Mountain High" was not a success. Some have said that it was simply because DJs were fed up of Spector refusing to pay payola, and had been looking for a reason to take him down a peg. Ike Turner thought it was due to racism, saying later “See, what's wrong with America, I think, is that rather than accept something for its value… what it's doing, America mixes race in it. You can't call that record R&B. But because it's Tina… if you had not put Tina's name on there and put ‘Joe Blow', then the Top 40 stations would have accepted it for being a pop record. But Tina Turner… they want to brand her as being an R&B artist. I think the main reason that ‘River Deep' didn't make it here in America was that the R&B stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was pop, and the pop stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was R&B. And it didn't get played at all. The only record I've heard that could come close to that record is a record by the Beach Boys called ‘Good Vibrations'. I think these are the two records that I've heard in my life that I really like, you know?” Meanwhile, Jeff Barry thought it was partly the DJs but also faults in the record caused by Phil Spector's egomania, saying "he has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep' is terrible, he buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that… if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song – just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me, listen to that bass sound. …' That, to me, is what hurts in the long run... Also, I do think that the song is not as clear on the record as it should be, mix-wise. I don't want to use the word overproduced, because it isn't, it's just undermixed." There's possibly an element of all three of these factors in play. As we've discussed, 1965 seems to have been the year that the resegregation of American radio began, and the start of the long slow process of redefining genres so that rock and roll, still considered a predominantly Black music at the beginning of the sixties, was by the end of the decade considered an almost entirely white music. And it's also the case that "River Deep, Mountain High" was the most extreme production Spector ever committed to vinyl, and that Spector had made a lot of enemies in the music business. It's also, though, the case  that it was a genuinely great record: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] However, in the UK, it was promoted by Decca executive Tony Hall, who was a figure who straddled both sides of the entertainment world -- as part of his work as a music publicist he had been a presenter on Oh Boy!, written a column in Record Mirror, and presented a Radio Luxembourg show. Hall put his not-inconsiderable weight behind promoting the record, and it ended up reaching number two in the UK -- being successful enough that the album was also released over here, though it wouldn't come out in the US for several years. The record also attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who invited Ike and Tina to be their support act on a UK tour, which also featured the Yardbirds, and this would be a major change for the duo in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it got them properly in contact with British musicians -- and the Stones would get Ike and Tina as support artists several times over the next few years -- and also made the UK and Europe part of their regular tour itinerary. It also gave the duo their first big white rock audience, and over the next several years they would pivot more and more to performing music aimed at that audience, rather than the chitlin' circuit they'd been playing for previously. Ike was very conscious of wanting to move away from the blues and R&B -- while that was where he'd made his living as a musician, it wasn't music he actually liked, and he would often talk later about how much he respected Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, and how his favourite music was country music. Tina had also never been a fan of blues or R&B, and wanted to perform songs by the white British performers they were meeting. The tour also, though, gave Tina her first real thoughts of escape. She loved the UK and Europe, and started thinking about what life could be like for her not just being Ike Turner's wife and working fifty-one weeks a year at whatever gigs came along. But it also made that escape a little more difficult, because on the tour Tina lost one of her few confidantes in the organisation. Tina had helped Pat Arnold get away from her own abusive partner, and the two had become very close, but Arnold was increasingly uncomfortable being around Ike's abuse of Tina, and couldn't help her friend the way she'd been helped. She decided she needed to get out of a toxic situation, and decided to stay in England, where she'd struck up an affair with Mick Jagger, and where she found that there were many opportunities for her as a Black woman that simply hadn't been there in the US. (This is not to say that Britain doesn't have problems with racism -- it very much does, but those problems are *different* problems than the ones that the US had at that point, and Arnold found Britain's attitude more congenial to her personally). There was also another aspect, which a lot of Black female singers of her generation have mentioned and which probably applies here. Many Black women have said that they were astonished on visiting Britain to be hailed as great singers, when they thought of themselves as merely average. Britain does not have the kind of Black churches which had taught generations of Black American women to sing gospel, and so singers who in the US thought of themselves as merely OK would be far, far, better than any singers in the UK -- the technical standards were just so much lower here. (This is something that was still true at least as late as the mid-eighties. Bob