Annie Nightingale: Bird on the Wireless

The music's always been about change.

You've got to do something that sweeps away the past.

What has kept British music so exciting and refreshing

is because someone comes along and changes it all again and we seem to welcome those changes,

which I don't think necessarily happens in other countries.

My name is Annie Nightingale. I am a Radio One DJ

and I have been now for four decades.

I may have done other things in my life, but this film is a personal account of my life in music

and some of the artists I've been passionate about.

I'm still crazy about music and I'm always looking for something new and exciting.

Probably once a week, somebody says, "What's your all-time top ten?"

And you think, "Oh, don't ask me that! That is so difficult!"

Or, "What's your favourite tune of all time?"

I go, "I might tell you one today but it'll be different from last week".

The point is, you're always looking forward. You haven't got time to look back.

"Annie Nightingale on BBC Radio One."

What happens with most people is their interest in pop music is greatest when they're teenagers,

perhaps into their early 20s,

and then you have rather more important things to take up your time.

For some reason, for me, I've gone on on that interest in the new music,

the undiscovered, the underground, and seeing it, nurturing it, really.

The length of how long she's been on the radio, four decades,

and she's still down, still cool. She's a legend.

She's given a lot of people breaks and she's got the spirit

that she's always stuck with the music. She's into what she does

and she's not in any way like a celebrity DJ, is she?

She's here for the music. She loves what she does.

I unfortunately was not born with a great singing voice,

which is the more embarrassing if your name is Nightingale,

and I certainly didn't feel confident enough to become a professional musician,

much as I would've loved to have done it. So that's how becoming a DJ, appreciating music,

playing it and huge enthusiasm for it and wanting to spread the word to other people,

that is how this job happened.

It's actually like being on the phone.

Being on the phone to your friend saying,

"I've just heard this great tune, I'd love to play it to you. Have a listen, see what you think."

You've got to be honest to yourself. I don't play anything I don't like.

You play a tune until it's peaked.

If it's going to be something that's in the charts, as soon as it's peaked in the charts,

you don't play it any more because you've got all these other tunes going, "Please play me!"

If you have a radio show or if you have a music column in a magazine or a newspaper,

you'd be deluged, inundated, everyone wants a review

or everyone wants airplay.

My role is just the conduit, get the good music out there.

So on what basis do you choose what to listen to? I can't tell you that.

If it gets some kind of emotional response from me, that is what you want.

What makes an emotional response is very difficult to say.

As John Peel rightly said, "I just want to hear something I haven't heard before."

You're never off duty. At home, I've got one set-up in the kitchen,

I have decks in the living room and then laptop on my bed,

so I've got all these different tunes all poised to listen to

simply because I want to get to hear everything.

Getting played on the radio...

In the days pre-internet, getting played on the radio

was your bread and butter. That's the only way people could really hear you apart from playing gigs.

So getting support from DJs who would play something that wasn't in the charts,

Annie and John Peel broke so many bands.

They were kind of our only real voice.

She was a great help to Primal Scream in the early days.

She's always championed us and she's a love for doing that.

# I have to praise you

A tune that hasn't got a plugger behind it, or hasn't got money behind it to promote it,

this is somebody at the beginning of their career, they can't afford to have...

They haven't even got a record deal, they haven't got a big label behind them. Who's going to get play that?

So that's why the evening DJs on Radio One

were much more likely to give those tunes an airing,

because they weren't playlist material possibly, and that's where I've always been.

The first time I can remember her was when the Stone Roses played at Alexandra Palace.

Just after the gig, we were on this fire escape having a crafty smoke

and we saw the girl mooching across with Stewart Copeland out of the Police

and I think I gave him a bit of cheek and got a good laugh out of her,

but she's always been around and always been very supportive

and she's a great lady. She's is the grand dame of Radio One.

AIRRAID SIREN BLARES

This thirst for the new is something that came from deep inside me,

probably connected with my childhood.

Growing up in this post-World War II environment

was not at all a bad thing.

Obviously, you only have one childhood, so I couldn't compare it with anyone in any other era.

To me, it was not a bad thing. It was very exciting

because it was a bit like having Bonfire Night every day.

Obviously, people had suffered terribly, but you don't realise that as a small child.

I didn't know any different. It didn't bother me in the slightest.

It wasn't just for me it was like that. All over the UK.

Growing up in Liverpool, can you remember what the landscape was like?

Places we would play we called bombies. "We're going down the bomby."

And then only later you realise you were talking about a bomb site.

And then it still didn't click.

It was only later you thought, "Oh, there was a house there

"and a bomb destroyed it and now we're playing football on it."

