Longevity.
Kinda a good thing, yes?
Your roof is leaking, so you want someone who has fixed a leaking roof more than a few times to turn up, right?
Not so good in music.
Listening to Aretha’s As and Bs comp., I decided to find out what Tony Blackburn did to mark her death in August on “Sounds of the 60s.”
Answer? Precisely what you’d expect from “soul man” Tone … her three most famous songs and then nothing for 8 weeks.
However, it’s the fact that he has apparently played the same Booker T. track (“Pigmy”) on 5 … FIVE … occasions in that time that suggests he is merely dialling it in.
What’s the point?
Why don’t they get someone with a knowledge (that he clearly doesn’t have) or, frankly, just someone with enthusiasm to do it?
Craig Charles’s tribute over on 6Music was a lot more like it – two hours, a wide-ranging survey including people she’d influenced and buried treasures from her later years.
Craig Charles is a prick, but at least he cares.
He may be a prick, but he’s an excellent broadcaster with a deep love for and knowledge of the music he plays. A genuine enthusiast.
Tony Blackburn – probably the last of the Smashie & Nicely brigade – is still hanging on in some strange ironic-retro experiment.
Unlike some of his R1 colleagues, he did actually like and know some music. Unfortunately a really narrow amount, and anything he didn’t like he made his feelings known.
Now given (sort of) free reign and not having to meet the playlist, he’s just playing the same stuff (and the obvious stuff) over and over again.
He is now firmly a Name presenter, NOT a Radio DJ
(see also Graham Norton)
I don’t like listening to the radio*, cos I can’t be done with the DJs, but I loved listening to SOTS when Brian Matthew presented it, and back when I was younger and more inclined to get out of bed by 8am on a Saturday I’d listen every week (unless I was setting off on a footy journey). Each week I’d be hoping he’d play Wonderful Land before the break, even though I could play that whenever I wanted. But I did get a bit fed up of Where Do You Go To My Lovely, which seemed to be on every other week! What I liked about the show was that they would play a few well known tracks, but plenty of lesser known ones, often with a little story to go with them. However, I was always of the impression that the records were chosen, and his script was written by the likes of Phil “the Collector” Swerne, or whatever his name was.
I’d have presumed that the same would be the case for Blackburn, but on the one or two occasions I’ve heard his show, usually on the iPlayer, the playlist has been something you’d expect if there was a 60s disco down the pub. I didn’t mind Tim Rice when he sat in. Or maybe Paul Gambaccini would be a better choice.
*Apart from Popmaster. Got them all right the other day. I’d quite fancy a go on that, but I’d want a written guarantee for no questions on chart pop music from the past 20 years. Even then, if I won I’d probably come crashing down by being asked to name 3 in 10 by Little Mix or Adele or something. I used to be really good at Countdown (nowdays my inability to see the obvious way to do the numbers rounds worries me!) but I’d never have applied because I just know that I’d get beaten by a swotty 13 year old wonderkid!
He’s preferable to most of his Poptabulous peers from wunnerful Radio 1 in so far is he isn’t as crude and abusive as Lee Travis or deluded and intolerably offensive like Edmonds.
Tony Blackburn described just about every record as a “sensation” when he did the chart rundown. Sometimes you meet people a bit like Tony in real life and you wonder what happened to them to make them be like they are.
You really seem to have a thing against Blackburn. Did he steal your girlfriend or something? He is old school, but, as stated above, does (did) have a real love of music which puts him some distance ahead of the likes of Edmonds, Travis, Brookes, Davies etc.
You can’t have seen the track listing of SOTS if you think he loves music. Someone who loves the 60s doesn’t play My Girl followed by Son of a Preacher Man followed by Mr. Tambourine Man every week.
Of course I’ve got a thing about Blackburn.
He is the curator of an era which features artists who routinely feature on the cover of magazines (just this month … Mojo – Beatles, Led Zeppelin / Uncut – Dylan / RC – Kinks) and are the subject of numerous documentaries/tours etc.; and an era that is a living, breathing, changing entity as the recent/soon to be huge reissues of the Beatles/Kinks/Hendrix/Band/Small Faces etc. testify … back catalogues are changing by the day … and yet he is completely unaware of all of this.
I doubt he’s heard of the White Album.
I’m absolutely certain he hasn’t heard of Big Pink or Village Green.
How on earth is he in charge of the specialist show on national radio!!!
Blackburn had never entered my orbit before but I’ve come to really get the Paul Whitehouse/Nicey impression of him. He got him down to a tee. Nice but completely and utterly clueless. I wouldn’t mind so much if he was funny.
Can you explain playing the same song 5 times?
I agree entirely. I have two issues with SOTS.
1. The music. I loved it when Matthews played some nugget that I’d never heard before eg Magic Potion by The Open Mind. No fear of that with TB. He and Swerne chose safe stuff, mainly from the first half of the 60s. An emphasis on soul but nothing unusual. The likes of Hendrix, Cream are totally ignored even though they had huge hits. It is not representative of the 60s charts.