Geldof talks in his autobiography about attending the recording session for "We Are the World" after having previously recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and being astonished at how much more technically skilled the American stars were and how much more seriously they took their craft.) And Arnold wasn't just an adequate singer -- she was and is a genuinely great talent -- and so she quickly found herself in demand in the UK. Jagger got her signed to Immediate Records, a new label that had been started up by the Stones manager Andrew Oldham, and where Jimmy Page was the staff producer. She was given a new name, P.P. Arnold, which was meant to remind people of another American import, P.J. Proby, but which she disliked because the initials spelled "peepee". Her first single on the label, produced by Jagger, did nothing, but her second single, written by a then-unknown songwriter named Cat Stevens, became a big hit: [Excerpt: P.P. Arnold, "The First Cut is the Deepest"] She toured with a backing band, The Nice, and made records as a backing singer with artists like the Small Faces. She also recorded a duet with the unknown singer Rod Stewart, though that wasn't a success: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] We'll be hearing more about P.P. Arnold in future episodes, but the upshot of her success was that Tina had even fewer people to support her. The next few years were increasingly difficult for Tina, as Ike turned to cocaine use in a big way, became increasingly violent, and his abuse of her became much more violent. The descriptions of his behaviour in Tina's two volumes of autobiography are utterly harrowing, and I won't go into them in detail, except to say that nobody should have to suffer what she did. Ike's autobiography, on the other hand, has him attempting to defend himself, even while admitting to several of the most heinous allegations, by saying he didn't beat his wife any more than most men did. Now the sad thing is that this may well be true, at least among his peer group. Turner's behaviour was no worse than behaviour from, say, James Brown or Brian Jones or Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis, and it may well be that behaviour like this was common enough among people he knew that Turner's behaviour didn't stand out at all. His abuse has become much better-known, because the person he was attacking happened to become one of the biggest stars in the world, while the women they attacked didn't. But that of course doesn't make what Ike did to Tina any better -- it just makes it infinitely sadder that so many more people suffered that way. In 1968, Tina actually tried to take her own life -- and she was so fearful of Ike that when she overdosed, she timed it so that she thought she would be able to at least get on stage and start the first song before collapsing, knowing that their contract required her to do that for Ike to get paid. As it was, one of the Ikettes noticed the tablets she had taken had made her so out of it she'd drawn a line across her face with her eyebrow pencil. She was hospitalised, and according to both Ike and Tina's reports, she was comatose and her heart actually stopped beating, but then Ike started yelling at her, saying if she wanted to die why didn't she do it by jumping in front of a truck, rather than leaving him with hospital bills, and telling her to go ahead and die if this was how she was going to treat him -- and she was so scared of Ike her heart started up again. (This does not seem medically likely to me, but I wasn't there, and they both were). Of course, Ike frames this as compassion and tough love. I would have different words for it myself. Tina would make several more suicide attempts over the years, but even as Tina's life was falling apart, the duo's professional career was on the up. They started playing more shows in the UK, and they toured the US as support for the Rolling Stones. They also started having hits again, after switching to performing funked-up cover versions of contemporary hits. They had a minor hit with a double-sided single of the Beatles' "Come Together" and the Stones' "Honky-Tonk Women", then a bigger one with a version of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher", then had their biggest hit ever with "Proud Mary". It's likely we'll be looking at Creedence Clearwater Revival's original version of that song at some point, but while Ike Turner disliked the original, Tina liked it, and Ike also became convinced of the song's merits by hearing a version by The Checkmates Ltd: [Excerpt: The Checkmates Ltd, "Proud Mary"] That was produced by Phil Spector, who came briefly out of his self-imposed exile from the music business in 1969 to produce a couple of singles for the Checkmates and Ronnie Spector. That version inspired Ike and Tina's recording of the song, which went to number four on the charts and won them a Grammy award in 1971: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Proud Mary"] Ike was also investing the money they were making into their music. He built his own state-of-the-art studio, Bolic Sound, which Tina always claimed was a nod to her maiden name, Bullock, but which he later always said was a coincidence. Several other acts hired the studio, especially people in Frank Zappa's orbit -- Flo and Eddie recorded their first album as a duo there, and Zappa recorded big chunks of Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe('), two of his most successful albums, at the studio. Acts hiring Bolic Sound also got Tina and the Ikettes on backing vocals if they wanted them, and so for example Tina is one of the backing vocalists on Zappa's "Cosmik Debris": [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Cosmik Debris"] One of the most difficult things she ever had to sing in her life was this passage in Zappa's song "Montana", which took the Ikettes