There’s nothing I hate more on radio than what I call the ‘curated playlist’. By that, I mean any radio programme that claims to play the hits of a specific decade but sticks ridgidly to a kind of greatest hits reshuffle, resulting in a show that plays out like a compilation album. What, you may ask, is wrong with that? Nothing as such. It’s just that, for a proper nostalgia trip back in time, you really need to hear everything – not just the greatest hits but those lesser tracks that skirted the top twenty for maybe just a couple of weeks, or even missed it completely. And you need the rubbish, too – those tracks that, incredibly, made it into the top ten (or in some cases, reached number one) despite being unlistenable pap. My point being that, listening back in the day to a programme like the weekly Top Forty rundown, you got to hear everything as a rule. If there was some awful record in the charts, you had to sit through it.
There’s no radio show more guilty of ‘curated playlisting’ than Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops, recently relocated to Sunday teatime and presided over by Mark Goodier (never the edgiest of radio DJs). The programme, following a tradition that goes back to Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show of the 1970s, plays two charts from a given week in history (rarely venturing back further than the 1980s). The charts are, of course, incomplete, and the programme is bogged down by the usual tedious programme trails, and a lot of pointless factoids about the year in question that anyone interested could look up on Wikipedia. But the real issue with the show is how the charts are cherry picked. Odd and obscure items are glossed over. Anything by personae non gratae such as Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter or Jonathan King is omitted without comment, which, in this era of cancel culture, is only to be expected. But not all the omitted music is from artistes such as these. Each top twenty is whittled down to around twelve or thirteen songs, with priority given to climbers (though not always); and you can bet it’s the time-worn ‘greatest hits’ that always make it through this vetting process. Anything a bit weird or out of left field doesn’t make the cut. A recent Pick of the Pops chart from 1969 allowed in all the 'usual suspects' like 'Ob-la-di-Ob-la-da' but couldn't find room for Des O'Connor's '1,2,3 O'Leary'. Bad call!
The numerous, themed hits stations like Boom Radio and Greatest Hits Radio are, if anything, even more guilty of this kind of thing. GHR’s daytime playlist is like a zombie roll-call of ‘heard it a million times never need to hear it again’ hits, focused on the 80s and 90s with seldom a 60s track to be heard. I had to give up listening to it, and not only on account of the dreadful, repetitive commercials. Unfortunately, it is now the only place one can hear Ken Bruce, whose old Radio 2 show, despite an obligation to include a quota of talent-free contemporary artists, did manage to maintain some degree of musical integrity – where else on radio might you have heard a track like ‘Jackie Blue’ by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils?
There’s more to pop nostalgia than greatest hits. Around twenty years ago, when mp3s became readily obtainable online, I began to compile collections that I dubbed ‘old and cheesy’, focusing on the kind of obscure vintage material one seldom gets to hear on radio. In doing so, I located songs I remembered from childhood that rarely, if ever, trouble the compilers of contemporary radio playlists. Daytime radio in the 1960s would be utterly unrecognisable to anyone born after around 1970, consisting as it did of pop songs, comedy records, light orchestral numbers and crooners. In its own way, it was ‘curated’, in that the Light Programme tended to avoid the noisier pop songs of the era – you never heard anyone like the Kinks or the Who. As to the Sunday afternoon chart rundown, a near complete top twenty was played, with only a few of the lower numbers omitted when they were on their way out of the charts or seasonally inappropriate (like Christmas singles that hung around into mid January).
For this reason, songs that I didn’t particularly like – Ken Dodd’s ‘Eight by Ten’, for instance – are embedded in the memory along with everthing else that was getting radio play at the same time. I can pretty much guarantee that no radio station in the UK will have played ‘Eight by Ten’ in years, decades even. Yet the irony is that these seldom heard songs are often more evocative of a moment in time than their more frequently playlisted contemporaries. ‘Eight by Ten’ reached its peak chart position of number 22 in the chart of 27 February – 4 March 1964, a week that saw Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ at number one, the Searchers at number three with ‘Needles and Pins’ and the Dave Clark Five making a right racket at number four with ‘Bits and Pieces’. All of these are ‘frequent fliers’ on 60s nostalgia shows. But not ‘Eight by Ten’. Nor are we likely to hear Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ or Josh Macrae’s ‘Messing About on the River’, both of which I remember vividly from radio plays in the early 60s (we even had the single of ‘Windmill in Old Amsterdam’). I think this is a shame. Old rubbish deserves to be heard, if only for its potent nostalgia value. Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere – the Ramblers’ ‘The Sparrow’, Brian and Michael’s ‘Matchstalk Men’, and any song about grandparents (step forward Clive Dunn and St Winifred’s School Choir). But on the whole, I’m usually happy to hear any of the more unlikely old records when they occasionally pop up on the airwaves, even more so when they do so in the context of a complete chart from the year in question. As I’ve written elsewhere, nostalgic items produce a kind of nuclear reaction when juxtaposed: a song, a TV series and a comic from the same week in, say, 1965, will give you a much more powerful hit of nostalgia when you can experience them simultaneously. It’s as close as we may ever get to travelling in time. But to be absolutely true to any given era, you have to take the rubbish along with the classics.
One of the few DJs on Radio 2 who was ever likely to play eccentric items of the sort I’m talking about was Liza Tarbuck – and, sadly, she has recently retired from her Saturday evening radio show. Liza’s was undoubtedly the most eclectic and original playlist on the radio, reflecting her own diverse tastes in music, and the antithesis of the kind of ‘curated’ playlisting I’m talking about here. I’d go so far as to insist that her playlists were more interesting and certainly way more diverse than even John Peel, purely on account of the eccentric oddities she allowed out on air.
Of Radio 2’s remaining crop of DJs, only Tony Blackburn is worthy of comment: his weekly ‘Sounds of the Sixties’ show often includes tracks that Tony admits to not liking himself. This week, his playlist included Esther and Abi Ofarim’s (pictured above) 1968 novelty single ‘Cinderella Rockefeller’, which I hated in 1968 and still hate today. Staggeringly, this bizarro oddity reached number one in the charts. She sounds like Vampirella and he sings like a bad yodeller. As a piece of music it’s catastrophically bad, but it rode on the coat tails of a brief chart flirtation with 1920s era flapper jazz (‘Winchester Cathedral’, ‘What a Day for a Daydream,’ ‘Honey Pie’) and because it hung around the charts for so long, it’s still embedded in the minds of anyone exposed to it at the time. Like Strontium 90.
As if that weren’t enough, the same show found room for Lulu’s 1969 Eurovision winner ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ (famously parodied by Monty Python as ‘Bing-Tiddle-Tiddle-Bong’) another song of questionable musical merit. But merit isn’t the point here – inclusion is. Hearing these tracks takes you back to their era much more readily than the over-played greatest hits that shared the charts alongside them. Constant repetition of a piece of music seems somehow to dull its nostalgic appeal, rendering it ‘timeless’ in a way that ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ is not. I'd much rather hear the likes of 'Sunshine Girl' or 'Something's Happening' by Herman's Hermits, or Oliver's 'Good Morning Starshine' (also in Tony Blackburn's playlist this week) than anything by the Kinks, the Stones or any of the other bands who crowd other artists out of the nostalgia spotlight.
Tony Blackburn’s ‘Sounds of the Sixties’, unlike many other radio nostalgia shows, is the genuine sound of an era, warts and all. Because real nostalgia has to allow for the rubbish alongside the good stuff.
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