Love the Show Steve! Friday Five: BBC Radio 1 DJs.

BBC Radio 1 played a big part of my formative years. It was my musical background; I felt comforted by familiar tunes and challenged by new ones. I defined my style through sounds - those I liked and those I didn't. The music made up my identity. There were the road shows, the drive time mixes, the morning routines, the chart release countdowns, the ridiculously catchy-jingles, the in-jokes and the wonderful lack of advertising. I didn't actually realise how wonderful that last point was until I started to listen to commercial radio and wished the station didn't have to keep being interrupted by the utterly banal - how naive I was not to know that was capitalism. 

Of course, it wasn't just the music; it was the personalities and their presentation. I learned a lot about mic technique and public speaking, just by listening to others. I learned there was a time to be controversial and opinionated and a time to let others speak their views. As this is was a public service broadcaster it was meant to be apolitical (as with all things which are supposedly non partisan, the right thinks it is too left and the left thinks it is too right), but as it targeted the 15-29 age group, it mainly focussed on 'youth issues' if it strayed into that territory at all.

Annie Nightingale

I'm mentioning it in the past tense because I stopped listening it to it when I left the UK in 1996. It is still going, as it has been since September 1967. Recently I have been thinking of it often, however, as several of the DJs to whom I used to listen have died, with the most recent being Steve Wright. So here, for Friday Five, I thought I would pay my respects to some of the great BBC Radio 1 DJs of the recent past (in alphabetical order). 

1. Annie Nightingale (1940-2024) - one of Britain's trailblazing DJs died earlier this year and it was a great loss to the musical community. As the first female presenter on BBC Radio 1, she specialised in championing new, experimental and underground music. She hosted afternoon request shows, afternoon slots, evening shows, and current affairs shows. In the late 1980s she considered leaving radio after becoming disillusioned with popular music, but instead became interested and involved with acid house music from 1989 onwards, playing it on her Radio 1 show before it became mainstream. She travelled and performed as a DJ at festivals all over the world and continued playing house music on her show until her death. 
2. Janice Long (1955-2021) - Janice Long (née Chegwin - big sister to Keith) presented a weekday evening show (Monday - Thursday, 7-10pm) featuring a mix of new music and current affairs. I used to listen to it as I did my homework (it ran from 1984-1987). She left the station in 1988 to have a baby, and was not offered a way to return, so she moved to Greater London Radio instead. It's her voice I remember most, as listening to it in my bedroom was an almost daily occurrence for me. 
3. John Peel (1939-2004) - The longest-serving of the original DJs on BBC Radio 1, he broadcast regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004. He was an absolute inspiration and a devoted Liverpool fan. He chatted away on the radio about new bands to whom he had been introduced by his son, William. With his avuncular attitude and eclectic taste, he showcased a number of genres from pop, dub and reggae to punk, post punk, electronica, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip-hop. His radio show was noted for the regular Peel Sessions- four songs recorded by an artist in the BBC studios, many of which became definitive versions - and the Festive Fifty, which was he only countdown that mattered. When I lived in Manchester I would occasionally walk past him on Oxford Road as we both hurried to or from work/ class, and it would always make my day to be in the presence of greatness. 



John Peel

4. Mike Smith (1955-2014) - Mike Smith was the presenter of the weekday lunchtime show on BBC1 from 1983-4, but it was his stint on the breakfast show from 1986-8 that brought him to my attention. He was charming, friendly, chatty, and a comforting presence, one of BBC TV's main presenters at Live Aid in 1985, and a regular presenter of Top of the Pops. He mainly played chart hits and new music from mainstream bands - nothing startling - with a family-friendly approach. He also piloted helicopters and married Blue Peter co-presenter, Sarah Greene. He seemed like a thoroughly wholesome chap. 
5. Steve Wright (1954-2024) - Steve Wright was one of my childhood DJs, whose show Steve Wright in the Afternoon had a cast of characters performing irreverent skits, inspired by the style of his mentor Kenny Everett. The 'posse' included producers and radio staff who joined in with the spoof and sketches. The program ran from 1981 to 1993 and it was what we listened to on the bus on the way home from school. The style - known as the zoo format due to the general feeling of chaos - became legendary and defined what it was to be a DJ at that time. It wasn't enough to just play music; you had to be a personality as well and to entertain above all. As he said himself, "It's a tabloid newspaper of the airwaves - fast, fun and packed with info. Something for everyone."