One of the other things I remember is you'd see what I now realise

were servicemen coming back from the war with shellshock.

You'd see guys walking down the street and they'd be sort of twitching

and you'd say, "What's that? What's up with him?"

And the grownups would say, "That's shellshock."

When I was growing up, all the relatives were talking about the wars they'd been through

and I thought, "I don't want this to happen again. I don't want to go through what they went through."

I do remember once talking to my dad

and this is probably why I asked the question.

I said, "Do people want peace?"

And he said, "Yeah, people everywhere want peace, it's the governments that screw it up."

The 50s, now considered dull and austere, I found really exciting.

Mainly due to the sounds coming out of the family radiogram.

The radiogram that I remember growing up with

was the kind of focal point of the room.

And it was from there that this music came out.

The first memories I have were violins making me cry buckets

and it still does. I'm terrified of things like symphony orchestras,

I have to run away because it affects me so much, I don't know why, and it still does.

As soon as the remnants of World War II had gone, we were in the space age!

This was very, very new and exciting.

And also this was the beginning of things like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

and strange sounds coming out of the radio which were not conventional music and were not orchestras

or popular music or crooners. It was like, "What is this?"

I was obviously very open to all these sounds

and I still am.

I guess that's why I ended up doing what I do.

The rebellious and independent streak I'm known for,

I'm still really not sure where that came from.

I was not approved of at school.

I mean, looking back on it, possibly it did build that sense of independence.

Independent girls-only school.

They didn't encourage this very left-field, weird, raver person.

# Gonna keep a-shaking, gonna keep a-moving baby

# Don't you cramp my style, I'm a real wild child

When I was 17, despite my parents' wishes, I was hell-bent on doing a journalism course.

I used to think it was the movies. That was my other great passion as a youth,

to go to the movies, and it was something like Roman Holiday

in which a journalist was making a really good time, and I think I thought,

"Well, that looks like a really exciting life,

"running around in sports cars and going, "Hold the front page!"

"and you're on the phone or chasing criminals, exposing corruption."

It was purely Hollywood fantasy, I suppose, of what I thought a journalist would be.

# Come on, baby, let the good times roll

It was a growing up process. It was as much a year of leaving school

and experiencing the big, wide world, which I desperately needed to do.

One of the interesting parts about this college was that every Friday

there would be a get-together in the main sort of hall of the polytechnic on Regent Street.

It was like a disco, really.

The music wasn't all that great, because this was just pre-Beatles,

and it was things like Bobby Vee, rubber ball bouncing back to you.

# Rubber ball, I come bouncing...

It was not a very good period of music.

And I would notice that in one corner there was this very cool gang.

And they were the art school.

These people looked amazing and I thought, "I'd like to be friends with them".

And it took a whole term, which was a lifetime in those days,

I was only doing a one-year course,

to be accepted by any of them.

Meeting these art students changed everything for me.

They opened the doors to a whole new world, from beat poetry to French new-wave films.

That became the Beatles' world.

The art school thing was a very important phenomenon.

I think it allowed kids like us

to think more freely than we'd been encouraged to think to that point,

which is one of the points of art school.

You look at a thing and are you going to make an abstract painting of it or figurative? It frees your mind up.

We'd kind of cobbled together this identity

which was happening anyway amongst the youth.

You know, there were millions of art students

who were kind of looking like we looked.

My father bought me a little... I'm sure he wished he hadn't afterwards!

..this very small, white, I guess it was called Bakelite, radio which I had all to myself.

I didn't have to share the musical choices with my parents,

I could have whatever I liked. And that's when I found Radio Luxembourg.

# You ain't nothing but a hound dog

# Crying all the time

# Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit

# And you ain't no friend of mine

# Goodness gracious, great balls of fire

This was the opening into this world,

this completely different world of different music which was for teenagers.

This generation who were not children and we weren't adults

and it was incredibly exciting.

And years later, you hear from The Who

and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles

that they were also listening to Radio Luxembourg

and that's what brought us all together.

Elvis appeared, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and all these people we loved,

and that was the big shockwave.

SCREAMING

That was it. It was like...

-# Shake it up baby now

-# Shake it up baby

-# Twist and shout

-# Twist and shout

# Come on, come on, come on, come on baby now

# Come on baby

-# Come on and work it on out

-# Work it on out

-# Ooooh

-# Work it on out now

-# Work it on out

Through all these little influences, the whole generation was going through a change.

So that positioned us, that we sort of came on the scene

and everyone just looked and went, "Yeah, I could do that".

# Shake it up baby

Shortly after my one year as a student, I became a journalist

and met somebody who was married.

We ran away to Brighton.

