Alan Freeman's
Album Request Show

When Radio 1 started back in 1967 it was AM-only: tinny, compressed and hard to receive after 6:00pm.

FM frequencies were available to the BBC (although most people only had AM radios as FM was "new" and expensive) but fuddy-duddies at the helm decreed that FM, with its full-bandwidth and even stereo transmissions were to be reserved for "proper" i.e. Classical music and, for some reason, talk (Radio 4), the medium least deserving of the improvements.. Radio 1 would not get its own FM frequencies until the 1990s.
But on Saturday afternoons Radio 1 borrowed Radio 2's FM frequencies and the wonderful Australian broadcaster Alan "Fluff" Freeman could play album tracks, progressive rock and sometimes classical, most definitely not Top-40 stuff. From Camel to Van de Graff Generator, he played it.
In the end I think he just played what he liked, making up many of the "requests" on the spot. He wasn't quiet as blatant as John Peel, who famously announced he would play the whole side of an album so he had to to go and have a crap, though...
Alan was a guy you could learn things from, discover new bands, new forms of music at a time when Progressive bands released singles (or didn't in many cases) to showcase what the albums they had created were like.

Annie Nightingale played a mean set late on a Sunday night but she was never quite up to Alana's standard, and Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show was just too raucous. Fluff's show was the thinking man's choice of pleasure.

I even swapped my little AM radio for a proper FM stereo radio-cassette unit to better appreciate ALan's offerings. Heady stuff for the 1970's.

Having recently, after a 25 year hiatus, re-watched the now-remastered-in-4K video for Joe le Taxi, the song holds up remarkably well but what comes through is the sheer guts of a 15 year old Vanessa Paradis gyrating for the camera. Surprisingly unsexy, Ms Paradis viewed through a 30 year lens comes across as wholesome and confident but needing dental work. Comparative studies of later photographs show she never did have the required work done, I guess she decided the oversized gap between her incisors was her trademark.

Putting aside the whole Serge Gainsbourg Svengali thing and noting that he’d be lucky to get away with it in the 2020s, the issue of course is that the intervening time since the songs release has cemented that sax break in to a section of our mind called “mid-80s classics”, along with Sade’s Smooth Operator and many others, making a truly critical listening impossible. But Serge’s ear worm and the high production values of both the song and the video for what was a first record from an unknown teenager speaks volumes about his confidence in her abilities.

Whilst on the subject of Sade, the Diamond Lives album fell out of the virtual jukebox a few weeks ago. I’d forgotten that not just the eponymous Smooth Operator but "When am I going to make a living" and "Your love is King" were present.
In fact there isn’t a bad track on the entire album.

From an early age I’ve had a jukebox in my head. Not just the last song I heard on the rock ‘n roll radio (Thankyou, Angie Baby by Helen Reddy) but a huge and easily recallable selection of 70's and 80's music.
Frustratingly, even music I don’t particularly like will often pop up, with perfect clarity. But my default setting seems to be either Oxygene Pt 5 by Jean-Michel Jarre (I can hear his father, the famous Maurice Jarre, looking down at young Jean-Michel and his electronic musical toys and shaking his head: “no future in that, boy, come and use some proper instruments”) or the instrumental break at the end of “Back to the Farm” by the now sadly deceased Steve Harley and his Cockney Rebel group.
Steve had a very black sense of humour in the early days ("Back to the Farm", "My only vice", "Mr Raffles", "It wasn't me"); sadly he became tamer later but not before releasing “(I can’t believe) God is an anarchist”. He’s missed by many, I know. I saw him in concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 2013 and I still firmly believe he was one of the truly great songwriters of the 1970s.

This jukebox was powered by Fluff’s Saturday Album request Show for most of the 1970’s, where “liked a bit of leather” Alan would play long, rambling, prog tracks interspersed with his inimitable style of presentation. But being the consummate professional he never, ever, talked over the music. Other DJ’s should take note: we’re not listening to you, it’s about the music, not your ego. I’ve found an on-line archive of his 1970’s shows and they stand up surprisingly well for being, yes, 50 years old.

Once the upper half of the FM band was released by the Police (not the band) the GPO allowed more FM stations. The proliferation of local radio stations made possible should have resulted in better quality radio but in practice the dilution of the available advertising revenue simply created cookie cutter stations all playing the same 50 records, which was an opportunity wasted.

DAB was a great idea but has been riven by competing technical standards, poor uptake of equipment and too many cookie cutter radio stations but mainly has simply been ambushed, as with so many things, by the Internet.
The near-ubiquity of 4G data coverage and cheap Bluetooth-capable radio equipment has allowed reception of any radio station anywhere in the world at any time.
Even the BBC, normally so hidebound by copyright issues they won’t allow their video streaming products to be viewed outside the UK, allow universal access to their radio stations via BBC Sounds. So it is quite possible to drive around Spain listening to Radio 4 live or time-shifted via a podcast.

My internal jukebox allows unlimited plays, instant rewind to the start of the best bit again and, like Spotify, will auto-suggest another track when this one finishes.

Of course our musical tastes are built in our younger years, for me that means the 70s and 80s. The 90s were sparse and post-Millennium it’s all a bit of a wasteland really, but it’s something I try hard to reverse, there must be decent music out there somewhere to add to the jukebox. I don’t subscribe to my friend Simon’s “John Peel” theory that if it’s new and different it must by definition be better, but then he also believes David Bowie was the best songwriter ever, whereas the rest of us know that he got coked up and lost in the mid-1970s and despite increasingly desperate attempts to stay relevant in to the 1980s his best years were behind him. Elton John suffered a similar fate but did manage to release just enough good material in to the Millennium to continue to support his flower habit and simply mined his extensive back catalogue for his tours rather than embarrassing himself with substandard newer material.

Simon Cowell didn’t kill music in the early 2000s, although he certainly had a good go. He certainly killed the relevance of the Top 40, but the attention span of later generations coupled with the demise of linear listening hasn’t helped. Apple Music, Spotify and the .mp3 have reduced the amount of cash sloshing around in the music industry, and re-focused artists on podcasts and live performances. But it does mean that any concerted new wave of musical style is simply impossible- the whole thing has become too diverse. I do note, however, on a good note, we seem to have passed peak rap at last. Spoken words over a stolen and looped riff, no matter how cleverly assembled, was a poor passing fad that really should not have been as big or lasted as long as it did.

I do enjoy Bhangra, trip hop and am increasingly into the sounds coming out of Mali. World music was not really on my radar until recently but Africa is, of course, the source of all the blues and now at last a few of the traditional Big Man African despots are being replaced by workable governments a middle class is appearing, hungry for local quality music. Like anything, this is patchy and often African nations go backwards.