A Personal History of the British Music Industry 104 – Tim Blackmore

Tim Blackmore: 1944-2023

I never worked with Tim Blackmore, yet I feel I knew him well, as much through his BBC links with all the disc jockeys from the launch of Radio 1 as for his later compassion with Duncan Johnson in particular, finding him a place at Brinsworth House in Twickenham, the care home for show business folk, when Duncan’s Parkinson’s Disease made it impossible for him to continue independent living. This interview dates from February 2005

Music was the whole reason I got into radio. I am a child of rock’n’roll. The very first record I was given with my Christmas present record player in 1957, was Paul Anna’s Diana, on a 78rpm disc. The record player had styli that you flipped over to play 78rpm and 45rpm discs, but initially I carried on buying 78’s. The first two records I bought were Be my girl by Jim Dale, which went on to be No.2 in the charts and I think was one of George Martin’s first hits, and That’ll be the day by the Crickets which was on Coral. Be my girl I knew because I listened to Radio Luxembourg at the time and EMI, like the other record companies, had their individual programmes. It’s almost impossible, retrospectively, to get anyone to understand just how important Radio Luxembourg was . That’ll be the day I heard at the fair which came to Pontefract in Yorkshire, where we lived, and that Saturday every ride was playing it. That whole era was phenomenal. I remember also the importance of films like The girl can’t help it where I saw Little Richard for the very first time. I think we’ve also forgotten how important jukeboxes were in those days. Now, with music coning at us from every available outlet in any form you want, it’s hard to explain to people that then (the 1950’s) it was very difficult to hear music. Juke boxes were essential – they were almost the only way to hear music if you couldn’t afford to buy the records, and like most kids – I was 13 at the time – I would put my threepenny bits in to hear the record. I had a terrible obsession with Danny and the Juniors’ At the hop, which I just loved.

Danny and the Juniors

Today you get all these disparaging remarks about white groups ripping off the black. At the time it didn’t matter at all. It was a great sound; it made the adrenaline pump, and you could dance with girls! I wasn’t a great dancer myself. I was one of those guys who always tried to get behind the record player when there was a party on, and put the records on, because it gave me a role. I didn’t have to worry that I had a hopeless sense of rhythm. That’s a concern that still hits people nowadays.

So juke boxes were very very important then, both in funfairs and in cafes so the only music you heard was paid for by the customers. (Needle time – the number of records that could be played on the BBC – was strictly limited by the Musicians’ Union, and cafes and pubs did not play the radio but increasingly installed jukeboxes) We’d make a cup of coffee last hours just to listen to the juke box! We would have heard the music on Luxembourg. To me, music has always been a combination of mouth and radio.

These two things feed the music generations. I remember the absolutely ludicrous situation at the BRIT Awards in the early 1980’s when Chris Wright, who was chairman of the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) at the time, getting up and uttering the immortal words “A record played on the radio is a record sale lost.” This was because he was pursuing what was then the political mantra of the record industry, because of its big dispute with the radio industry. I have to say that, even though I work in radio, I know from personal experience that it was radio that prompted me to buy records, because for me, there was always the thrill of actually holding the record itself. I interviewed Tim Rice the other day and he was saying that he still hasn’t got turned on the CD’s – he still enjoys the album sleeve, the EP sleeve, whatever it might be, to such an extent that he can’t get excited about a CD, no matter how ornate the design is. You can’t read the bloody things anyway because the typeface is so small!

People like us who were starved with music in those days were much keener to find any way to seek it out.

If you were as interested as I was in what would now be called ‘cutting edge’ (though of course that music is now seen as very middle-of-the-road and appears on Radio 2), the frustration was that the BBC at that point presented the music lover with two concerns. The first was that there were hardly any programmes that broadcast contemporary music. You could sit around listening to Two Way Family Favourites on Sunday lunchtime praying that a contemporary record might slip in, but you were more likely listening to Rosemary Clooney followed by The Dam Busters March! We did get to the point when Saturday Club arrived, followed by Easy Beat, which were dedicated to new music. But even then there was an edict by a lady called Anna Instone, who was head of the Gramophone Department and had the responsibility across all the networks for the use of gramophone records as they were then called. It said that where there is a choice of artist singing the song live, we must always support the British. Hence, if you study the statistics it seemed ludicrous. Why was Craig Douglas having more success that Sam Cooke? (Craig’s version of ‘Only Sixteen’ went to No.1, while Sam Cooke’s original version only made 29 – and both recordings were on EMI labels (Top Rank and HMV!!)