# Love, love me do

# You know I love you

When the whole beat boom happened,

all the bands like the Beatles, they all toured endlessly, that's how they got known.

So, of course, they came to Brighton

and I by then had got a job on the local newspaper

and I got to interview anybody I liked.

When I saw the Beatles the first time, I clicked.

I thought, "I sense I know these people".

They were like the art students I knew.

And famously I was told that I launched my career by insulting John Lennon.

It's not strictly true, but I just said, "Ah, you're the difficult one, then." And it caught his attention.

# Why do I never even try, girl?

Going to cover a pop concert or doing an interview with a pop star

for some journalists might have just been part of the job

and they'd be going, "Yeah, OK, what's your name? John. George..." And that would be that.

I was obviously insanely excited about all this

and to have the chance to meet them... You know, I was a fan!

I felt that rapport because it was an echo of the people I'd met, the art students I'd met particularly,

with that attitude and that kind of really irreverent attitude.

You had not had that in show business before.

Although I was living in Brighton, I started writing music reviews

for London-based newspapers and magazines.

# I see a red door and I wanted it painted black

I started working on a national paper and I had a column in the now derided Daily Express

and another paper which doesn't exist any more called the Daily Sketch,

so I became the pop columnist. There weren't music journalists, really,

apart from those at NME and the Melody Maker,

but working on local and national papers,

there weren't really people who specialised because it had only just begun.

I was excited by That Was The Week That Was,

by satire, by Private Eye, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Beyond The Fringe,

that was all part of how society was completely changing.

And the Beatles were the musical reflection of that.

They just reflected this groundswell of change and excitement

that this young generation were bringing.

Also, it didn't matter what background you came from,

it didn't matter if you had a working-class accent.

In fact, now it was suddenly deemed to be brilliant to come from Liverpool!

A lot of things were more possible and they were possible for

young people who hadn't had good educations.

# Pretty woman

That's why it's so important. It opened up the world to a lot of people

and the opportunists got in there and got on with it.

I felt I had to contribute something to this. Because you could feel it. It was changing everything.

Part of this social revolution that was happening.

So it was happening in television

and it was happening with music.

But we still had the BBC.

# Ding dong, the witch is dead

# Which old witch? The wicked witch

Who were not keen on all this pop music.

And then along came a pirate ship playing pop music

in international waters, so therefore not restricted by any British laws.

We're going to do the thing right here on Caroline South.

Along with Radio Caroline, other pirate radios also broadcast from international waters.

I mean, it was a brilliant idea.

They changed everything because they were playing great tunes all day long.

# Wonderful Radio London

Luxembourg was only, I think, on in the evenings, but this was all day long.

And it was American-style radio

and it was helping all the young music.

It was just another part of this youth revolution that was affecting all areas.

It was hugely enjoyable. It was just a feeling that you could do anything you wanted to.

The opportunities were there.

# I hope I die before I get old

-# Talking 'bout my generation

-# This is my generation

# This is my generation, baby

"Go on, have a go, you may be able to do it. Don't be afraid to try something."

The opportunities were there.

The first opportunity I had to do a bit of radio was actually a little un-manned studio

inside the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, which may still be there.

And it was sort of automated studios, there was nobody else there except me,

and I had to put these headphones on and then somebody would speak to me who was in Bristol or somewhere.

And whilst I started doing it, it felt great.

I thought, "This comes naturally to me".

Having seen Broadcasting House every day when I was at Regent Street Polytechnic,

I never imagined that I would end up working there

because it was part of the establishment.

Then again, I couldn't really see myself at sea with the pirates, either.

But then they got shut down and the BBC started their own pop station,

Radio One, in 1967.

# Radio One, good time music

-# Right!

-Right! And it is three minutes past one o'clock on a Monday afternoon.

Radio One had begun and it was all male.

And I was more than shocked to hear that, "No, no, no women."

"Disc jockeys are husband substitutes." This is what they said. I couldn't believe it.

And therefore they don't want women broadcasting.

# There's nothing you can do that can't be done

This is ridiculous. What is so special about this pop radio station

that it could not... that it had to be male only?

I didn't get it. I couldn't understand it. It didn't make any sense.

By now, I was becoming quite a feminist, I had a column in Cosmopolitan Magazine,

I was feeling quite strongly about feminism generally.

So I couldn't understand it. So I'd write attacking them.

So eventually I think they thought,

"We'll have to have one. Who do we know?"

-"Mary Nightingale - BBC Radio One."

-And so I became the token woman.

Then they went, "Erm, can you work a desk?"

And you go, "What? What do you mean, work a desk? What does that mean?"

