No Rock And Roll Fun

BBC RADIO RESHUFFLE: The BBC launch Five Live Plus in March. What's that got to do with music? Not much, except that in its wake will come Network X and Network Y, two new music stations. X will be an urban station (as in Artie's phrase from Larry Sanders, "Lenny Kravitz is only half urban"), while Y will be an archive station. This raises a major question: namely, where's the BBC going to put Evening Session type music in the future? Assuming Radio One continues to be mainly chart and pop led (I know they say they support new music first, but anything that's not mainstream gets shunted further and further into the schedules - its no coincidence that Peel is now back in the slot he occupied during the days of the Bierling regime, and Kershaw's been shoved so far down he's popped out onto Radio 3), and 2 is aimed at the swathe of people between "slippers are quite comfortable" and "did he have a favourite suit, madam?", there doesn't seem to be an outlet for guitarry, rocky, type music. This would be curious anyway, but with the massive interest (be it ever so slack jawed) in loud, shouting, back to front baseball cap tunes, it seems to be missing out a whole subsection of youthage. Unless the idea is to more or less banish R&B and garage from most of Radio 1's output, but that hardly seems a wise move either artistically or politically - not many So Solid Crew fans with three hundred quid DAB machines yet, I'd guess...