Category Archives: Worlds Shortest Radio Show

He was a California hippie named Ivan Dryer and this is how he introduced the show. He invented laser light shows and the big one was Laserium at the Planeterium. It was a sensation – multi-coloured laser beams moving to music played through the most powerful sound system most people had ever heard and this […]

……and this track could have come from it. It was late 90s but could easily have been the 60s, 70s, 80s or even today. Not because it’s “timeless” but because everything about it is so childishly simple. Even people who can’t play the guitar or bass could probably play the guitar or bass on this. […]

Paul means ‘small” and if you call someone a “berk”, it’s Cockney rhyming slang for Berkshire Hunt, so I wasn’t blessed with the best of monikers. I didn’t get too much stick at school – not with Colin Looney in the year below. Over caffeine the other day with my friend James Ballantyne (now that’s […]

Britain’s first commercial radio station is 40 years old this week. It’s a talk station and most of its programmes are phone ins. Yet back in the 80s it had a completely incongruous hip-hop show on Sunday afternoons. Even weirder, it was hosted by Mike Allen, a smooth, urbane middle-aged man whose tastes when he […]

The BBC are currently celebrating this man’s distinguished 40 year career but I simply don’t understand how he’s still going. He is of course a very knowledgeable, wise and articulate authority on popular music but a strangely soulless broadcaster. He seems to deliver his carefully considered links from a lectern without warmth, humour or enthusiasm. […]

Yesterday would have been my parents’ wedding anniversary. They’re no longer around to celebrate it but my mum always insisted that the day they got married in London NW2 it was a “beautiful sunny day”. Anyone who knew her will recall that she was, shall we say, prone to exaggeration – especially if it made […]

I know that sounds like the beginning of a Les Dawson routine but all I’m going to say about my mother-in-law is that she looks exactly like Petula Clark. I met Petula Clark a couple of years ago with David Gest at Vanessa Feltz’s valentine’s party (now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write) […]

Don’t you hate people who say that? Instead of saying, “Sorry?” – a polite apology for not hearing you, they say “Say again”, commanding you to repeat yourself as though you’re to blame for their failure to hear you. Now I know that, when he sits at the piano, Sir Elton looks increasingly like Mrs. […]

……not when there was stuff like this to listen to. And I mean listen. This sort of soul had a far more interesting tale to tell. Songs about divorce, adultery and lives really lived. It all sounded so intoxicatingly grown-up. It still does, especially this one. It’s like a whole movie in about four minutes. […]