Last time, I looked back to my first encounters with recorded music via my parents’ modest but interesting collection of records, kept inside the huge veneered cabinet of the radiogram. The very word ‘radiogram’ is now an archaism. Once upon a time, it meant any piece of home entertainment equipment that comprised both a radio set and gramophone in a single unit. They were usually presented as stylish pieces of furniture, at home in any modern living room.
In my recollection, the radio was turned on most days. In the mornings, we would hear Housewives’ Choice and Music While You Work, the latter a survivor from the war years that was still going in the early 60s (astonishingly, the venerable Workers’ Playtime was also still running as late as 1964). Around lunchtime, our mum would retune to the Home Service for the news, Listen With Mother and Woman’s Hour.
This was still the era of valves, and any valve-driven piece of equipment needed a few minutes to warm up after being switched on. This was certainly the case with our old ‘KB Junior’. You knew it was switched on because a lamp lit up behind the tuning display with its list of domestic and European stations. I knew the words on that display long before they meant anything to me: Third, North, Light and Home for the BBC – Luxembourg, Hilversum, Helsinki and other European capitals, although we seldom ventured away from the familiar territory of the BBC Home Service or Light Programme. After maybe a minute, a hum began to emanate from the speakers, and if the set was switched to radio, you’d hear voices or music start to filter through.
Housewives’ Choice, a programme of record requests, went out every weekday at 9am, running for just 55 minutes. If you want to know what sort of programme it was, watch the opening credits of the film Billy Liar (1963) which re-creates a typical broadcast, complete with presenter Godfrey Wynn.
Housewives' Choice was followed by a short reading in a slot with the self-explanatory title ‘Five to Ten’, a fragment of which can also be heard in Billy Liar. The Radio Times listing described it as ‘a story, a hymn and a prayer.’
Music While You Work ran for just half an hour and featured live music. ‘Needle time’ was subject to restrictions imposed by the Musician’s Union, ensuring a ready supply of work for its members, so the number of programmes featuring gramophone records was strictly limited.
Despite this, I remember hearing a good many records on the radio. It was on the radio that I first heard the Beatles and, indeed, all the other groups of the early 60s; but the sounds reaching me from our KB Junior were for the most part a far cry from pop music as we know it today. The charts were still wide open to all comers, and a typical playlist from around sixty years ago would comprise an eclectic blend of pop groups, jazz, crooners, comedy records, novelty songs, light orchestral numbers and popular classics.
I absorbed all of this material unquestioningly. Yet looking back, it seems an almost bizarre hybrid of styles. One minute you’d have folkie Josh Macrae singing about ‘Messing About on the River’, the next you’d hear the Beatles singing ‘All My Loving’, followed by The Singing Nun’s surprise international hit ‘Dominique’. ‘Elizabethan Serenade’ was a popular light orchestral piece that got played a lot, and if I heard Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ once (with narration by Peter Ustinov) I must have heard it a dozen times. There were records aimed at children – Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ or Peter Paul and Mary’s ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ – comedy songs from the likes of Bernard Cribbins, Charley Drake and Rolf Harris – and spoken-word comedy from performers like Kenneth Williams, whose bank holdup skit ‘Hand Up Your Sticks’ puzzled and slightly unnerved me as a child.
The playlist of memory still surprises me. A random selection, all of which reached me via the Light Programme in the early 1960s: Horst Jankovski’s ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’; Helmut Zacharias’ ‘Tokyo Melody’ (the official theme to the 1964 olympic games); Russ Conway’s ‘Side Saddle’ (already an oldie of some five years’ vintage); Bernard Cribbins’ ‘Right Said Fred’; Charlie Drake’s ‘My Boomerang Won’t Come Back’; ‘Morningtown Ride’ by The Seekers; The Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Monday Monday’; The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’; Burt Bacharach’s ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’; Peggy Lee singing ‘Pass Me By’; Doris Day’s ‘Move Over Darling’, and the Searchers’ ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ – a song to which I supplied the alternative lyric ‘Don’t Throw Mrs. Tubby Away’ (Mrs. T was a battered old teddy bear sans ears whom our mum once threatened to put in the dustbin). Most of these tracks date from 1964, the year when I began to emerge from the fog of semi-comprehension that is early childhood, and started to take notice of the world around me.
Now and again, I’d hear songs that got played on only a handful of occasions but which unaccountably got stuck in the memory. ‘My Name is Mud’ was a 1962 country song by someone called James O’Gwyn, which reached my ears around 1965 or 66. The title amused me at the time, but I would not hear it again for nearly sixty years when it turned up unexpectedly on Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday evening programme. Indeed, if you want to get anything like a flavour of the eclectisism of early 1960s pop radio, her playlist is the closest thing you’ll find on any contemporary radio station.