Cos I hadn't thought about that. I thought you speak into a microphone,

somehow the music just gets played and that's it.

But it's a whole technical aspect of it which was intimidating

because you had this whole...like a recording studio and I was thinking,

"I don't know how that would work" and this was a big problem.

And on the very first show I did, I stopped the record that was actually being broadcast

because I thought, "I'll do something useful."

We were half doing the desk, half me and half the producer,

so I thought, "Well, that's just going round and round, why don't I do something useful and stop it?"

But it didn't just stop, it ground slowly to a halt.

Eight seconds of dead air, which is a lifetime.

So that was quite a tough learning curve.

My first show at Radio One after the tryouts

was in the middle of the afternoon

and there were very great restrictions on playing records.

It was called needle time. So you had nothing like you have today

where you have pop stations playing music 24 hours a day.

That didn't exist. There were very strict rules about it.

So other hours were given to... It was a loophole, really.

So it was reviewing records. So because I'd been...

He said to me at one point, "The only reason we've accepted you here is cos you're a journalist."

So not really a proper DJ.

I was a journalist who'd been allowed in.

But it meant that I could do a show where we playing new records

and say, "This is the new one by whoever it was and it's on this label and the number is so-and-so"

rather than going, "Hey, everybody, have a good time! Bang, bang, bang!"

It was a device so we could fill the airwaves with more new music.

Certainly in the UK, certainly on Radio One,

you're either a specialist DJ who plays music of your own choice,

you bring the music with you, or you're a daytime presenter

who plays the playlist and you don't have any free choice, or very little.

Whether they intended me to be a daytime DJ I don't know,

because Radio One was still relatively young,

but I noticed the people who were on the evening

were able to play more adventurous music,

so I said, "I want to be on in the evening" and they went, "Oh, OK, then".

Because it seemed to me that you were more, again, underground. You could play more underground music.

There was still a very chauvinistic attitude,

and in those days there would be an engineer through the glass,

so they could talk to me on the talk-back and they'd be going, "This is rubbish, isn't it?"

But these were all tunes that I'd personally chosen,

so I thought it was an insult to the music and it would drain you of any confidence you were building.

There was years and years of that. It took me a huge amount of time...

I didn't have any problem with talking about the music or any of that,

but it was the technical side, it was this woman-driver complex

and the feeling that they were waiting for me to make some very big mistake.

Of course people made mistakes. It didn't matter, actually.

Then television started exploding

and we had a programme called Ready Steady Go,

one of the best pop music programmes ever,

and the editor of it was Vicki Wickham,

who was also manager and very close friend of Dusty Springfield.

One Sunday night, literally on an impulse,

I thought, "I should really go and see Dusty Springfield"

at somewhere called the Asoldo in North Street, Brighton.

# Anyone who had a heart

# Would take me in his arms and love me, too

I went into her dressing room.

Dusty said, "Oh, this is Vicki Wickham." I went, "Oh, really?"

She went, "We're starting to do a new show and we're looking for a presenter. Would you be interested?"

And that became my first TV series.

It was all live. No recordings of it exist.

It was called That's For Me. So now I'm in another world

and I'm going to Ready Steady Go every week

and you all go out to a meal afterwards and then you all go to the Ad Lib Club

and there's the Stones and the Beatles and Michael Caine, everyone all around you,

and you're suddenly in the midst of this extraordinary world.

The end of the 60s and the end of the Beatles felt very much like the end of a chapter.

# Is equal to the...

When the Beatles broke up, everyone was looking for, "Who'd be the band who replace the Beatles?"

And then I realised, it wasn't a band at all,

it was David Bowie.

# Ground Control to Major Tom

I'd been to see him play at the Dome in Brighton, he sat on a wooden stool

wearing a pair of jeans and a white shirt, playing acoustic guitar.

He was magnetic. You could not take your eyes off him.

# Here am I sitting in a tin can

# Far above the moon

# Planet Earth is blue

# And there's nothing I can do

I thought, "This guy is the future".

That is what music's always been about.

Change. You've got to do something that sweeps away the past.

# Oh, you pretty things

# Don't you know you're driving your mamas and papas insane?

Suddenly this androgynous look

and very thin blokes dyeing their hair bright colours, wearing makeup,

which a few years ago would've been unthinkable!

# Say it again, you gotta make way for the homo superior

David Bowie was part of a great art movement.

He was very involved with art on many levels. He was the man.

And then he took this whole generation with him.

That became the 70s.

# Well, you're dirty and sweet

# Clad in black, don't look back and I love you

# You're dirty and sweet, oh, yeah

# Get it on

# Bang a gong, get it on

Marc Bolan, he and Bowie were very close

and what is to be called glam rock

was actually quite a short period of time.