Simply because the BBC boss said we should support British artists rather than American – and that caused all sorts of effects. Those kinds of thing were happening all the time. If you were listening to someone like, say, Tony Hall on Radio Luxembourg, who was doing the Decca shows, you would be filled with enthusiasm and would discover records on their London American label that you would hardly ever hear on British radio. That’s why there are so many records from that label that we now look back on and revere. But if the current generation looks in the British Book of His Singles, they won’t find them. And that is very largely due to British policies.

And an excuse for another airing of my wife in 1967 when she worked for Tony (left) with Ray Kane (centre). The cat has never been named!

It was interesting at the end of the 50’s when probably the biggest act in the country was Cliff Richard and the Shadows. I well remember Jimmy Savile’s ‘Teen and Twenty Disc Club’ on Luxembourg. Every record was from the Decca group of labels, except that they included Cliff Richard. I couldn’t work it out at the time, but subsequently spoke to people and they knew Cliff was so big – why have a record programme where you don’t play the biggest star? Much better to sacrifice sixty seconds of your air time and include the biggest name in pop, and use the other 29 minutes to plug your own product. I look back on that now and think it was a very clever move.

Do you remember whether you took an interest in the labels?

Absolutely. I could probably tell you the colour of the label, the colour of the sleeve and maybe even the prefix. The Columbias were all DB something, and HMV was POP. I remember Presley being on HMV and then suddenly he switched to RCA and I didn’t understand why that was. I didn’t know much then about the inner workings of the business, but I was certainly aware of the labels. But I didn’t have much knowledge of or interest in the companies, but I was aware of which labels were in the same groups . You used to go into the record shops and there’d be a a big poster for EMI and it would have the logos of the labels they had, which at that time were Capitol, HMV, Parlophone, Columbia, MGM and Verve

Your Anna Instone story was compounded by the fact that most of the UK acts were drawing on American material

I remember Melody Maker used to list all the versions, so you could look and see That’ll be the Day by The Crickets and underneath it would say That’ll be the Day by Larry Page – that kind of thing. I was aware there was this competition. A song would come out and almost every company would release its own version. The song was powerful, much more than it is today, in setting the running. I think there is a desperate shortage of songs now, which is why people are going through catalogues to find things they can re-work, put a rap lyric across a musical hook. In the Fifties people would recognise a hit song, probably from America and every label would have its version.

A lot of rock’n’roll was recycling songs from the 1940’s

Oh yes Jan and Dean with Heart and Soul – not a big hit record but a good song, and P.J.Proby’s Hold Me. I thought ‘ what a great rocker’ and then I heard some of the versions from twenty years earlier.

And Elvis’s ‘Blue Moon.’

The interesting thing about Elvis for me was, I did buy his records but I was not aware of just how special he was until later. I think to me he was tarnished because the girls reacted so hysterically to him, so I kind of put him to one side. My musical favourites would probably have been Buddy Holly, Everly Brothers, Drifters, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard – they are the ones I would have spent most of my money on.

Did you buy records your parents hated, and were you aware that’s what you were doing?

I was aware that they didn’t like what I was buying! The only point at which there was a crossover was when the folk boom arrived. I didn’t start buying until the end of 1957, and my main recollection would have been Junior Choice more than anything else, but hearing Max Bygraves, Doris Day, Teresa Brewer, I never wanted to buy their records. Ironically, now I’m in my 50’s (2005) I’m going back and listening to some of that music and I think it’s terrific. I just bought the Bear Family compilation of Johnnie Ray’s stuff and some of it is outstanding – the arrangement, performance – terrific stuff, but I was very dismissive at the time.

