It was announced on Hogmanay that DJ Johnnie Walker has died. He was one of the original pirate DJs and eventually joined the BBC when the pirate radio became untenable.
I remember listening to his lunchtime show on Radio 1 back in the day, indeed it was on that show I first heard Barclay James Harvest’s I’m Over You, one of my favourites of that band’s songs.
He was too much of a rebel to last at the BBC and moved to the US for a few years.
When he eventually came back to the UK he finally settled in at Radio 2 with the show Sounds of the Seventies, taking over as presenter from Steve Harley and also took the helm of The Rock Show. He had a short stint presenting Sounds of the Sixties in the aftermath of Brian Mathhew’s departure from that show before Tony Blackburn took over the slot. His increasing health problems saw him give up broadcasting only a few months ago.
His voice is missed.
This Duane Eddy track was so beloved by Walker that it became his signature tune. No excuses for featuring it again:-
Duane Eddy: Because They’re Young
Peter Waters Dingley (Johnnie Walker;) 30/3/1945 – 31/12/2024. So it goes.
I was shocked yesterday to hear of the death of radio DJ Steve Wright. It was only on Sunday he presented, as usual, Sunday Love Songs on BBC’s Radio 2 and he sounded in fine fettle (though the show was probably recorded earlier.) But he was only 69.
We have Radio 2 as our radio alarm station and so we listened to him every Sunday.
His DJing style wasn’t always to my taste (in particular I couldn’t stand his Serious Jockin’ segment) and he had a habit of talking over the ends of songs or even adding his own idiosyncratic vocals but he had a legion of fans and will be a miss on Sunday mornings from now on.
Stephen Richard Wright: 26/8/1954 – 12/2/2024. So it goes.
Regular readers will know I occasionally mention the Radio 2 programme Sounds of the Sixties.
Barring two minor interludes when he was unwell, for all the time I’ve been listening to it – many years now – it has been compered by Brian Matthew, a well-known voice from the Light Programme of my youth. In fact he has introduced the show for 27 years.
Recently he has been absent for a span of time during which Tim Rice filled in. I was pleased when I learned on 18/2/17 that Matthew was set to return – as he did last Saturday, the 25th.
This turned out to be a temporary reprieve as Saturday’s episode was valedictory and Matthew informed us it would be his last ever Sounds of the Sixties.
Fair enough, Matthew is not a young man any more. I wish him well in his (part) retirement. I say part as he did say he would be introducing other Radio 2 shows from time to time in the future. But I’ll miss him.
The good lady and I speculated on who might or could replace him – neither of us thought Tim Rice had quite the timbre of voice for it – whether a star of the 60s or the only other DJ from that time presumably available (Johnnie Walker already ensconced in the Sounds of the Seventies seat) Tony Blackburn.
All was revealed in a trailer I heard on Sunday. It’s to be Blackburn. I suppose it’s the obvious choice. The show will feel very different, though. Blackburn does not have the gravitas that Matthew has.
Another change is that Sounds of the Sixties will now be aired at 6.00 am rather than 8.00 am as previously. That’ll be me listening on catch-up then.
If any of you still hanker after Matthew and his style that last show is available on the iPlayer for another three weeks or so.
(If you listen to Radio 2 you may also have heard the trailers for this being aired hourly since about the end of April – or does it just seem like that?)
Guys. I know it’s been fifty years and your only major trophy win is not likely to be repeated any time soon. But it’s not as if it hasn’t been mentioned at all in the interim.
Don’t you think it’s maybe time you got over it?
After today might we possibly have a moratorium on the whole business? Please?
I noticed that Radio 2’s news on Saturday evening referred to William McIlvanney as a crime writer. That is a gross over-simplification. Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties may have featured a detective but they were primarily novels. And there were seven more novels to add the account, as well as his poetry and journalism.
Another Graham Gouldman composition; but this one was most definitely a hit – for the almost anodyne Herman’s Hermits. In the US, where the Hermits had huge success, it was only released as a B-side but in the UK it reached no. 7 in 1966.
No Milk Today is lyrically very curious as a pop song, what with its emphasis on the down side of life. It has a very British feel to it, though, with its evocation of the daily morning delivery and terraced housing, “just two up, two down.” Nowadays the line, “the company was gay,” is likely to be read differently from back then!
For some reason I really like the bells in the “but all that’s left” sections of this.
Herman’s Hermits: No Milk Today
It seems the Hermits also recorded a version of Tallyman (see last week’s post) but it was never released, being thought not commercial enough by the group’s producer Mickie Most. This is a version they recorded in a BBC session. It’s introduced by the voice of Radio 2’s Sounds of the Sixties, Brian Matthew.
I’ve just been listening to an iPlayer rerun of last Saturday’s Sounds of the Sixties where they gave a run out to Joe South’s Games People Play which I featured on Friday on my Mind a couple of weeks ago. Brian Matthew’s intro to it said Joe sang all the vocal parts and played all the instruments himself – as well as writing it.
Last week I heard a DJ on Radio 2 saying when Agnetha came to sing this song for Abba she must have said to Björn and Benny, “The lyric on this is insane! It doesn’t scan or rhyme.”
I think this lyric is fantastic, precisely because of the rhymes and scansion.
The rhyme scheme for the first verse is AABB*CC*DEFF* (where the * is for a part rhyme – which is more than common in popular music.) Moreover the D and E lines have an internal rhyme of lunch with bunch. Indeed, if you consider the line break is at “lunch” – which verses 2 and 3 suggest is more correct – the rhyme scheme becomes a near perfect AABB*CCDDEE.
The second and third verses both have an absolute AABBCCDDEE rhyming.
As to the scanning; it’s brilliant. In fact the line, “Undoubtedly I must have read the evening paper then,” is a wonderful iambic heptameter.
“There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see,” is superb; the best line in any Abba song bar none. If you allow the “see-ee” at the end as an iamb it’s also a near perfect iambic nonameter.
The only thing I dislike about the lyric is it’s written in USian. Gotten is now archaic in British English – except for the phrase “ill-gotten gains” – and we don’t say “to go” but “to take away” or, in Scotland, “to carry out.” But then “to go” provides the rhyme.
Plus there’s an element of SF to it all, with the looking back to something that has changed, the implication of a life transformed.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Blancmange version.
I happened to be listening to Radio 2 when Jonathan Ross’s Saturday programme on that station came on yesterday. (I know, but Sounds Of The Sixties had just finished.)
Before Ross spoke there was broadcast the official announcement of the adjudication on the Ross/Brand Sachsgate affair – which said the BBC had been fined £150,000 over the to-do and gave an email address to see the whole judgement.
Ross’s first words were to the effect, “Why do you never have a pen when you need it? Did anyone get that email address? I can’t read enough of that.”
He then proceeded to play The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum by The Fun Boy Three.
Has Ross learned nothing? The clear implication is that the ruling was given by lunatics. It hardly shows contrition, nor any amendment of ways.
This is like Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor making their rude gestures. It compounds the original offence.
There are two defences. One is that Ross did not intend to imply any such thing and that the song he played was a mere coincidence. Except he commented to that effect after it had finished; thereby only increasing the suspicion he knew exactly what he was doing. The other defence is that he himself was the target of the lunatics reference and then, the implication is that the BBC is mad to allow him to remain on air. (Which it obviously is, in either case.)