# Bang a gong

He was a very good friend. I remember him saying that

they had to shorten the name of Tyrannosaurus Rex to T-Rex

cos he thought radio DJs wouldn't be able to pronounce it.

# You're built like a car, you've got a hub cap diamond star halo

That's what has kept British music so exciting and refreshing,

because someone comes along and changes it all again and we seem to welcome those changes,

which I don't think necessarily happens in other countries.

The 70s not only gave us glam rock, but rather more dubiously, prog rock.

And bundled up in that mainly regrettable genre was King Crimson.

Still special to me today.

This album arrived with an extraordinary cover

which was really quite scary. It was like a troll

or something out of Grimms' fairytales.

# I wait outside the pilgrim's door

# With insufficient schemes

I was absolutely transfixed by it

and I was so excited cos I'd never heard anything like it before.

I remember the next day thinking, I want to put it on first thing, as soon as I woke up,

to see if it's still as good as it sounded the night before. And it was.

So then I was a passionate follower of this band

and I became very friendly with Robert Fripp, who's the main protagonist.

That band was very, very important to me and I became very evangelical about them

because I could hear things I had not heard anywhere before.

That's what you're always looking for.

I just want to hear something I haven't heard before.

And that was certainly true of them.

# 21st century schizoid man

It's quite interesting that Kanye West sampled 21st Century Schizoid Man,

which I absolutely love, and has brought that back to life.

# 21st century schizoid man

# The system broken, the school's closed, the prison's open

That sort of spans eras between the two, to me, very brilliantly.

# Everybody we rollin'

# With some light-skinned girls and some Kelly Rowlands

# In this white man's world we the ones chosen

# So goodnight, cruel world, I see you in the mornin'

-# Huh? I see you in the mornin'

-# 21st century schizoid man

You want to go onto punk now? Brilliant.

# I am an antichrist

# I am an anarchist

I think one of the reasons punk happened was because of the pomp rock.

Self-indulgent, pretentious,

long, long, awful, boring, long guitar solos.

But when you got to the point where you have Rick Wakeman doing ice shows...

..this really was kind of ridiculous.

That was when I think everyone went, "Enough!"

And meanwhile, you've always got a new generation of people coming along

wanting to create their own music

and do not want to be part of what is established and popular.

I think that's what brought about punk.

It's always been bubbling away for some years before the underground comes up

or someone has a breakthrough hit and then the door is kicked open again

and then a whole generation comes rushing through.

# God save the Queen

How do you shock people? The Stones had done urinating against walls

and "Would you let your daughter go out with them?"

They shocked one generation. It was now quite difficult to be shocking

cos it'd all been done. How do you... What can you do now?

# There's no future

We were also into a very difficult time...

..for most people financially. The 70s was miserable.

Music reflects what's happening.

# No future for you

# God save the Queen

# We mean it, man

# We love our queen, God saves

With the Sex Pistols, you kind of needed to have more than one band

to create a movement, so we had the Sex Pistols, The Clash and many, many others.

# London calling to the faraway towns

# Now war is declared and battle come down

The Clash stood for incredible defiance.

I mean, obviously, some people thought,

Joe Strummer, son of diplomat, how could he have the proper working-class credentials

that you were supposed to have if you were going to be a credited punk band?

But they were coming out with incredible music and incredible gigs.

They were amazing to see them live.

And they were very much... That was what they were about live

but had that kind of call to arms.

They captured that voice of the nation.

Co-founding member of The Clash Mick Jones represents that generation.

I joined him in West London where he was rehearsing with the newly-reformed Big Audio Dynamite

to find out what has fed his musical passion.

So, is this the Clash Cave?

Yeah, it's a Clash-opolis.

It's not only Clash-opolis, it's all the other stuff.

It's like a personal collection

running alongside a cultural collection, so all the other stuff that went alongside it,

and what informed it, what came before it. I've been collecting since I was a kid.

# In here we're all right

People went to art college not to do fine art necessarily

but just to form bands. Were you part of that?

Well, actually, all the people I liked had gone to art college

so I knew I wanted to go to art college if I wanted to be in a band.

The only reason I went to art college, in all honesty,

was for the grant, which I used to spend immediately

on amplification and guitar strings.

All the people before, in the generation before, had all gone to art college,

all the people I liked, so I knew that was my route to music.

But I did fine art and then at the end of art college, I was doing The Clash.

They were going, "Have you done any paintings?" and I was going, "Yeah, look at my shirt."