several days' rehearsal to get right. [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "Montana"] She was apparently so excited at having got that passage right that she called Ike out of his own session to come in and listen, but Ike was very much unimpressed, and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said “I don't know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long. He treated her terribly and she's a really nice lady. We were recording down there on a Sunday. She wasn't involved with the session, but she came in on Sunday with a whole pot of stew that she brought for everyone working in the studio. Like out of nowhere, here's Tina Turner coming in with a rag on her head bringing a pot of stew. It was really nice.” By this point, Ike was unimpressed by anything other than cocaine and women, who he mostly got to sleep with him by having truly gargantuan amounts of cocaine around. As Ike was descending further into paranoia and abuse, though, Tina was coming into her own. She wrote "Nutbush City Limits" about the town where she grew up, and it reached number 22 on the charts -- higher than any song Ike ever wrote: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Nutbush City Limits"] Of course, Ike would later claim that he wrote the music and let Tina keep all the credit. Tina was also asked by the Who to appear in the film version of their rock opera Tommy, where her performance of "Acid Queen" was one of the highlights: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Acid Queen"] And while she was filming that in London, she was invited to guest on a TV show with Ann-Margret, who was a huge fan of Ike and Tina, and duetted with Tina -- but not Ike -- on a medley of her hits: [Excerpt: Tina Turner and Ann-Margret, "Nutbush City Limits/Honky Tonk Woman"] Just as with "River Deep, Mountain High", Tina was wanted for her own talents, independent of Ike. She was starting to see that as well as being an abusive husband, he was also not necessary for her to have a career. She was also starting to find parts of her life that she could have for herself, independent of her husband. She'd been introduced to Buddhist meditation by a friend, and took it up in a big way, much to Ike's disapproval. Things finally came to a head in July 1976, in Dallas, when Ike started beating her up and for the first time she fought back. She pretended to reconcile with him, waited for him to fall asleep, and ran across a busy interstate, almost getting hit by a ten-wheel truck, to get to another hotel she could see in the distance. Luckily, even though she had no money, and she was a Black woman in Dallas, not a city known for its enlightened attitudes in the 1970s, the manager of the Ramada Inn took pity on her and let her stay there for a while until she could get in touch with Buddhist friends. She spent the next few months living off the kindness of strangers, before making arrangements with Rhonda Graam, who had started working for Ike and Tina in 1964 as a fan, but had soon become indispensable to the organisation. Graam sided with Tina, and while still supposedly working for Ike she started putting together appearances for Tina on TV shows like Cher's. Cher was a fan of Tina's work, and was another woman trying to build a career after leaving an abusive husband who had been her musical partner: [Excerpt: Cher and Tina Turner, "Makin' Music is My Business"] Graam became Tina's full-time assistant, as well as her best friend, and remained part of her life until Graam's death a year ago. She also got Tina booked in to club gigs, but for a long time they found it hard to get bookings -- promoters would say she was "only half the act". Ike still wanted the duo to work together professionally, if not be a couple, but Tina absolutely refused, and Ike had gangster friends of his shoot up Graam's car, and Tina heard rumours that he was planning to hire a hit man to come after her. Tina filed for divorce, and gave Ike everything -- all the money the couple had earned together in sixteen years of work, all the property, all the intellectual property -- except for two cars, one of which Ike had given her and one which Sammy Davis Jr. had given her, and the one truly important thing -- the right to use the name "Tina Turner", which Ike had the trademark on. Ike had apparently been planning to hire someone else to perform as "Tina Turner" and carry on as if nothing had changed. Slowly, Tina built her career back up, though it was not without its missteps. She got a new manager, who also managed Olivia Newton-John, and the manager brought in a song he thought was perfect for Tina. She turned it down, and Newton-John recorded it instead: [Excerpt: Olivia Newton-John, "Physical"] But even while she was still playing small clubs, her old fans from the British rock scene were boosting her career. In 1981, after Rod Stewart saw her playing a club gig and singing his song "Hot Legs", he invited her to guest with him and perform the song on Saturday Night Live: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, "Hot Legs"] The Rolling Stones invited Tina to be their support act on a US tour, and to sing "Honky Tonk Women" on stage with them, and eventually when David Bowie, who was at the height of his fame at that point, told his record label he was going to see her on a night that EMI wanted to do an event for him, half the record industry showed up to the gig. She had already recorded a remake of the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" with the British Electric Foundation -- a side project for two of the members of Heaven 17 -- in 1982, for one of their albums: [Excerpt: British Electric Foundation, "Ball of Confusion"] Now they were brought in to produce a new single for her, a remake of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together": [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Let's Stay Together"] That made the top thirty in the US, and was a moderate hit in many places, making the top ten in the UK. She followed it up with another BEF production, a remake of "Help!" by the Beatles, which appears only to have been released in mainland Europe. But then came the big hit: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "What's Love Got to Do With It?"] wenty-six years after she started performing with Ike, Tina Turner was suddenly a major star. She had a string of successes throughout the eighties and nineties, with more hit records, film appearances, a successful autobiography, a film based on the autobiography, and record-setting concert appearan

