In the early 1980s, purely
because I worked in the local
record shop, I was offered
the opportunity to host my
own Hospital Radio show.
Visions of being hailed as
the new John Peel flowed
through my mind and I readily
accepted.
When the day of my first show
arrived, I headed off to the
hospital with little
preparation and no records -
no need, I was told, the
station had a bountiful
supply of donated records,
enough for a hundred shows.
On arrival at the studio I
was indeed greeted by a huge
quantity of records...Foster
& Allen, Mantovani, Charley
Pride, Val Doonican, James
Last, Johnny Mathis, Daniel
O'Donnell, Klaus Wunderlich
you name them, they were all
there on the shelves of a
musical wall of horror. My
heart sank.
Needless to say, from my
second show onwards, I made
greater preparations and took
my own tunes. That first
week, however, I went through
every last record in the
studio in an effort to find
an hour's worth of
broadcastable music - the
pickings were very slim
indeed. On-air, I mumbled and
waffled from nerves and also
to cover the fact that I had
scarcely anything decent to
play.
Bizarrely and unaccountably,
however, I found a 7" single
of The Jolly Brothers
'Conscious Man' in amongst
all the dross. I played it
instantly. Then I played the
dub version on the b-side.
Then I rambled on a bit about
reggae in general, Lee Perry
in particular and the Black
Ark studio where the track
was recorded in 1977...I
might have even played the a-side again!
What the patients on the
wards upstairs made of my
efforts that day, or in the
slightly more organised weeks
and months that followed, is
thankfully lost in the mists
of time, but whenever I hear
the distinctive, squelchy,
couldonlycomefromtheblackark
intro to 'Conscious Man' I'm
transported back to that
studio and it's musical wall
of horror.
Here's the full 12" mix. Have
a great weekend.
5 comments:
What a shame that the 'bountiful supply of donated records' should contain so little of real interest - and isn't that nearly always, disappointingly, the case? If I'd been a patient in one of those wards at the time, listening to Daniel O'Donnell and Val Doonican et al would have made me even more ill. (Either that or sped up my recovery, perhaps, in a bid to get out of there as soon as possible - ah, maybe that was the idea?!) Anyway at least you found something refreshingly different amongst the dross and it was probably the first time it had been aired on there...I'm sure it would have made a number of patients smile.
Great post TS...reminds me of being in hospital many many years ago....the hospital ask me to give a request....the had no Joy Division, Tear Drop Explodes...you get the picture....I ended up requesting I'd Rather go Blind by Chicken Shack which they had,,,great record....I as uin there with an eye injury playing squash...not aware of the track...it's good of course...I like Saturday Scratch
nice post mr Swede. Go to the Orb's website (orb.com), they have a free download of the new collaboration with Lee Scratch Perry, 'Hold Me Upsetter'. That is if you haven't done it already of course...BO!
Fab post, sir. Hospital radio DJ! I think that's great. The musical wall of horror sounds like almost every charity shop bin I've ever flicked through! Arrrggghhh! Do they really want the poor folk to get better? makes you wonder. As for The Jolly Brothers - this is one of my favourite roots reggae tracks. Perry genius strikes again. If I was in hospital, I'd definitely welcome them at my bedside.
Thanks for the positive vibes one and all.
The postscript to the story is that when I mentioned the Jolly Brothers 7" to the station controller, his reaction to it was much as mine was to the whole wall of horror! He told me to keep the single on the grounds that it wasn't suitable for hospital radio and he had no idea where it came from. I couldn't do it though, even though I didn't then own a copy. I tucked it back into the middle of a pile of utterly naff records in the hope that it would one day be re-discovered by a desperate DJ with similar tastes to my own. I wonder if it ever got another airing?
(flycasual, already done, thanks to a tip on the Tunedoctor Twitter feed!)
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