# A couple of years ago down Ladbroke Grove

# The Dreads uptight sitting on a treasure trove

Music changes people's lives. It was so great that we went so far,

from a council block to untold, you know?

And that wouldn't have happened before the 60s, as well,

because there was the class disassemblation

and that's what took us on to what happened with punk and stuff.

When punk came in, it was about that anybody could do it, for a start,

and it was that do-it-yourself ethic, but also, if the class barriers hadn't gone down in the 60s,

that wouldn't have happened. So it was still connected,

even though it was supposed to be the end of days and Year Zero,

there was a big connection for a lot of us.

We'd come out of that. We still studied and followed the counter-cultures.

# My baby drove up in a brand new Cadillac

# Yes, she did

# My baby drove up in a brand new Cadillac

I wrote most of my best songs on the bus.

The rumble of the bus actually starts the tune and then the next thing you know...

It's like Janie Jones, which was written on a number 31 bus.

# He's in love with rock'n'roll, whoa

# He's in love with getting stoned, whoa

# He's in love with Janie Jones, whoa

I do need to be able to walk around and stuff,

and so I just try to look to the future.

I always think it's like in the Second World War, they had a gun that shot round corners,

and I always think the next thing I'm going do if I go round the corner might be the really good thing.

So I try to keep looking forward in what I do.

There. The old ones are still the good ones. Thank you very much.

BBC was very behind with punk.

I'd been playing it, John Peel had obviously been playing a lot of punk on Radio One,

but it's quite hard to get that music across.

At the time, the most significant music programme on television was The Old Grey Whistle Test.

When punk came along, punks hated it,

they wanted nothing to do with the show as it was.

It was with great interest that I watched the piece of film you're going to be shown, it really was.

I think it's an important piece of reference.

Bob Harris, who'd been the presenter...

An unfortunate incident in a club with one of Sid Vicious's mates

and Bob's mate got glass in the face...

Bit of a surprise, that.

Bob went, "This is not my kind of thing, it's not my kind of music"

at which point the show was handed over to me

and they said, "Would you like to become the presenter?"

and I didn't have a problem with punk so I went, "Yeah, that would be great"

Ladies and gentlemen, The Damned!

Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The Skids.

I ended up presenting the show for five years,

embracing not only punk but introducing an eclectic variety of other acts.

Please welcome Elton John.

You're not supposed to be playing tonight?

No, no, some other queen's playing there.

Gary Numan with Me I Disconnect From You.

# The alarm rang for days

First of all, I can remember the last time and first time I ever met you was in a hotel room

-and you used to say then that if any of your band were found with dope on them, they were fired.

-Yeah.

-Have you stuck to that all these years?

-I've bent the rules a couple of times.

The studios are haunted by The Who.

Every few years, there is a peak artist

and this one happened through a label, through Stiff Records.

Along came, to me, one of the greatest albums of all time,

New Boots And Panties by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

# I could be the driver an articulated lorry

# I could be a poet, I wouldn't need to worry

# I could be the teacher in a classroom full of scholars

# I could be the sergeant in a squadron full of wallahs

# What a waste

# What a waste

# What a waste

# What a waste

# Because I chose to play the fool in a six-piece band

# First night nerves every one night stand

One of the threads in my interest in music has been lyrics.

I like great lyricists.

And lyrics or a line in a song that really resonates with you, stops you in your tracks.

# Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll

# Is all my brain and body need

This guy is a poet, purely and simply.

He's very, very well known. Everyone knows the songs on that album.

There's Billericay Dickie, Clever Trevor. They were all naughty.

They were always going to be difficult to play on the radio.

There was a B-side called Razzle In My Pocket which I got away with playing.

# In my yellow jersey I went out on the nick

# South Street Romford, shopping arcade

# Got a Razzle magazine, I never paid

# Inside my jacket and away double quick

Fascinating character. He'd had polio,

he was quite severely crippled.

I didn't know the expression "raspberry ripple" before I knew Ian.

And to become a sex symbol, being a tiny guy with a withered arm who could hardly walk,

that was quite something to achieve. I remember saying to him once,

"When did you realise that you actually had become famous?" and he said, "When you wrote about me".

# In the deserts of Sudan

# And the gardens of Japan

I found a telegram from him saying, "We couldn't have done it without you".

Something quite amazing which, as he's quite a long time deceased,

means a huge amount to me.

# Hit me with your rhythm stick

# Hit me, hit me

# Je t'adore, ich liebe dich

# Hit me, hit me, hit me

# Hit me with your rhythm stick

# Hit me slowly, hit me quick

# Hit me, hit me

# Hit me

I do think it was grossly unfair

that he battled with polio and then he should die of cancer.