It's the BBC's 99th birthday! Well it was on the day this episode landed. So for episode 37, here's the podcast's story so far...   Between season 2 (covering the BBC in 1922) and season 3 (the BBC in 1923), we're on a run of specials. So here we summarise EVERYTHING we've learned so far. 36 episodes condensed into one.   Condensed, yet also extended - because we recorded a shorter version of this episode for The History of England Podcast. So to lure in folks who've heard that already, I've added a ton of new stuff, including some brand new bits. By which I mean, very old bits. As well as hearing the voices of: First teenager to listen to the radio in his bedroom GuglielmoMarconi First major broadcast engineer Captain HJ Round First voice of the BBC Arthur Burrows First regular broadcaster Peter Eckersley First slightly terrifying boss John Reith …You'll now also hear from: First broadcast singer Winifred Sayer First BBC pianist Maurice Cole (the most wonderful accent, “off" = "orff") First BBC singer Leonard Hawke (although WE know from episode 28 that the Birmingham and Manchester stations broadcast music the day before - but the BBC didn't know that) That's a lot of firsts. Plus more recent voices - hear from these marvellous experts: Professor Gabriele Balbi of USI Switzerland Marconi historian Tim Wander (buy his book From Marconi to Melba) Radio historian Gordon Bathgate (buy his book Radio Broadcasting: A History of the Airwaves)   SHOWNOTES: This podcast is NOTHING to do with the present-day BBC - it's entirely run, researched, presented and dogsbodied by Paul Kerensa You can email me to add something to the show. eg. Send your ‘Firsthand Memories' - in text form, a time you've seen radio or TV being broadcast before your eyes: a studio, an outside broadcast - what were your behind-the-scenes insights? Or record your ‘Airwave Memories' (AM) - a voice memo of 1-2mins of your earliest memories hearing/seeing radio/TV. Be on the podcast! My new one-man play The First Broadcast is now booking for dates in 2022. Got a venue? Book me for your place. Here's one - The Museum of Comedy. Join me, in April or in November on the very date of the BBC's 100th birthday! Thanks for joining us on Patreon if you do - or if you might! It supports the show, keeps it running, keeps me in books, which I then devour and add it all to the mixing-pot of research for this podcast. In return, I give you video, audio, advance writings, an occasional reading from C.A. Lewis' 1924 book Broadcasting From Within etc. Thanks if you've ever bought me a coffee at ko-fi.com/paulkerensa. Again, it all helps keep us afloat. Like our British Broadcasting Facebook page, or better still, join our British Broadcasting Century Facebook group where you can share your favourite old broadcasting things. Follow us on Twitter  if you're on the ol' Twits. I have another podcast of interviews, A Paul Kerensa Podcast, inc Miranda Hart, Tim Vine, Rev Richard Coles and many more. Give us a listen! Please rate and review this podcast where you found it... and keep liking/sharing/commenting on what we do online. It all helps others find us.  My mailing list is here - sign up for updates on all I do, writing, teaching writing, stand-up, radio etc. My books are available here or orderable from bookshops, inc Hark! The Biography of Christmas. Coming in 2022: a novel on all this radio malarkey. Archive clips are either public domain or used with kind permission from the BBC, copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. Oh yes they are. Next time: What Marconi Thought of Broadcasting - plus 1920s adverts, voiced by listeners...       APPROX TRANSCRIPT:   Marconi himself appeared on the BBC in 1936, playing himself in a reconstruction of when he first sent Morse code across the Atlantic in 1901...   Those are Marconi's last recorded words before he died, there with his assistants Pagett and Kemp, though Kemp was played by an actor. They're recreating the moment when they sent Morse Code from Poldhu in Cornwall to Newfoundland, 2000+ miles away. Prior to that 255 miles was the wireless record.   Marconi was always outdoing himself. As a teenager he'd sent radiowaves across his bedroom – a transmitter and receiver ringing a bell. Then outside, asking his assistant across a field to fire a gunshot if the wireless signal reached him. Then over water. Then... in 1896 the 21yr old Marconi came to England. The Italian army weren't interested in his new invention, so he thought he'd try the influential engineers of London. I think it's that decision that set London and the BBC as the beating heart of broadcasting a couple of decades later.   There was a magical moment where Marconi strode into Toynbee Hall in East London, with two boxes. They communicated, wirelessly, and he simply said: “My name is Gooly-elmo Marconi, and I have just invented wireless.” That's a drop mic moment. If they had a mic to drop.   Others played with this technology. In December 1906, Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden managed to make a very faint speech broadcast for ships near Brant Rock Massachusetts – making the first entertainment show for radio. He played a record, Handel's Largo, played O Holy Night on violin, and read from Luke's gospel, chapter 2. Well it was Christmas Eve.   