I wasn’t aware of the hysteria that Johnnie Ray created – it was Elvis who did that. I remember my father took the News Chronicle and in 1956 there was a cartoon of teddy boys tearing up a cinema with some reference to rock’n’roll, and me asking him what rock’n’roll was. I can actually remember asking him that question. He explained it was music from a film. It was after that I went to see Rock Around the Clock, by which time I was into the whole thing.

The other interesting landmark I remember is reading a copy of the NME when I came to London for the first time in 1962, end of September, and seeing an advert from a fan club for a group called The Beatles, wishing them well for their first release, Love me do. I remember saying to my mate ‘what a stupid name for a band’ and now you look back – could they ever have been called anything else? Of course not! It seems like a golden age now, but I think that’s only because it was an age of discovery for me personally. I was getting something for the first time. All of a sudden I discovered this music that spoke to my generation – the lyrics of Felice and Boudleux Bryant which they gave to the Everly Brothers to sing, and the lyrics of Buddy Holly. They hit me; they were singing about scenarios that I knew like having to get a girl home from the cinema before her father started going apeshit. It was all there in the songs; people were writing these songs, making these records, about the life I was living. Fantastic

I’m sure successive generations feel the same

I hope they do, because it’s a great feeling.

The movie wasn’t so hot
It didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked
Our reputation is shot

When did this interest manifest itself in employment?

The first thing I was aware of was when I was very active in a youth club in Blythe, Northumberland when we moved there in 1958. My father was a Methodist minister and had been responsible in 1945 for running youth clubs in Germany, designed to bring together the occupying troops and the young people to try and rebuild Germany – he’d been doing this is Hamburg and, to a lesser extent, in Berlin. When he returned to England he got involved in starting MAYC, the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs, which became the biggest youth club organisation the country’s ever seen – still active even now. When we moved to Blythe I was 14 and able to join. People would bring their record players and discs until, after 18 months when the club had really taken hold, the church allocated some money to having a built in sound system and I bought what must have been the first twin turntable in the North East of England. I had simply worked out that rather than having that awful hiatus when the auto-changer dropped the records down, if we had twin turntables you could start the second one before the first one stopped playing.

To cut out a whole lot of personal crap, I was involved in running drama societies and public speaking groups..all sorts of things, and the end result of all that was Pure Maths. At the end of sixth form I failed to get any of the grades for the university places I’d been offered, so I had to get a job quickly.

There was an advert in the Radio Times for Trainee Technicians at the BBC, which said things like ‘Do you have a special interest in electronics, in amateur dramatics and music’ and I was able to write a later to say I hadn’t got any grades but was very interested because I’ve built this (twin turntable) unit and have been involved in making audio. I’d used a Grundig tape recorder. I didn’t understand editing at that point, but did know that if you found someone else with a tape recorder you could dub from one to the other, and I used to make little tapes to accompany slide shows…and in the end they said ‘look, we’re sorry you didn’t get all the grades you need but we like what you say about yourself and we’d like to offer you a post as a trainee.

Which I did, and joined the BBC as a studio manager, then studio manager announcer and then a studio manager announcer on the World Service at Bush House at the end of 1962. Five years later the government passed the Marine Offences Bill, and Anna Instone of the Gramophone Department advertised for four young people to start the new Radio 1 network. I was then 23 and landed the plummiest job of all which was putting together the new Radio 1 Breakfast Show with Tony Blackburn.

Ann Instone

With no production experience?

None! For the first six weeks it was produced by Johnny Beerling and then I was given the running order for the Tony Blackburn playlist. I’d been working as No.2 to Johnny, but he’d been making the final selection. (he showed me a sheaf of papers) . This shows all the records played and the code system. You either got records played twice in a week – Tuesday and Thursday – or three times – Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I created a Top 40, so we were doing Top 40 radio and ran the same format that Tony had been doing on Radio London, simply adapting the format slightly to fit a BBC scenario. It was based on my ears, but, looking at the chart, the records I deemed inappropriate for the national breakfast show, didn’t appear in the Top 40 at all! We would also move things much faster than the sales chart did. If a record was struggling a bit around the 10-11 mark, we’d abandon it pretty quickly as it was clear it wasn’t going to become immensely popular. And we could have records high in our chart simply because I thought they were great for getting people up in the morning, even if they weren’t going to buy them!

