Radio is magic

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
I am a big fan of radio and its various modern incarnations. There is a lot of shit talk about people now having everything on demand and 'consumers' wanting to cherry pick the best tunes from an album and all that. In parallel, words like 'curate' have been debased by all sorts of self-important posturing.

Beyond strictly music I gobble up lot of podcasts, documentary, drama and discussions on all sorts of subjects. Obviously people are often subject to absolute dross and monotony as part of their work day but at the same time, the "radio" format feels like the last place where you still find the committed and obsessives, on both sides of the microphone. That wonderful blogging of the last decade never quite made or survived the transition to mainstream (and paid) publication and at best remains marginal. We all know know the names and posts from long abandoned blogspot accounts but that standard and level of ingenuity appears only sporadically in the online press. (you only need look at the death of Bowie where one generation couldn't see beyond the 90s and another, by and large, are incapable of writing without the aid of a press release)

'Radio' and that format where someone has to put together an hour for broadcast still holds a vitality rarely found elsewhere. No doubt many of DJs on somewhere like Rinse or NTS put serious effort to prepare their show and I will always big up the likes of Spooky (as one of the last peope keeping old skool pirate patter alive and) seemingly doing seven shows a week if possible, but the straight DJ mix show often makes me long for the style that (for want of a example that everyone would understand) Peel, where you get a bit talk, history and anecdote in between tracks.

1521559_10153692580020123_259223273_n.jpg


I listen to a lot of stuff where a couple of friends or acquaintances with a mic will record six episodes of wild shit and never be heard from again. The may only be brought together not by geography or history but passion for a subject or concept This might just be from some regional town in Ireland or abroad with a soundclud account or even on NTS they do an hour of field recordings or an hour what you could barely descibe as music at three on a wet Wednesday afternoon. IntergalacticFM, or even Resonance, likewise have such an open minded ethos and willingness to push and exploit the medium

The BBC , for all its faults, remains a standard for how to do radio and US campus stations have been a big influence. Obviously, London pirates have been a constant of this forum and to me, some tunes will never sound as good as when you listen back to old Stretch and Bobbito shows but beyond that I would be interested in what others think of the format and what you are listening to. Whether released this week or 30 years old.

Broadcasting is still magic and I'm sure there were shows that every scene once revolved around that I still haven't heard of. Who ruled the airwaves in Jamaica for example? Was the Electrifying Mojo or Hot Mix 5 really ground zero in their cities? There are some incredible New York radio sets in the 80s from the likes of Pettibone, Merlin Bobb and Tony Humpreys. I grew up too far from Dublin and the grass roots pirate era to have underground radio butradio was essential and we always chipped in for batteries to keep it going all night, every Saturda from 6pm to 6am (and till seven - "the 13th hour" when we were first introduced to more ambient out there stuff) radio remained a vital connection to music. What stations, shows and DJs influenced you growing up?
 
Last edited:

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
most important show for me was tim westwood on capital and then radio 1 (still have tapes of it). and then dj 279. basically all the rap and R&B shows at the time. choice fm was pretty key. i wish i could say john peel, but my listening tastes were pretty narrow until i went to university!

last time i was taping stuff was when grime was still new-ish and when funky was big.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I keep thinking I'd like to start doing a radio show (online) or a podcast, but I hate the sound of my voice when I hear it on recordings. I spend more time listening to podcasts than music these days, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

I agree about the prepared format being special, though so is the live spontaneity of pirate radio (which doesn't seem to really exist anymore?)...

I agree also that radio is a nice antidote to our current culture of listening to only what you seek out (even though that could be basically anything). There's no surprises anymore. Whenever I turn on 1Xtra for an hour I always hear a few tunes I never would have sought out or bothered with.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
most important show for me was tim westwood on capital and then radio 1 (still have tapes of it). and then dj 279. basically all the rap and R&B shows at the time. choice fm was pretty key. i wish i could say john peel, but my listening tastes were pretty narrow until i went to university!

last time i was taping stuff was when grime was still new-ish and when funky was big.

I really wish I had kept my tapes of Westwood's shows from around 1998 when I listened as often as possible.
 

luka

Well-known member
Pulse fm 90.6 first of all, nicky blackmarket and a bunch of people i cant remember
weekend rush and kool further down the line. shows i liked on that was ron and five o, brokie and det, swift and naviagator, dj jinx, tonic and remadee, ash and coe gee, etc
really religious sense of mission around '93 with kool, and 5-O especially. very inspirational. hairs on the back of the neck etc. evangelical fervour.