This was actually my way in to this whole radio story. I wrote a book on the history of Christmas, called Hark! The b of C. So I researched Fesseden's Christmas entertainment first... and also the first BBC Christmas of 1922. When I read that the Beeb had 35,000 listeners at that point, but 4 employees, I had to know who these 4 employees were! I started digging. When I discovered that 2 of those people had an on-air feud, one of them was John Reith, an arguably immoral moralist, and the 4th was soon sacked by him... I thought, there's a book in this. So as I research and write that, I'm podcasting as I go on the BBCentury. I love that this medium of podcasting owes so much to those early pioneers... and I'm no engineer. For me, it's all about the characters. We'll get to the BBC pioneers soon enough, but Marconi, he was one of those characters.   Through the 1910s, business was booming for Marconi, but he still saw radio as a two-way thing – we ‘radio' for help. Marconi took the credit for radio's use in catching criminals – Dr Crippen, who'd escaped on a ship across the ocean. And saving lives, onboard Titanic. Soon every major vessel carried radios and a Marconi operator – for a fee of course. He made his money in sending messages, the world over, between two people. The broadcast aspect was an accident – a pitfall of radio being too ‘leaky'. So the first listeners were actually called ‘listeners-in' – the messages weren't intended for them.   So it was at a more amateur level – the radio hams – who'd be experimenting with ‘broadcasting'. Britain's first DJ, technically, was a woman called Gertrude Donisthorpe in WWI. Her husband Horace was the eager experimenter, an army wireless trainer by day, and at night the couple would cycle to a field near Worcester, he'd set up one side, her on the other, and she'd play records and recite rhymes just for her audience of 1 – her husband, to see if it worked. She'd cycle across the field to see if it had, often finding he'd cycled off to tell her via a different route. As they progressed, they started transmitting limited wireless concerts for some local troops. And they were popular. Radio amateurs enjoyed what they heard, when they could hear it. There was demand for wireless entertainment... just not much supply.   But the engineers like those at the Marconi Company, were continually strengthening and improving the technology. Marconi's right-hand man Captain Round for example...   No fan of red tape... this Churchill lookalike, round face, cigars and no-nonsense... joined 1902, genius... designed radios... especially for aircraft... Jutland direction-finding... But Captain Round is a name to watch.   After the war, 1919, just months from the birth of broadcasting, The Marconi Company still had no real interest in radio as an artform or entertainment or anything other than point to point messaging. Apart from one person, their Head of Publicity, Arthur Burrows...   In 1918 Burrows wrote: “There appears to be no serious reason why, before we are many years older, politicians speaking, say, in Parliament, should not be heard simultaneously by wireless in the reporting room of every newspaper office in the United Kingdom. . . . The field of wireless telephone, however, is by no means restricted to newspaper work. The same idea might be extended to make possible the correct reproduction in all private residences of Albert Hall or Queen's Hall concerts or the important recitals at the lesser rendezvous of the musical world. . . . There would be no technical difficulty in the way of an enterprising advertisement agency arranging for the interval in the musical programme to be filled with audible advertisements, pathetic or forcible appeals—in appropriate tones—on behalf of somebody's soap or tomato ketchup.” We'll come back to Arthur Burrows.   Around the same time in America, future radio mogul David Sarnoff sent a memo referring to a “radio music box”, that could “listeners-in” could have in their homes, playing the music broadcast by wireless stations, that were cropping up, especially in America, and a steadily increasing rate.   In Britain, Captain Round of the Marconi Company continued to experiment. Rightly medalled after the war, he switched his attention from using radio to find enemy ships, to using radio to transmit the human voice further and stronger than ever before. This meant tests.   Now the nature of radio, the quirk of it, is that it's not private. You can't experiment without anyone with a set listening in – and since the war there were more and more ex wireless operators and amateur radio “hams”. So as Round experimented, in Chelmsford at the end of 1919, with his assistant William Ditcham, across Britain and even into Europe, people heard him. Ditcham had to read out something into his microphone – just the candlestick part of an old telephone. Ditcham would begin by addressing those listening – the ‘leaky' nature of these radio experiments meant the engineers actually used those cheekly listening in to find their range and signal strength. So Ditcham would begin: “MZX calling, MZX calling! This is the Marconi valve transmitter in Chelmsford, England, testing on a wavelength of 2750metres. How are our signals coming in today? Can you hear us clearly? I will now recite to you my usual collection of British railway stations for test purposes... ...The Great Northern Railway starts Kings cross, London, and the North Western Railway starts from Euston. The Midland railway starts from St Pancras. The Great Western Railway starts from...”   Railway timetables! And they were a hit. Mr Ditcham became an expert is this new art of broadcasting, before the word was even invented. He noted: “Distinct enunciation is essential and it's desirable to speak in as loud a tone as possible!”   