One of the most bizarre songs I recall hearing was ‘Down Came the Rain’ by the songwriter Mitch Murray, styled on the label as ‘Mister Murray’. This appeared around 1965 and got a few airplays, which is susprising considering what a caterwauling confection it was. I suspect it had been written for Charlie Drake, as the hidously off-key chorus sounds just like him. This soon disappeared without a trace, and I wouldn’t hear it again for another forty years when it popped up unexpectedly on Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the Sixties – by a bizarre coincidence, I’d been thinking about the song about half an hour before it got played…
Sharing the airwaves with the popular record releases of the day were a variety of other programmes which our mum listened to. I knew the theme to The Archers from a very early age, but I couldn’t tell you anything else about the programme during that era (or since, for that matter). Radio’s other daily soap was The Dales, broadcast every weekday morning and afternoon, and better remembered in its earlier incarnation, Mrs. Dale’s Diary. I could still hum you the theme from The Dales, I heard it that many times. I believe the version in my head was a signature tune by Johnny Dankworth that had a lively, uptempo feel and had, apparently, only recently replaced a more sedate piece, to the consternation of listeners. My head may yet be its final resting place, as I’ve searched in vain for it online.
For children, there was, of course, Listen With Mother. I’m sure some of this must still exist in the BBC’s archive, but if so, it continues to gather dust. I recall fragments of songs – a traditional ditty about someone called Aitken Drum, a man who lived in the moon who ‘played upon a ladle’ (and prompted the earliest nightmare in my recollection); the song ‘pussycat, pussycat’; and a ‘walking song’ about a pair of boots named Horniman and Sir. I can still hear the presenters’ voices if I concentrate hard enough – Daphne Oxenford and George Dixon in particular.
On Saturday mornings, there was a record request programme for children, hosted most famously by Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, but formerly presided over by Blue Peter presenter Christopher Trace. The Seekers’ ‘Morningtown Ride’ later became enshrined as the theme music, and other records were perennial favourites with listeners: I doubt if I’d ever have heard Terry Scott’s ‘My Bruvver’ if it hadn’t been for Junior Choice. These days, the format is usually revived for Christmas morning by Anneka Rice.
Another good source of music on the wireless was the Sunday lunchtime request show Two-Way Family Favourites, aimed at an audience of ex-pats mostly in the armed forces (many requests would include the initials B.F.P.O. for British Forces Posted Overseas). Judith Chalmers was the usual presenter, and the music was a family-friendly mix of what would later become known as ‘easy listening’. One song I heard more than any other on this programme was The New Christy Minstrels’ ‘Three Wheels On My Wagon’, a comedy country number from a band whose line-up had briefly included future Byrds vocalist Gene Clark. The song was written in 1961 by Bob Hilliard and Burt Bacharach, and the Minstrels’ recording appeared on an EP the following year, with Barry (‘Eve of Destruction’) McGuire on lead vocals. Other popular songs on TWFF included film themes and selections from the popular musicals of the era. On any given Sunday you stood a better than average chance of hearing ‘Climb Every Mountain’ rubbing shoulders with Chaim Topol’s ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ (from Fiddler on the Roof).
Radio comedy passed me by completely. I’m sure we listened to some of the shows of the era, but the likes of Round the Horne were unknown territory to me until much later. The earliest radio comedy I was aware of was The Clitheroe Kid, another Sunday lunchtime perennial, but I didn’t really tune into comedy until I was quite a bit older.
One curiosity I remember is what I presume to have been a skit on Thunderbirds, performed around the beginning of 1966. The obvious candidate was Cook and Moore’s ‘Superthunderstingcar’, but the sketch only ever appeared on television. Clearly, someone else had a similar idea: whoever it was, I can still remember hearing what I took to be Thunderbirds on the radio, accompanied by audience laughter, which made for a bizarre listening experience at the age of four or five.
The KB Junior radiogram made the move with us to our new home in Sutton Coldfield in 1967, but our home audio was due for an upgrade, and in 1968 our dad invested in a proper hi-fi system, with stereo speakers. I’d never seen (or heard) stereo before, and the sound it made was impressive: but for the first decade its sole purpose was for playing jazz records from his personal collection. My brother and myself were later permitted to play pop albums on it, but the EQ was set for a curiously muffled low/mid range spectrum which made everything sound a bit weird to me.
My brother had by this time been bought a small record player of his own, which began to supplant the KB, whose record deck had become erratic in operation. The KB was finally retired around 1974, when it was replaced by a modern stereo radiogram from the popular manufacturer Fidelity. It was on here that our pop singles got played for the next eight years or so.
My last memory of the KB Junior is of it sitting up in my brother’s bedroom where its short-wave setting could be used to listen in on the local police and taxi firms. By now, it had lost a couple of its control knobs and was starting to look somewhat the worse for wear after more than twenty years. The very last thing I remember hearing on it was the single ‘This World of Water’ by New Musik, in the spring of 1980: my brother wasn’t around and I’d been randomly messing around with the old radiogram to see if I could get anything out of it.
Examples of the KB Junior are now extremely hard to come by. When they do crop up, it’s usually in auctions of house clearance items and their value is no more than £20 or £30. Ours ended its days on the council refuse tip in Sutton Coldfield not long after its 1980 swansong. I’m not sure what I’d do if I came across one now: it’s simply too big to make room for, even for the sake of nostalgia. But as my introduction to records and radio, indeed as my introduction to music itself, the old KB played a big part in my formative years.
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