Suddenly, given this programme to produce must have exposed you to the entire record industry?

Yes, it was completely mind boggling. My entry was to the music radio industry (although they are two separate industries, record and radio, there are very strong links). There is a firm interdependency. The first shock to me was that there were these strange people, whom I later came to know as pluggers, who began ringing me up and then saying ‘can we come and see you?’ and they actually gave me free records. Instead of having to decide out of the twelve records I desperately wanted (to buy), which two I could afford all of a sudden every single record that was released – and I guess at that time it was 70-80- a week – something like that – landed on my desk. That was a source of enormous pleasure. What was not a pleasure was the amount of pressure placed on me. I was a 23-year-old music lover with relatively little experience of the commercial world – i.e. the importance of buying and selling music – who happened to have had five years learning how you made radio programmes. It did get to me initially, and I thought ‘I don’t know if I can handle the continual ‘will you do this, will you do that and if not why not’.The majority of the pluggers were people who had been genuine song-pluggers. They had been used to going round the band leaders to persuade them to play their songs, and now they were dealing with getting the finished recordings of these songs played by people like me on the radio.

That was the first time the pluggers had a national station that was going to play records all day.

More to the point, the record companies were receiving payment as well as getting plays, which was totally different from what they were used to where they had to buy whole programmes (on Radio Luxembourg) to get their records in the radio. The way I decided to handle it, and with hindsight I have no idea why I came up with it, was that I was going to be very straightforward with people. During the first few days at Radio 1 I had been shadowing other producers and I’d hear them saying ‘yes, well I’m not sure I need to hear it again. I need to check out the reaction and just see. I’ll certainly be considering it.’ I watched this, and thought it was totally unproductive, so what I adopted was a policy of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ on the basis that if I said ‘no and then changed my mind after three or four plays, they’d be thrilled, and if I said ‘no, I really don’t rate it; I’m going to play ten new records this week and this isn’t one of them ‘then they were off my back. It was much more effective that saying ‘ well, let me think about it a bit longer.’ The truth is that you do have to hear records more than once. I don’t know how many geniuses there are out there who can hear music for the first time and say ‘; that’s going to be brilliant on radio’ or, in simple terms,’that’s going to be a hit. Most of us get it right sometimes; most of us get it wrong. It’s so variable. You do need to hear a record several times. I started from the point of being pretty firm initially as to whether it was yeah or nay, and I think that worked it my favour. I don’t think the pressure ever really got to me.

Who were these characters trying to persuade you to play their records?

A bundle of now legendary names! Johnny Wise I well remember from what was Pye Records then, and later became PRT records and tapes, with Issy Price also from Pye. At Decca – now serving Her Majesty’s Pleasure, Mr Chris Denning, erstwhile DJ. When his DJ work failed him he became head of Promotion at Decca at the point where Jonathan King had just lessened his activities as an artist and was working with Sir Edward Lewis as a consultant – he got Chris in to do promotion. Decca had a whole team of generally young people. Tony Hall, who’d been the longtime promotion man there had just left and set up the first of many independent promotion companies, with Ray Kane. EMI – I particularly remember Len Wood, Ron White, Ken East. They weren’t plugging but they were the people you met at receptions almost every lunchtime. I remember looking out of the window at Egton House, the headquarters of Radio 1, and seeing Langham Street outside virtually blocked with limousines waiting to take DJ’s and producers to receptions or lunch. It was quite spectacular; there was a choice almost every day of the week of which reception to go to. The receptions could be anything from standing round chatting, someone making a speech, a bite to eat and plenty to drink – through to where you might even get the artist to perform.

With the aim to get their record on your list?