Word spread. Letters to newspapers said how much radio amateurs were enjoying Ditcham and Round's wireless experiments... but the content could do with being a bit more exciting. How about a newspaper?   So in January 1920, William Ditcham became our first broadcast newsreader, literally reading the news, from a paper he'd bought that morning. Well, he'd sit on it a day, and read yesterday's paper... The press might have a problem with their copyrighted news being given away for free. And thus begins the rocky relp between broadcasters and the press. It's worth keeping them on side...   In Jan 1920, there are 2 weeks of ‘Ditcham's News Service' – that's Britain's first programme title. That gains over 200 reports from listeners-in, as far as Spain, Portgula, Norway... up to 1500 mi away. So the transmitter is replaced, from 6kw to 15kw. Ditcham ups his game too. Throws in a gramophone record or two. 15mins of news, 15mins of music. A half hour in total – that seems a good length for a programme – really it was what the licence allowed, but it's clearly stuck – at least till Netflix and the like mean programme length has becoame a little more variable, a century later.   Then in Feb, there's live music – just a few fellow staff at the Marconi Works in Chelmsford, including Mr White on piano, Mr Beeton on oboe and Mr Higby on woodwind.   At Marconi HQ, Arthur Burrows, that publicity director who wrote of possible wireless concerts and ketchup sponsors, he gets behind this in a big way. He heads to Chelmsford, supports Ditcham and Round, and even joins the band. And you know who else joins the band...   ...from the neighbouring works building – Hoffman's Ball Bearings - a singer, Miss Winifred Sayer. Now as she's not a Marconi employee, she needs to be paid... so she's radio's first professional   Previous broadcasts had been a little luck of the draw, but this one, well it would be nice to tell people it's going to happen. So Captain Round sends out the first listings – the pre Radio Times, radio... times... you can hear Winifred Sayer and the band: 11am and 8pm, Feb 23rd till March 6th That memo goes out to all the Marconi land stations and ships at sea. The first song Winifred sang was called Absent – she later called it a “punch and judy show”, and enjoyed her ten shillings a show. As she left, the MD of Marconi's said to her: “You've just made history.”   So, we have radio, right? Not so fast! The fun is just beginning...   The press, you see, were worth keeping on side. The Daily Mail got wind of this. Arthur Burrows, that publicity chap and radio prophet, he became friends in the war with Tom Clarke, now editor of the Daily Mail. And the Mail loved a novelty. They'd sponsor air races and car dashes and design-a-top-hat competitions. Radio was right up their fleet street.   But they'd need a bigger singer than Winifred Sayer from Hoffman's Ball Bearings. They wanted to see how big an audience there'd be for broadcasting – a word just coming into use, a farming term, about how you spread seed, far and wide, scattershot, never quite knowing how far it reaches, and whether it will be well received and grow into something. So the Daily Mail fund one of the world's biggest singers: Dame Nellie Melba – of Peach Melba fame. She was over in England at the Albert Hall doing some shows, so for a thousand pounds – enough to buy a house – she came to Chelmsford. Outside broadcasts didn't exist at the time, given the size of the kit. Ditcham and Round prepared the Chelmsford Works building, although that involved a small fire, a carpet Melba rolled away as soon as she saw it, and a microphone made from an old cigar box and a hat rack. Arthur Burrows gave Madame Melba a tour when they weren't quite ready... She took one look at the 450ft radio mast and said “Young man if you think I'm going to climb up there, you are greatly mistaken.”   She broadcasts on June 15th 1920, and it's a huge hit, despite a shutdown just before finishing her last song. Captain Round makes her do it again, without telling her of the shutdown, by simply asking for an encore.   Arthur Burrows gives the opening and closing announcements, instead of William Ditcham, because this has been Burrows' dream. Broadcast radio concerts. So what next? It spanned Britain, reached Madrid, parts of the Middle East...   But it's too successful. The Air Ministry finds planes couldn't land during the concert. It dominated the airwaves. So despite a few extra professional concerts from Chelmsford that summer – opera stars like Lauritz Melchior, and Dame Clara Butt – the govt step in and shut all radio experiments down.   Arthur Burrows finds himself at sea, literally, that summer, demonstrating radio to the press on the way to an interionational press event... but without govt backing, journalists now see radio as maybe a means to communicate newsroom to newsroom. Ditcham's news and Melba's music seem to be all that broadcasting amounted to.   For 18 months, nothing. Radio amateurs, and indeed Arthur Burrows at Marconi, petition the PostmasterGeneral to reconsider. And finally... it worked.   Because while the ether had fallen silent in Britain, it continued in Holland, a bit in France, and in America radio is booming. Not wanting to be left behind, the British govt say ok, you can have one radio station. The Marconi Company is granted a permit. But much to Burrows dismay... the job lands on the desk of another person I want to introduce you to... Peter Eckersley   Eckersley was with the Designs Dept of the Aircraft Section of Marconi's. His team had helped create air traffic control; Eckersley had been there in the war for the first ground to air wireless communication, and now in their spare team, his team in a muddy field in the village of Writtle in Essex, not far from Chelmsford, would have to fit this broadcasting malarkey in in their spare time, for an extra pound a show, not much.   