It's just really, really not on. Pretty disappointed for him.

# Hit me with your rhythm stick

# It's nice to be a lunatic

# Hit me, hit me

# Hit me

It's interesting to me that every few...maybe every few decades

or generations

this desire to express your music with really original, witty lyrics,

the opposite of a Hallmark greetings card's lyrics,

as in Everything I Do, I Do It For You...

# Everything I do

# I do it for you

-..lazy...

-# And I

# Will always love you

-..cliche-ridden...

-# We'll stay

# Forever this way

..drones that I find it hard to believe that they've been number one for years,

sometimes it feels like for years...

# I feel it in my fingers

# I feel it in my toes

It obviously works on some level that resonates with that audience.

# Love is all around me

# And so the feeling grows

But I prefer something, you know, wittier. And we have it.

# Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still ain't calling

# I left my cell, my pager and my home phone at the bottom

# I sent two letters back in Autumn, you must not have got them

# There probably was a problem with the Post Office or something

# Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot 'em

# Anyways, what's been up, man? How's your daughter?

# My girlfriend's pregnant, too, I'm about to be a father

# If I have a daughter...

Obviously, it's come from hip-hop and rap, which is all about words,

and extraordinary... I mean, I'm a huge Eminem fan.

# I know you probably hear this every day, but I'm your biggest fan

# I even got the underground ... that you did with Scam

# I got a room full of your posters and your pictures, man

We've had a long period of dance music, instrumental music, which I love,

but recently there seems to be a great resurgence

amongst what is loosely called the urban performers. It's brilliant, it's genius

# And it's only right you ain't feeling let alone rating that

# But babe it's a fact that they call me the latest map

# I had to live by that I spend nights in your flat

# And I know that thought alone is ill

# Left the next taste in your mouth like a drink gone flat

# Yeah, we bring the stars out

# We bring the women and the cars and the cards out

# Let's have a toast, a celebration, get a glass out

# And we can do this until we pass out

# I ride this ... beat like a tractor

# I ride this ... beat like a train

# Choo-choo, go hard, go faster

To me, people like Tinie Tempah, Tinchy Stryder, Wretch 32,

there's so many joining in this incredibly rich period

that we're going through in the UK and there's a lot of wit going on.

# My lifestyle's terribly wild

# But you never catch me on the Jeremy Kyle show

That line is enough to... catch people's attention.

Despite what some people thought, the 70s were really creative musically.

ENGINE REVS

Once I'd heard German electronic music,

to me, it was like the invention of the atomic bomb. You could not uninvent it.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC

I absolutely loved it.

But from then on, there was always going to be this backlash

of people talking about real instruments

and thinking that synthesizers were something horrible. They're not.

Electronic music just changed everything and I knew it would.

# She's a model and she's looking good

# I'd like to take her home...

Kraftwerk are fated and honoured to this day for their contribution and rightly so.

We accept electronic music now totally. Nobody goes, "That's not a real piano"

or "That's not a real guitar"

and am amazed by the fact that with a box of electronic tricks

you could create that sound. Why wouldn't you?

It's originality. To me, it's what music should be about.

# He's gonna step on you again

So, I wake up one morning and the beat has changed.

That is what causes the main changes in pop music is when the beat changes.

We'd had this rock beat that had been going for 20 years or more

that was one, two, three, four.

Now it was one, two, three and a four, one, two, three and a four.

It became called acid house.

# You're unbelievable

Several DJs went on holiday to Ibiza

and found that there were DJs in the clubs there,

which stayed open all night,

which was unheard of in the UK,

and they were mixing music together,

they were mixing guitar music and flamenco

with Chicago house music

and this became the basis of acid house.

So they came back from their holiday,

as you do, in your holiday clothes thinking,

"Oh, well, that was great, why can't we carry this on?"

-And so the whole rave scene developed.

-# You're unbelievable

One of the figureheads of this new musical movement that started in the late 80s was Primal Scream.

And they came to make this album called Screamadelica

which they put together in bits and pieces,

but that became one of the defining albums of that time.

Now, this lot were a Scots band that came to live in Brighton

who'd started out by being influenced by The Birds, who were one of my first hero bands.

So we all started to hang out together.

They met a guy who was running a fanzine who was part journalist, part all sorts, Andrew Weatherall,

and they gave him this track that they were doing.

And they said, "Would you like to do a remix of it?"

So he changed the whole thing and he put horns in

and he put all kinds of things in, it completely changed it and it became Loaded.

Which became the tune of that generation.

That, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses.