A Refusal to Die of White History: Modewarre

Modewarre by Patricia Sykes

Spinifex

Pp. 90

Modewarre is the indigenous word for musk duck, a creature at home on land, water and air. Through her poetry, Patricia Sykes explores various histories and the boundaries between them which blur and blend. She splits the poems into three sections: House of the Bird, House of Water, and House of Detention, examining words and their connotations, dwelling on reflections, refractions and altered perceptions.

Naming things robs them of their magic and power, as we use “language, so impossibly cumbersome/ for discovering the true weight of things/ the grandmother would have known”. The literary fragments are almost Sapphic with physical and sensual meaning: “as always the modewarre/ places faith in its eggs/ yolk and the sun/ breed each other”. The strong bonds of belonging and connection to land go beyond words, until the frustration is clear in a poem such as eponymous, “to the interrogator who keeps asking/ ‘so are you still suckling on myths of place?’/ I say try the enigma address/ the bird who keeps vanishing in water –”

The poems recall the land and the life before the colonists came, and also the sheer incomprehension of the invaders dealing with the loss. In eupathy (right feeling of the soul) she sees the land from above as though flying with the eagle. “to talk now/ of whether this is still so/ or if the eagles in free flight/ are an option/ to speak of/ options, land, again/ once more/ not as that which was taken/ is un-ownable/ contracting and crowded/ but as lava shift/ the heat of a river/ always underfoot/ in a molten indifference/ to politics”. There are layers of knowledge contained in a word, such as the poem, ‘brid’, eight darkness in which ‘brid’ is the name given by Nyangangu, a Yolgnu artist of Northeast Arnhem Land, to her bird carving. “there, where you are,/ bred of earth, breeding sky/ working the uplift, wingbeat/ as if sculpting a refusal/ to die of white history”.

The world is a palimpsest and so is the brain – our thoughts and memories are malleable. Birds connect people and places, and are often totems for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, helping to define kinship with people, their Country and nature, connecting to the roles and responsibilities of a mob, offering protection and foreshadowing danger and momentous events. This connection extends throughout the world as the birds migrate along their own songlines.

Means of expression are insufficient, with even mechanics of speech and typing unable to capture the richness of the language. “this keyboard’s/ tireless tap-tap mouth/ which cannot voice/ the interior ‘n’ in Nyangangu/ the one with the tail/ the sound of ‘ng’ in singer”. And yet the words can be damaging and belittling. “how the eyes like linguists are never satisfied/ how they’ll poke and pry into any lexicon”, wanting to preserve and capture, destroying the natural.

The poems in House of Water are concerned with childhood, disease, death, invasion, cattle, birds, and bunyips. Roads are built over traditional lands, only to crumble and fray at the edges demonstrating their impermanence in the liminal space. “what never was field/ become paddock become/ fences become livestock/ the cattle the sheep/ foraging for the hoofprints/ they lost the last time/ they departed a shore”.

In the House of Detention, the poems move on to highlight migrants trapped in refugee camps, prisoners in cells, wives in marriages, women in motherhood, caterpillars who will one day be butterflies, political constraints, and people wanting to be “at home in every world/ where exile does not exist”. In great-aunt narrative among the excised lands, Sykes leans upon the double meaning of refuse (verb and noun) as it relates to denial and pollution: “oh my Canberra…/ high city of presumptive cleanliness/ among the dirty waters exuding from the workplaces/ the smell of your refusal laws”. She uses a rare capital letter in this poem, which must surely be ironic as her punctuation is clean and almost entirely absent.

Modewarre is a great collection of powerful fragments, connecting words to the echoes of previous language both spoken and unspoken. It is a reminder that we are merely one of millions of moving parts that comprise our environment, expressing a concern for what will happen to the delicate balance once we form a pyramid and place ourselves at the apex.