Well, that was the only purpose. It certainly meant we became immersed in the machinations of the record industry, and because we were meeting their representatives on such a regular basis, we were well aware of all the politics of the industry, what was happening. It was useful from that point of view and, let’s be honest, it was jolly good fun. Anyone who pretends it was not enjoyable industry to be part of, is kidding. It was thoroughly enjoyable. These were the now historic Swinging Sixties, as people call them. It was a great era where music was God. Music was the universal means of communication for a generation. That isn’t true now. I don’t think people in the 15-24 age range see music as powerfully as we did. It was all we had – a little bit of film, but normally only when the film included music. The music was the way in which we shared a common experience. If you met people socially there’d always be music playing, conversations about music. If you followed the Top 30 in those days, three quarters of the records were of pretty universal appeal. Nowadays the sales chart is simply a collection of an incredible number of diverse music genres. I don’t know how many universally appealing records you’d find in the Top 30 now – you’d probably be lucky to find three or four with a very strong melody – the highest number being ballads. There’s no denying that the 60’s were very special. Those of us who were part of it, both in record companies and radio stations were very well aware that we were part of something very new. Almost all the bosses were over 55, and if not, they behaved like it! And here we were, a bunch of 20-30 year olds – a lot of us were under 25 – and we were being given great responsibility to make things happen. I don’t think we will see a revolution like that ever again. What it did do is to establish a precedent that young people could take responsibility, make a difference and more or less run things as responsibly as elder people did, In a sense we’ve never looked back. There was a situation when you and I started, that you could reasonably be expected to be in employment until you were 65 – that’s when the pension didn’t start until 65. I’m coming up to 55 next year and I know many people who are 55 and still working in the industry.

Do you remember any wacky record promotions?

We were having a meeting on the top floor of Egton House when one of those painter’s cradles used for the outside of building, came up past our window. In the cradle appeared the faces of two well-known pluggers – Oliver Smallman and Richard Evans. The window was open and they handed in the record they were plugging, I can’t remember the record (!). Richard Evans tells a wonderful (but sad?) story about how he hired a rag and bone man with a horse and cart and the horse died in traffic in Regent Street just as it was coming to Broadcasting House!

How did you see your role, being a passionate music person?

I think I did feel I had a bit of a missionary role. I thought ‘here I am, I’ve got a chance to hear all this music. I can help people towards the great riches that are available’. This came to a peak with me at the end of the 60’s when I was asked to work with the then unknown Noel Edmunds, who had previously been making trailers for the BBC. When Kenny Everett got fired for not abiding by the commitment he had made (he’d had several problems and had agreed not to talk to the press without BBC press officers being present. He broke this commitment and the terminated his contract),

they had to put someone in so they pulled Noel Edmunds out of nowhere, put him on Saturday mornings and gave me the show to produce. I’d moved on from the Breakfast Show in the course of 1970 and was given Noel on Saturdays and Jimmy Savile on Sundays with a chat show called Speakeasy. Then a few weeks on, another change was made – Noel was moved to Sunday mornings and I was given Stuart Henry on Saturday mornings.

Stuart Henry

I couldn’t work out how to get people to notice Noel, but I came up with what I thought was a whizz bang scheme. Noel had an idea that is now commonplace, but literally was not happening then – that you could stimulate the audience to provide you with the bulk of your editorial material. Up until then, the only way the listeners could contribute was by sending in requests and being given dedications. Noel wanted to stimulate competition. For example he talked about the origin of a phrase and asked the listeners to write in with another. My proposal, which we had real struggles with, was to start playing album tracks. Now that sounds silly, but the only real outlets for albums was a weekly programme playing some of the new releases. I was talking about a peak time Sunday morning show. Cat Stevens had just returned from having TB and had recorded Mona Bone Jacon; Elton John has his first album out and in America there were the first stirrings of artists like Harry Chapin, Carly Simon, James Taylor – the singer/songwriter movement was just starting. Partly because of my folk background, but also through instinct, I always had a feeling for what was going to happen musically, which is how I survived that very competitive period. I said ‘ I think we must stop concentrating purely on the Top 30 and must look at these singer/songwriters’ . So I introduced the concept that Noel always took the piss out of. He used to credit me at the end of the programme as ‘Tim-back-from-the-news-with-a-hit Blackmore. That was because we started and came out of the news, which was every half hour, with a hit but the rest of the programme was albums, including segueing three tracks together in the middle. I don’t think anyone had had done that until then. We had an album of the week, from people like Jim Croce or Crosby Stills Nash & Young. I remember having debates with the hierarchy – Teddy Warwick, Doreen Davies and Derek Chinnery were the executive producers at that time; above them would have been Mark White. I remember having a debate with Doreen about this (playing album tracks) and she used her great phrase ‘keep it 2.30 and bright'(i.e.the length and the mood!). She was a very successful producer, but I remember arguing about a style of broadcasting and that maybe we could have a different style. In the end it was down to Teddy who was the executive producer of the Sunday morning slot, and he backed it. Within three months we had achieved a 20% increase of Sunday morning listeners and the show became something of a legend, a) because of the music we were playing, which was supporting this new movement of singer/songwriter, and b) the fact that Noel was creating this fantasy world with tremendous involvement from the listeners providing gags and material to use, which eventually led to the creation of the Manor House and the butler. That ran until 1973 when Noel was promoted to the Breakfast Show and I moved on to making documentaries.