It was odd. Radio amateurs wanted it. Burrows the Marconi publicity guy wanted it. Eckersley and his team couldn't give two hoots about it – in fact they celebrated when the govt banned radio 18 months earlier, as finally the airwaves were clear for them and their serious work, instead of constant blinking opera from Chelmsford.   But it's Eckersley's job, to start Britain's first regular radio station: 2MT Writtle. And from Feb 14th 1920, for the first few weeks it sounds pretty normal. They play gramophone records, chosen by Arthur Burrows at head office. Burrows has arranged a sponsorship deal – not with ketchup with a gramophone company, who provide a player so long as it's mentioned on air. Peter Eckersley's team of boffins break the gramophone player. There was a live singer – the first song on the first regular broadcast radio show was the Floral Dance, though the Times called it only “faintly audible”. It is not a hit. For 5 weeks this continues, bland introductions to records, a live singer or two. And Peter Eckersley, the man in charge, goes home each night to hear the show his crew put out on the wireless. Until week 6, when he stays, for a pre-show gin and fish and chips and more gin at the pub. Then he... runs down the lane to the hut and reaches the microphone first! And he starts talking......   Eckersley talks and talks and mimics and carouses... He plays the fool, plays the gramophone records, off-centre, or covered in jam...   ...the strict licence meant closing down for 3mins in every 10, to listen for govt messages, in case they have to stop broadcasting. Eckersley doesn't shut down for 3mins. The licence limited them to half an hour. Not Eckersley. Over an hour later, he stops. And sleeps it off. Next day, his team gather round and tell him what he said.   Our man Arthur Burrows gets in touch. A stern admonishment! Burrows' dream of broadcasting, had been dashed on the rocks by Eckersley, a man drinking, on the rocks. But accompanying Burrows' angry missive came a postbag of listener fanmail. “We loved it” they said. “Do it again.” Burrows was a lone voice against Eckersley's antics, so the following Tuesday, and every Tuesday in 1922, Peter Eckersley seized the mic again and again.   Demand for radio sets boomed. Ports stopped receiving ships when Peter Eckersley was on. Parliament even closed their sessions early to hear him. He was our first radio star. And he helped spawn an industry.   Burrows is still fuming, but there is no greater demand for radio. So he applies for a 2nd licence, for a London station – let's do this radio thing properly. 2LO in London is granted that licence, and Burrows isn't taking any chances – HE will be the primary broadcaster.   Poetry readings, sports commentary, opening night boxing match. Later in the summer, garden party concerts. And as Burrows is a publicity and demonstration man, many of these broadcast concerts are for private institutions, charity events, a chance to show what broadcasting can do.   Other wireless manufacturers other than Marconi's express an interest, they ask the PMG for a licence to broadcast too. MetroVick in Manchester, they want in, so the PMG says fine. Kenneth Wright is the engineer at MetroVick who gets the job of launching in Manchester.   Wright continues in Manchester... Eck continues in Writtle in Essex... Burrows continues in London...   But Eckersley mocks Burrows. In fact people write to Arthur Burrows saying how much they enjoy his broadcasts on 2LO London, but could he stop broadcasting every Tuesday evening for the half hour Eckersley's on, cos listeners want to hear Eckersley lampoon Burrows. For instance, Burrows played the Westminster chimes in the studio – this is 18mths before Big Ben's chimes would be heard on the BBC. So Eckersley outdoes Burrows by finding all the pots, pans, bottles and scrap metal he can, and bashing it all with sticks. Messy chaos! He loved it.   He's another, retold by Eckersley and Burrows themselves, some 20 years apart... You see, both would close their broadcasts with a poem.   All through the spring and summer of 1922, each broadcast is still experimental. Official broadcasting hasn't quite yet begun – because no one knows if there's a future in this. In fact the Marconi Company largely thought all this was one big advert to show consumers how easy wireless communication is, and how they should all pay Marconi's to help them send point-to-point messages.   But the bug grows. The press want in. The Daily Mail apply for a licence for to set up a radio station. They're turned down – it would be too powerful for a a newspaper to have a radio station. It only took Times Radio 100 years...   In Westminster, the PostGen is inundated by applications for pop-up radio stations. He can't just keep licensing all of them. What is this, America?! Arthur Burrows...   In May 1922, the PostGen says to the wireless manufacturers, look. I can't have all of you setting up rival radio stations. But I will licence one or maybe two of you. Get together, chat it through, work out how you can work together.   For a while, it looks like there will be two british Broadcasting companies – a north and a south. Kenneth Wright...   ...but after weeks, even months of meetings, primareily with the big 6 wireless firms, an agreement is struck.   ...You may wonder where Reith is in all this. Wasn't he meant to be the fella who started the thing!? He arrives when the BBC is one month old. For now, he's leaving a factory management job in Scotland, settling down with his new wife, having moved on from a possibly gay affair with his best friend Charlie... and he's about to try a career in politics. He's never heard of broadcasting at this stage. But for those who have, in the summer of 1922, Parliament announces there will be one broadcasting company, funded by a licence fee.....   