If we had to have bands then they were the bands, but they worked with DJs

and they would put on an event where the DJ would play first,

then they would play, then a DJ would play till five in the morning

and people weren't used to this at rock gigs. It wasn't the thing to do.

You saw the band and you went home. But no, you stay,

and because everyone was E'd up, as well, they would stay awake.

# Baby, let's go

# I don't want to lose your love

Acid house was very much about colour

and the DJ became the star.

This was a new generation.

Now we had this new drug called ecstasy.

But the problem is nobody wanted to outlaw it.

I don't think the police wanted to. They were ravers.

The 90s were actually a bit like the 60s.

Exuberance, creative and very inclusive. It was just a wonderful party,

So there's this new feeling of camaraderie and love.

This reminded me of the kind of 60s thing, but they weren't hippies.

With the new heroes, who were DJs not bands,

and new environments, which were raves or they were outside in fields,

which then revived the whole idea of festivals.

I was in Brighton where we had the Zap Club

so we had that kind of north-south, and in between and all around, these raves were happening.

The government's considering giving local councils new powers to control acid house parties.

On Saturday night, several policemen were hurt

as they tried unsuccessfully to stop a party going ahead near Reigate.

The government were furious about it!

A bill to ban acid house parties

has been given an unopposed second reading in the Commons.

The illegal parties, with tickets costing up to £30,

have led to running battles with police,

a barrage of complaints over noise levels, drug abuse

and concern over inadequate safety and fire precautions.

Government ministers support the bill.

I don't think it's stuffy or boring

to tell young people to watch it.

It couldn't be worked. It was unworkable.

To me, the effect of acid house, which is from 1987, 1988 onwards,

the whole effect is still there.

Much more so than punk, really.

And yet it doesn't seem to be recognised, so that's my personal platform.

This was the Skream mix of Cassius - I Love You So.

# I love you so

# But why I love you I never know

The second time I heard it, I thought, "This is genius".

The first time, I thought, "These squeaky girls at the beginning, I don't know, really".

But then I listened to it again and I thought, "It's absolutely brilliant. It's genius."

You've changed the music. I mean, are you aware of that?

There's a team of us. We're sort of had a genre.

We've brought a genre...

A solid genre now that I can't see going anywhere

cos it's improved, it's not a fad.

Grime and dubstep has its resonance with people like Linton Kwesi Johnson,

who's now recognised very much as a sort of godfather of dubstep.

Skream remixes today are very special.

He puts the gaps in. He's not afraid of silence and most people are,

so when everyone else is filling it up with so much tune and so much noise

and so much rhythm and so much RPMs, he will just make it completely silent. So here it is.

MUSIC: "I Love You So" by Cassius (Skream Remix)

It's taught me never, ever to get disheartened,

because something will come up through the cracks,

up through the paving stones, as it has just done right now with grime and dubstep.

You're going to play at Coachella. Tell me where the billing is for you for Magnetic Man.

We're on the same line as Lauren Hill and just under Kanye West

and I can't remember who else is headlining that night.

-But, yeah...

-So you're going stratospheric, which is very exciting.

# Electronic world

# Supersonic girl

The first album by Magnetic Man

went to number five in the charts in late summer of 2010.

I had a message on Facebook saying, "Oh, so dubstep's gone commercial, then, so what's going to happen?"

You think, "Hang on, this is one band with one record going to number five,

"so already they're being dismissed as having gone commercial."

All those years for me, that always happens.

That underground might stay underground, it may go over-ground.

And when it goes over-ground, I go, "Great, they're off on their journey now, they don't need me any more."

This now is informing what goes forward

and so they'll be variations on that.

Now everybody is playing dubstep.

Cos that's changed the beat. You see? Like acid house changed the beat and house changed the beat.

When that happens, there's a major step change.

And so everyone then is in... Well, nearly everyone in contemporary music

will become involved in it, because otherwise you sound dated.

"Annie Nightingale - BBC Radio One."

Life has taken me on the most extraordinary musical journey.

And I've been fortunate enough to experience many changes along the way.

I'm still passionate about finding new talented people

and I hope that perhaps I can help some of them along the way.

I am a freak, really. I don't understand why.

The only other person I ever knew like this was John Peel,

who had his passion for new music, as well,

and as he's no longer with us, I kind of feel like it's good to keep that flag flying, as well,

as someone who's of his generation.

# I'm beautiful in my way cos God makes no mistakes

# I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way

# Don't hide yourself in regret Just love yourself and you're set

# I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way

I don't seem to forget tunes. I might forget a lot of other things,

friends' names and stuff, but you don't forget a tune and what it is and where you heard it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]

# I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way

# I was born this way, I was born this way

# I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way

.