Did you feel you had a hand in making some artists successful who might otherwise have struggled? Did you have a relationship with them and even tell them if you didn’t feel their current single was up to it

I would certainly say ‘yes’ with Cat Stevens. He invited Noel and me to hear at least two of his albums even before they were passed to the record company to see whether we thought they would go down well. We also championed The Strawbs like there was no tomorrow. I remember we played almost every track on New World. We probably had two meetings with Cat Stevens, had dinner three times with Harry Chapin. I loved him – I just thought ‘what a fantastic observer of human life’. I thought the same about Jim Croce. I also remember several times having very upset pluggers who had assumed that because we’d played one record by a particular singer that we were locked into them. I’ve always said that in programming you can never guarantee the artists you will play. There are artists whose material is likely to suit us, but we’re not guaranteeing we will play it because that makes no sense.

At the very first Music Radio Conference that I organised, Paul Gambaccini interviewed Cliff Richard. Cliff said ‘I believe that an artist of my stature with my achievements should receive automatic playlisting from radio stations‘. I don’t believe that is ever ever deserved. There is not artist on this planet that I, as a programmer, would say ‘I will automatically play their next record.’ To some extent it was indulgent radio. That was the only programme I’ve either produced or been responsible for, where wholeheartedly we played music that I appreciated. That is a rare opportunity to have a radio slot, the demands of which totally coincide with what you want to do.

What did the pluggers make of that – that you weren’t playing the singles they were paid to bring you?

Quite often there was a happy coincidence, because most of them at that time were bringing albums at the same time. I remember ‘Your Song’ we played week after week, and talking to Dick James’s plugger , a girl called Sandra, and I said ‘please please please put it out as a single’ and they said ‘Elton doesn’t want to work on any singles.’ He’d had two earlier ones on the Philips label which didn’t sell. I think at that point I was still working on the Tony Blackburn show because I remember saying something I very rarely said to people. ‘If you put that out as a single I will guarantee it as the Tony Blackburn Record of the week’, which was the only spot where we played a record every day. That was incredibly powerful. If I told a plugger a song was going to be record of the week, he would say ’can I use your phone?’ and would literally ring the factory and you’d hear these ludicrous pressing figures being talked about. This was the era when a No.1 single could sell 75-85,000 copies a day. (N.B. from my years in the record business I would respectfully suggest he’d have called his boss!)

What went through your head when something like this happened?

I imagine I would have thoroughly enjoyed the role of being able to have an impact on what was going to happen in the music business, and the track record of Tony Blackburn’s ‘Record of the Week’ – and we didn’t do obvious records; we would try to find something that made people go ‘wow’. We had a lot of this

I remember Derek Chinnery saying more than once: ‘the BBC is not here to serve the record industry’ and we would respond that without us you wouldn’t have anything to play!

Derek was right, but he was only taking one part of reality. There was, and is an interdependence. Radio stations, and particularly a public service broadcast like the BBC, has an obligation to maintain its editorial independence. I think it probably did and still does that. It starts to get blurred now when you have radio stations becoming record companies. That’s not a new thing. In America the links between CBS and the Columbia record company as was, were pretty strong, as with RCA and Westinghouse.

Derek Chinnery

On a smaller scale Yorkshire Television had Deke Arlon running York Records with Lovelace Watkins

And now you have Capital Radio owning a joint venture with Telstar.