i didnt really do freek and london underground much, they were probably the garage pioneers. too tasteful for me. did majick (however they spelt it) passion fm, de ja,
mission,
supreeme team with preshsus and starkey, heartless obviously, major ace floating about (run tings like my name was ceaser getting leaner off bacardi breezer) reaper, tek... those people who were floating about underneath the biggest names

then into grime days rinse raw mission, de ja
nasty crew show every week. taped most of those specials, jammers birthday, young man standings etc de ja was my station then really. rinse tended to be a bit dull in comparison. would try out the championship and league one strugglers sometimes too. crews control, desire etc
plus people like frisky and randy c doing the breakfast host geezer daytime radio thing so well
knights of the round table doing the junior heartless routine, loved that

also istened to those 'community' radio stations all through that period. ragga fm, station fm, klymaxx, all that lot. that voiceover man everyone used for their adverts on those stations. i liked how djs would just float about, move from one station to another.
there were two bobo dreads who used to play loads of sizzla around 97 who i used to listen to a lot, gave me a lot of good feelings when i was a bit adolescent and miserable. used to play a marley a day cos it keeps the dr away... started every show with a bob marley... still think of that bit of life as my sizzla period. that guy had the right kind of energy at that time. very powerful. ill try and remember the names of those two djs edit-bobo El numero uno was one

also rare groove shows on sunday afternoons are foundational. apparently idris elba used to do one, proabbly listened to it at some point

plus for sure these
always magical when you got to go to new york once a month
there was something parochail about max and dave and 279 in comparoison

also had a period from '96 where i didnt know what to listen to started listening to patrick forge, then gilles peterson on kiss on sundays. got into pharoah sanders, sun ra, load of jazzy gear, listened to ross allen too when he got his glr show. then started to find it all a bit cloying. funny to see benji b taking up that mantle, the annointed one from when he used to be the teaboy on gilles' show.
kicks off with alice coltrane, cant knock it....
 
Last edited:

Woebot

Well-known member
very inspiring post sectionfive.

i do enjoy a good radio show. like you say - it's that mix of the live interjections by the commentator with a thoughtful selection.

perhaps there's too many mixes posted without commentary? i think perhaps i'd even do this myself if my own voice wasn't so much of a turn-off!
 

luka

Well-known member
You can use the daft punk mask strategy for the voice. Its what I'm doing now as I record voice for my film, use all the effects and that so no one hears your southern England margarine on sliced white voice
 

Woebot

Well-known member
You can use the daft punk mask strategy for the voice. Its what I'm doing now as I record voice for my film, use all the effects and that so no one hears your southern England margarine on sliced white voice

not sure if that doesn't defeat the purpose :-/

and yeah - your voice is actually quite normal/acceptable davis so i don't know what ur worried about
 

luka

Well-known member
No one wants to be normal. Yours is normal too. You've avoided sounded either nobby or mockney. But it's not good enough is it we wanna sound sexy/mysterious/charismatic etc
 

nomos

Administrator
Sorry if I've flogged this old mix of mine too many times, but it's a favourite and it's...

... about picking up and decoding transmissions, then mentally recombining them. It’s a bit of a play on memory and the out-of-scale mental maps that far away followers of localised music scenes (like grime and dubstep) assemble as they attempt to lock on to a distant sound through it’s fragmentary online archives.

Lots of pirate chatter built in. LOTS of text commentary to go along with it.

http://www.deeptime.net/blog/?p=38
http://www.weareie.com/audio/blogariddims/blogariddims08.mp3
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
dance music sampling (pirate) radio chatter

bit of a tangent, but when did that trend for sampling radio chat begin? i was listening to the fourtet album from a few years back which does that but much more dynamically than a lot of the grime stuff. obv it has coincided with the fall of pirate radio, i keep thinking it seems like some burial 'mourning for a lost history' kind of thing, but i dont think he actually did it. anyone know of older examples of dance producers sampling old radio? come to think of it, ive always liked anything that sounds like a radio show, like the american graffiti soundtrack.
 

nomos

Administrator
Not the lineage you're looking for but I thought those Cruisin' records were pretty great when I was a kid for that reason...

 

PiLhead

Well-known member
most of the periods i've been most excited about music have involved radio - postpunk and John Peel - jungle etc etc and pirate radio - more recently rap and rachet & B and popdance on the car radio in LA.

there is something about the way radio gives you what you already want, plus every so often things you didn't know you'd like or want, that really works

i think it was Greil Marcus who said something about radio being "a good weird machine" for delivering surprises and pushing you gently outside your comfort zone

plus you can do other things while listening to the radio

for a while MTV in America had something of that function of radio but you had to sit down and watch - it consumed all your attention - radio integrates more with active (mentally active or physically active) life
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
bit of a tangent, but when did that trend for sampling radio chat begin? i was listening to the fourtet album from a few years back which does that but much more dynamically than a lot of the grime stuff. obv it has coincided with the fall of pirate radio, i keep thinking it seems like some burial 'mourning for a lost history' kind of thing,

This trend brings the infamous Boomkat review of Jamie XX to mind:

'In Colour' posits Jamie as the pre-eminent posh soul boy, lifting and massaging inspiration from the rich heritage of late '80s + early '90s London dance culture and channelling it into a pop-ready format palatable to Radio 1 daytime tastes and festival soundtracks. The putative "soul" of rare groove, boogie, hardcore and early jungle is sucked out and spliced with vocals in feathered arrangements ripened up for students and yummy mummys alike - all under one roof.

