Radio One More Time: Specially recorded jingles

Radio One, by nature of being the only national pop network, had enormous power to make or break the fortunes of new singles. Since rules frowned on the idea of disc jockey and producer's favour being curried by the payment of large sums of undeclared funds into Swiss bank accounts, record labels had to come up with different ways of flattering the gatekeepers of the nation's taste.

One popular way of doing this was to record a specially re-worded version of the single to function as a jingle for one or more shows. So, for example, Owen Paul reworked

You're my favourite waste of time

as

Gary Davies in the summertime.

So vain were the jocks, these sly marketing parries almost always proved successful, helping keep the parent songs in the public eye... well, ear, and almost certainly squeezing a couple of extra plays here and there. And it wasn't just the usual chancers you'd expect to pull this sort of trick who got involved - even Kate Bush did a special Radio One jingle at one point.

The most played reworked jingle, though, would have been The Trainspotter's High Rise tribute to Mike Read. The original chorus ran

High Rise
High Rise
The neighbours are banging on the wall again
High Rise
High Rise
I want to live on the ground

The 'band' happily reorganised this into

Mike Read
Mike Read
Two seven five, two eight five
Mike Read
Mike Read
National radio one

So pleased was he with this, Mike Read used it not only as his main jingle, he also encouraged listeners to sing it all over the world - every day, someone's claim to have sung the tune in Berlin, or at the top of a mountain, or down a mine, would be rewarded with a mug. Naturally, there was no way of establishing the bona fides of the claims, as people didn't have mobiles, much less video cameras in their pockets, but everything was done on trust back then.

So who were these Trainspotters, whose single-turned-jingle got such exposure?

It was, um, Mike Read.

[Radio One More Time]