The BBC went through a period when Humphrey Walwyn ran BBC Records. He was taking the cast of East Enders and making a record with them.

You will remember that there was a concession in the PPL licence agreement, which it called ‘review time.’ We were allowed to include certain records outside the needle time agreement if they were new releases. The idea was that these records were being reviewed, though they very rarely actually were. What normally happened is that we played a jingle saying ‘Radio 1 new spin’ and the jock would explain which label it was available on. That gave us five or six ‘new spin’ slots in a two-hour breakfast show. Everything else was needle time and we didn’t have to include any live sessions. When I left the BBC in 1977 and went to Capital Radio we were still operating there on a maximum of nine hours a day needle time – a PPL restriction acting on behalf of the Musicians’ Union. They didn’t want what happened in America where they had to end up releasing only a cappella records because none of the Federation people in the State would work with them. The BPI/PPL agreement reflected very closely what the MU was asking for and the restriction demanded was that no more than nine hours of needle time per day should be allowed. So we were employing everybody from The Who to the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, taking in loads of little trios and quartets doing popular song versions which were used in our overnight programming, leaving the nine needle time hours for the most competitive hours of the day!

Going back to the days when you and I listened to the radio, ’Saturday Club’  was full of live bands, trad and pop.

There were some bands live in the studio and some who had pre-recorded sessions because they were away touring. I didn’t become aware of needle time until I’d been there quite a while. I think there may have been a change at the point when the Light Programme became Radio 1 and 2, a little bit more needle time negotiated, or something. . There was The Gramophone Department which did all the programmes that were predominately records, and then there was the Music Department in Aeolian Hall, which did the live music. After some years they amalgamated and created music departments for Radios 1 & 2. Initially we were very well aware that there were programmes which spent a lot of money getting live or specially recorded music, and other programmes that just played records. I must say I didn’t have much interest in live music.

What about the enticement of independent records that had ‘non participation of PPL’ stickers on the labels?

I think there was no doubt that it was very valuable to the BBC in the 60’s and commercial radio in the 70’s that there were record companies which were non-PPL. Almost all of those were more than happy to write a letter saying the BBC had permission to use their recordings on air as much as we wanted, because they much appreciated the airtime. 

When did you switch to commercial radio?

1977. I always say I celebrated Radio 1’s 10th anniversary by leaving! I’d been asked to join commercial radio when it began in 1973, when Capital approached me, but I was in the middle of producing a series called The Story of Pop which was the first substantial effort to tell the story of how rock’n’roll came about. I took the view that if I left with that project not completed, I would be looked upon as a pretty fly-by-night guy and it would be damaging to my future, so I stayed. I completed that project in 1974 and then went on a variety of BBC management courses, good training and they were invaluable to me in what I’ve done subsequently. At the beginning of 1977 I was asked to have lunch with Peter James and Aidan Day. Together with Stuart Grundy and myself, we were the four people hired by the BBC Gramophone Department in 1967. We were four young things. Pete had been a pirate on Radio 390, Stuart was at Radio Luxembourg and Aidan was another studio manager. Aidan and Pete left to start Capital Radio, Stuart stayed at the BBC  until about 2000 and I went to Capital in 1977. I had no great dissatisfaction with the BBC, but I was 32 and I just had this sense that while the people at the BBC seemed pleased with what I was doing, I began to think ‘am I only good at what I do because I’m with the BBC’, this kind of womb like existence where the corporate structure props me up and what would happen if I went into the outside world? So there was this kind of driving thing that was worrying me, so when I was approached this second time, I said ‘OK’. Contrary to what people said at the time I left for exactly the same money as I was getting at the BBC – maybe another £50 or something.

The most exciting thing for me at Capital was that the studios and the offices were in the same building. You just walked across the floor and then went into the studio, so you had this great sense of really being part of a radio station. In the BBC we had our offices in one building and you had to walk across the road to get to the studio – there was a real detachment. I remember ringing Derek Chinnery who was then in charge of Radio 1 and saying ‘Derek, you have to do something in your power to get Radio 1’s studio and offices in the same building.’ And they did a couple of years later. Another big difference was the sense of support. I remember saying to Aidan, who was the controller, that I had to go to Glasgow to see Radio Clyde. ‘Who organises travel round here?’ and he threw a copy of Yellow Pages at me! That kind of crystallised the difference between a big organisation an us, and a couple of others. There was certainly a sense of being a very key part of a whole at Capital. It felt like your radio station. I had a trial period of about three months as executive producer; they then made me head of the music department and for the last two years, head of programs. The same pluggers were still knocking on the doors – that didn’t change.