Very harsh, yes, but I can sort of sympathise with this. I think with SOME of this stuff, there's an attempt to confer 'authenticity' on middle-class music going on...

(I used to do the same thing when I made music on Reason, btw. Chucking a Wiley sample into the middle of a bland, sentimental track with 'deep' chords, e.g...)

OTOH the lost history thing is OTM. Perhaps for many ppl they only experienced rave at a distance, through pirate radio at the time, or at the even greater remove of listening to pirate radio sets years later on the internet - ALA ME. And for others its a case of nostalgia, full stop.

Also I think radio is mourned for by those that remember it, like vinyl e.g. An analogue feel, a bit of dirt and dysfunction, a human element.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
btw the title of this thread keeps reminding me of that 'Derek' show Gervais did and it should have a trigger warning blocking it IMO
 

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
Have seen George "Hound Dog" Lorenz mentioned in various interviews down the years but for someone reputed to be so influential, no one has bothered writing a wiki page yet. He's credited as one of the first DJs to play black Rock and Roll artists on radio, crucially WKBW then had a massive 50,000-watt signal reaching much of the East Coast and Canada. One of the earliest examples of the 'that DJ there from the beginning' mould that we would be more familiar with since.

Not a whole lot written down online in article form, Im sure it exists in books maybe but some genuinely great snatches and memories from people. You could spend a while reading far worse on the internet. He really put the life long love in people http://www.hounddoglorenz.com/memory_time/index.php

'The Big Heavy' would start to pound on every car radio at the drive-in, or wherever the kids would gather. It would immediately be tuned up loud as we heard...'The Hound's Around....We're rockin' in record, baby...from the Zanzibar man...for Big Bob and Pal Al. And don't forget all you hound-doggers, Don't pound the slab...Take a Madison Cab...George Lorenz would punctuate the licks of his theme song, 'The Big Heavy' with obviously his own slogans for all of his sponsors. He was the coolest DJ I've every heard. I often tell my kids of those fabulous times at the birth of rock n roll and how it was the off-spring of the Rhythm n Blues music that was played by the semi-underground DJ's, led by The Hound. I'd love to get a tape of one of his programs.

He would play really good instrumentals like that by artists who had few or no hits as well as the popular hit songs ( I can still remember him introducing Love Me by Elvis, which was only on an album ). His commercials were crazy ( Get your snap jacks --- snap your fingers --- at Tom McCanns) because he spoke in rhyme and used slang or hip expressions. He signed off with " that's all she wrote --- that's where the pencil broke. " Most Rock and Roll shows were held in the downtown movie theaters and that's where I saw many of the now famous artists before they became famous. In 1957 Elvis had a show in War Memorial Auditorium downtown ( later torn down ) and about a dozen artists later, banded together and had a show there also, but most played in the movie theaters. Although he did not invent the term, the Hound was an intrinsic part of the rock and roll culture

I don't remember the exact year but I was listening to the Hound on WKBW, which I did every night in the late 50's, and for some reason this night he had no coffee. Well, he played Santo and Johnny's new recording of 'Sleepwalk' 13 times in a row until someone brought him some coffee. I thought that was amazing, just loved listening to the guy.

I remember listening to The Hound Show about 1955 or so. I was living in a tent just beside Algonquin Park in central Ontario, called the Halburton Highlands. I had an old Phillips portable radio, and strung copper wire all around the trees and plugged it in to the radio as an extra antenna. Picked up WKBW on clear nights. The hound's around! I'm rockin on record daddy-o/ from the Zanzibar tavern in Buffalo.... Then I got to hear Elvis Presley for the first time singing Blue Suede Shoes. I'll never forget that night, it was so beautiful outside, and WKBW music floating over the quiet lake breaking the stillness with ROCK AND ROLL. Party on George.


In the earliest days of Rock & Roll music, even before it was called Rock & Roll, I was blessed with a brother who was five years older than myself. Growing up in a suburb of Buffalo, we shared a small room, with a radio on the table between our beds. At bedtime, I wanted to sleep, but my brother wanted to listen to music. “One more song,” he would say to put off my whining, “one more if it’s a good one.” And more often than not, the disk jockey on the radio was George “Hound Dog” Lorenz. “The Hound is around,” he would intone, before playing something by Johnny Ace or Ruth Brown. This was on WKBW before the arrival of Top 40 Radio. Some nights the Hound spun records live from The Zanzibar on William Street, a club that hosted performers like Fats Domino, Bill Haley, and Little Richard. At the War Memorial Auditorium, the Hound booked Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Chuck Berry. But the real history was in the audience: white kids and black kids together, loving the music


lrfzTNa.jpg
 
Top