2. Blackburn himself. He’s no better than he was in the 60s and, in some respects worse. He still has bloody ‘Arnold’. He’s totally self-obsessed, mentioning how he was on Caroline every week (we know, we know). He knows nothing of the music he plays and just reads out what Phil Swerne as written down for him. He still thinks he’s funny – he never was and still isn’t. Although a lot younger than Brian Matthews, he seems far less with-it and is deteriorating fast. The only way to listen to him is on iplayer and fast-forward his inanities.
In the 70s John Peel saw him as the anti-christ and I tend to agree.
Does he still do that thing where he says something to set up the first line of the song as if it was a reply? I don’t think anyone except him ever found those funny.
Yes he does! And even when he doesn’t he always talks over the start of the records until just before the singing starts.
To be honest I always found him slightly irritating. Something that stuck in my mind was when watching an old TOTP rerun from 1976 and Tone was presenting. Hey Jude was back in the charts, and as an introduction to a clip of them performing the track he referred to it being it from 1966. Surely it would have occurred to him, seeing as he opened proceedings on Radio 1 in 1967, that he had spun the disc a few times whilst working on said station when it was a hit. To give him the benefit of the doubt it was apparent he had been reading from an autocue, but there was no excuse when after said clip was shown he came back on camera and he repeated the same thing about the year it had been a hit! I mean for chrissakes, ffs etc
All daytime DJs used to do that. Maybe they still do. None of the “Fades in slowly…” scholarly appreciation you got from Peel, Korner, Vance, Harris, David Jacobs…
i don’t know, but generally producers pick the songs, not the presenters.
I haven’t heard SOTS since Mathew died, but maybe it has just run it’s course? I am not really a TB fan, but thought he was ok on Pick of the Pops.
Even if he is better than DLT, Edmonds, etc., they aren’t fronting a key BBC Radio 2 station about 60s music.
As Mark Lamarr’s rock’n’roll show demonstrated quite spectacularly, having somebody “from the era” is not only unnecessary but may actually be a hindrance.
Can you imagine what Bob Stanley’s Sounds of the Sixties would be like?
Bob for SotS! The campaign starts here
His Spotify lists have essentially done it already but he’d also be very good on obscurities.
He is dreadful, and I always thought so. You could forgive the inanities if he presented a show that had interesting content, but this is just 2 hours of filler. Brian Matthew was a great presenter – inclusive, warm, humble – whereas Blackburn is the polar opposite. I do some radio and I would do a better job.
I very seldom listen to the radio except in my car. In my car it’s usually BBC Radio 4, but even they seem to have their equivalent of the “greatest hits” (political, or economic items) that get repeated endlessly. When I get bored with R4 I give Radio 3 a go, which is fine as long as it’s not somebody singing in German (to my mind a language that’s fine with a choir or chorus but not suitable for solo voices). If I can’t find something I like on either of them I play a CD (Honky-Tonk Country, Jazz, Electronica or Psychedelia) or just drive in silence.
I did at one time consider getting a DAB radio for the car but decided not to bother in the end.
In my opinion the choices on that medium are insufficiently better than those on FM.
Your individual mileages may vary.
Not suitable for solo voices? Not even the noble Ralf Hutter??
Of course Mike means Wagnerian veins-throbbing-in-the-neck SSHHHRRRRRRIIEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKing or else prim and polite Schubert “Lieder”. Certainly on Radio3.
Got a point you know. And I say that as a fluent German speaker and Wagner fancier (but also avoid the “vocals” when possible).
😉
That is pretty much exactly what I mean.
Too much emphasis on the consonants to be properly tuneful.
When several voices are harmonising together, the sound gets rounded out and seems more melodic.
Don’t like consonants? You should try Goldfrapp, she hasn’t used any for about eight years.
Or move to Essex where they are pretty much extinct.
Consonants have been pretty rare in Denmark for decades.
A lot of the Danish dramas I watch sound like swallowing contests (hurrr)
I’m of the opinion that for whatever reason, R2 are trying to quietly kill SOTS off.
There can be no other explanation for putting Tone in the driving seat, and for shifting the show to 6 in the bleedin’ am.
Yes. Why would anyone get up that early to listen to someone playing a bunch of stuff from the kind of compo you’d get in the shop at Scratchwood Services? Along with a bottle of Pepsi costing three quid, natch.
Perhaps there are people who are thinking “If only I had an overpriced compo from the shop at Scratchwood Services, I wouldn’t need to get up at 6am for a Tony Blackburn radio show.”
Maybe we should start a support group for them.
I thought old fogeys don’t need so much sleep, so having him on at 6 is a public service for such codgers, with the double whammy of either enlivening their rage buds or sending em to snooze.
T-shirt slogan:
Codger Patrol
Have I had my tea yet?
“We want the world and we want it at about teatime”
That’ll be on the back.
Preferably worn with a splurge of mince’n’tatties careering down the front of it.
Tweeted by Tone today: “I don’t think some people now in the radio business know the history of radio. We went out in the North Sea to bring about great radio with personalities, not three in a row, a time check and the same 300 records over and over again.”
I bet @deramdaze will have something to say about the the final point.