In the editorial sense there was even more responsibility because Capital operated its whole station on the playlist basis. The biggest programme at that time was Saturday mornings, presented by Peter Young, in which we played the Capital Countdown.

Peter Young

Every Friday night I decided what the Top 40 would be. It would be a mix of records we knew the audience would be comfortable with and new releases that we were introducing. It would lose about 10 records every week and we added a new 10. We’d vary the ones at the top – sometimes they lasted for seven or eight weeks, and if they didn’t work too well, sometimes only two. Some would be hits, others would be what were laughingly called turntable hits, like Solid State Brain by Christopher Rainbow which we played the backside off, but nobody bought. They sounded great on air, and out audience figures went up and up. 

Mike Smith, with Sarah Greene and Alan Freeman

I brought in Mike Smith who had been a researcher – he was also a PR man at Brands Hatch racing circuit. We put him on the overnight slot and later on the Breakfast Show which in its top half hour was getting over a million listeners – three times what Chris Tarrant gets now (or rather later!).

I had no influence hiring people at Radio 1, but at Capital I was employing and removing people, or having a high say. I found a young guy in University Radio in lancaster, called Richard Allinson, who again I brought in to do overnight and then moved him to the Chart Show at weekends. I brought in Charlie Gillett, probably the leading historian of rock music. It was an exciting time to develop talent for radio, just the same as it must be exciting for an A&R man in the record industry to spot someone with potential and help them grow their careers.

What’s you view of the current (2005) state of the record industry?

On the one hand, the only problem the record industry has is working out what its carrier is going to be. The essential task of identifying, developing and marketing talent is still there. What’s not clear is whether you’re going to continue doing it through the traditional retail outlets or through other means. What is the impact of technology that allows you to download any kind of sound recording in perfect clarity? I don’t know what the answer is. You could debate whether there actually is a need for a record industry as we’ve known it. A spin off of the way technology has changed is that there may be no need for record companies as we’ve known them. If we think of the whole history of record companies, how you recorded, manufactured, distributed…all these things that need people in white coats, distribution gangs – technology has changed all that.

I have a degree of cynicism about whether Britain will be able to maintain the place it’s had for the last 40 years as a key source of new and exciting music. I believe quite firmly that it is having something fresh new and different to stimulate them, makes them want to be music makers. Take Paul McCartney – two instances. Firstly, his mates who worked at Liverpool docks, got records from the States that he would otherwise not have heard. He’s said that not even Radio Luxembourg were playing the things that were exciting him. Secondly, had The Beatles not heard radio programmes like The Billy Cotton Band Show and Workers’ Playtime, the concept of “Sgt Pepper” would not have been possible. He would have been listening to “Two-Way Family Favourites”, stayed on for 10-15 minutes and heard jokey bits, funny bits, other types of music and snatches of melodies that stayed with him. My fear is that segmentation of market sections, soulless activities sitting in front of a computer surfing the web, the closing down of avenues that traditionally fed people’s creativity , could have a detrimental effect and people will not be stimulated to use music as a way of expressing themselves. Radio’s creativity is threatened because people don’t see it as a way to creativity. There is a fear now of what I call the dominance of fellowship over leadership. Many many breakthroughs in music came from an A&R man somewhere saying ”I don’t quite know how this is going to work, but by the time we get to the third single, it is going to be something”. People working in A&R now are continuously looking over their shoulders; they’re fearful – will their contracts be renewed next year? No way when we have a fearful over-the-shoulder-looking, must-check-this-out environment, will we encourage any creativity whatsoever.

I agree-it’s the problem of a creative community becoming a business. Maurice Oberstein said “this is a business; we are here to make money.

©David Hughes, 2023. Photos Google searched and there just to break up the text. No money is involved in these interviews!