One British Broadcasting Company. Marconi, MetroVick, Western Electric, General Electric and so on... each will have one representative on the board of this BBC, and then broadcasting can continue, they'll all sell wireless radio sets, and to fund the operation, there'll be a licence fee.   The name ‘BBCo' is coined by one of the wireless manufacturer bosses in one of those meetings, Frank Gill, who notes in a memo before the name ‘broadcasting company', the word ‘British'. A few lines down, he's the first to write the word ‘pirates' regarding those broadcasting without a licence.   But there's one more hurdle to conquer – news. That takes some time to iron out with the press, and finally it's agreed that us broadcasters will lease the news from them, for a fee, and no daytime news, to ensure readers still bought papers.   The press and the broadcasters still have an uneasy relationship, so whenever you see the newspapers having a pop at the BBC, know that the Daily Mail sponsored the first ever broadcast with Dame Melba, they were turned down for a radio station when they applied, and for years they were annoyed this radio upstart was trying to steal their readers.   With the starting pistol sounded, Arthur Burrows gets his dream: he's convinced his employer, the Marconi Company that radio isn't just about sending messages to individuals, it's about reaching many listeners... or better still, it's still about reaching individuals, just lots of them. Flash forward to Terry Wogan's sad goodbye from his Radio 2 Breakfast Show. “Thank you for being my friend.” Singular. Radio – even podcasts like this – still speak to one listener at a time. I make a connection with you. Arthur Burrows and Peter Eckersley, were among the first to realise that.   But which of them would launch or join the BBC? The wild unpredictable Eckersley, who created demand for radio, and was still mocking Burrows in his field hut in an Essex village? Or the straight-laced Arthur Burrows, who's prophesied broadcasting for years?   I think we know the answer to that. Playing it safe, The Marconi Company kept 2LO as part of this new British Broadcasting Company, as well as 2ZY Manchester under MetroVick, and a new station in Birmingham, 5IT, run by Western Electric. Marconi's would also build new stations, in Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow, and more, growing in reach and ambition.   But it starts in London, on November 14th 1922, with a souped-up transmitter, rebuilt by good old Captain Round, the Marconi whizz who helped start it all. Arthur Burrows is before the mic, achieving his dream, to see broadcasting come to fruition. There are no recordings of that first broadcast, but we recreated it...   The next day, the Birmingham station 5IT launches – they quickly bring in the first regular children's presenters, Uncle Edgar and Uncle Tom. An hour after they launch, Manchester 2ZY starts under the BBC banner, with more children's programming there, plus an early home for an in-house BBC orchestra.   When the jobs go out for the this new BBC, bizarrely after it's actually launched, there are just 4 employees hired before the end of the year, and Burrows is first, a shoo-in for Director of Programmes. John Reith applies for General Managership, having tried a bit of politics, but been pointed towards the BBC advert by his MP boss. On arriving, one of the first things he says is: ‘So what is broadcasting?'   As for Peter Eckersley, he continues at 2MT Writtle, every Tuesday evening into January 1923. The only non-BBC station to share the airwaves till commercial, pirate or... well there's Radio Luxembourg but that's for a future episode. But Eckersley too is ultimately convinced to join the good ship BBC. And all it takes is an opera, broadcast live from the Royal Opera House in January 1923 – one of the first outside broadcasts.   A penny drops for Eckersley, and he realises the power and potential of this broadcasting lark. Reith convinces him to stop his frivolous Tuesday show in Essex, and offers him a job as the BBC's first Chief Engineer. And here Eckersley prospers, giving us new technology, nationwide broadcasting, the world's first high-power long-wave transmitter at Daventry, he brings choice to the airwaves, with a regional and national scheme. Without Burrows, without Eckersley, without Reith, British broadcasting would look very different.   There's one other name, among many, I'm particularly enthusiastic about: Hilda Matheson. An ex-spy who becomes the first Director of Talks, who reinvents talk radio and gives us the basis for Radio 4 and speech radio and indeed podcasting, you could argue, as we know it. She's a fascinating character – part of a gay love triangle with the poet Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf. She's the only BBC employee allowed to bring a dog to work.   And so much more, we'll unpack on the British Broadcasting Century podcast, plus the Pips, the Proms, the Radio Times, and everything else you know and love, tolerate or loathe about British broadcasting today.  

My guest today is fan and blogger, Weronika Cyrynger. Born and brought up in Poland, Weronika is developing a growing following with her blog David Cassidy Being Together (talkingaboutdavid.blogspot.com) . A former teacher and librarian she started her unique blog last December writing about his career from rock star to Broadway actor, offering fresh, original content. In our conversation, she talks about growing up in a communist country, the importance of Radio Luxembourg in those years, and how being a Cassidy fan opened up a world of travel allowing her to build friendships across the globe. Listen and Follow on Apple  The David Cassidy Connections on Apple Podcasts Listen and Follow on Google Google Podcasts - the david cassidy connections Listen and Follow on Spotify The David Cassidy Connections | Podcast on Spotify Louise's Twitter @LouisePoynton David Cassidy Rocks @CassidyUnited