25 years ago today: Bates on the wall

If yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the fall of The Berline Wall, that makes this morning the 25th anniversary of Simon Bates turning up in the city to do the Golden Hour from the midst of history.

This was most memorable because, arriving too late to get a good spot, Bates explained his position like a person who'd inadvertently booked a fortnight in Boppard rather than Cologne. The people you saw down at the Brandenburg Gate were just the sort of people who want to get on TV, revealed Bates, but here - further down the Wall - was where the real Germans were.

It sounds less and less convincing with each passing year, doesn't it?

Simon Bates eased out by Smooth

With so many clouds hanging over former Radio One DJs, it's rare to hear of one being dropped simply because there's no place for him at his current station any more.

But that's what's happened to Simon Bates, leaving Smooth not because of Yewtree or pretending to be a car salesperson:

"Andrew Castle, Kate Garraway, Tina Hobley and Myleene Klass joining Smooth tell you just how seriously Global takes the launch of Smooth, and the focus and investment we're putting behind this brand," said [ Ashley] Tabor.

"It's a further demonstration of our core strategy of 'national brands delivered locally', and it's very important to us. As Smooth becomes one of the country's biggest commercial radio brands, we're investing to make it bigger and better for our listeners and advertisers."

Yes, nothing says 'we're taking this radio station seriously' like putting a tennis player and one of Holby City in roles previously done by radio presenters.

Radio One More Time: Current Affairs

Radio One's news means only one thing, of course: Newsbeat. Except for the brief period when Newsbeat in the evening had given way to News 89, or News 90, depending on what the year was - a whole thirty minutes of mainly news which, we suspect, had been launched in response to Capital Radio's much-missed The Way It Is, only abandoned when Five Live was launched to cater for the I-like-news-but-I'm-not-obsessed-with-news audience. Perhaps the key Newsbeat - the most Newsbeaty Newsbeat of them all - was the lunchtime edition which covered both the attempted coup by military-obsessed hardliners in Moscow and the launch of Take That's first single. Who knew that both would be organising their comebacks at the same time?

We've never been sure, but we've always suspected that the existence of Radio One's semi-unique news on the thirties would have been down to sharing a news team with Radio 2 in the early days and an easy way of letting one presenter be on two networks without needing to be in two places at the same time. Of course, the two minute, half-past news bulletin never used to part of the Newsbeat 'brand', only changing during the Banister-era. "It's not Newsbeat" protested Danny Baker, "it's just the news".

The station has always seen a current affairs offering as being essential to its position, sometimes going a little extreme in its determination to keep world affairs in amongst the pop. Mike Smith's tenure at the Breakfast Show saw headlines bursting out every twenty minutes, but without a 'crew', Smith himself was expected to do the newsreading for all but the standard news slot. You don't know the meaning of "clunking change of gears" until you've heard a man trying to get from "has the victim of the IRA bomb made it through the night" to "has Bon Jovi made it three weeks at number one". When Simon Mayo settled in to the Breakfast chair, he was gifted a team to try and make this work more easily - Rod Mckenzie, who then did the news and is now in charge of Newsbeat, and Sybil Ruscoe, who was travel and weather, and went on to open the BBC Bar in Manchester Oxford Road. Ruscoe was the first female breakfast regular, although, of course, she was only allowed to do the lady-slanted "don't forget your sou'wester and make sure the kids get to school on time" bits.

Simon Bates, clearly, wanted to be thought of as Radio One's key anchor, which meant that if something interesting happened, he'd be jumping into a radio car to bring the news. We do wonder if anyone actually asked him to drive to Berlin when the wall was coming down, but he did, popping up to report for the breakfast show. Bates was away from the rest of the world media, but bravely insisted that this was because Radio One's Golden Hour was right, and CNN, BBC News, ITN and the German Media were wrong: "If you're watching TV, you're missing the story. They're at the Brandenburg Gate, that's not where the real Germans are, that's where the TV cameras are, that's where people go when they want to get on TV. We're where the real Gemrans are." And Simon Bates, of course.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

Radio One More Time: First Love

You were my first love
and first love never, ever dies

Much has been written about Simon Bates' Our Tune, the daily feature in which Bates would read out a letter about a love story which - normally - ended in tragedy and then, after a spin of the doomed couple's song (quite often something by Dire Straits of Will You, by Hazel O'Connor), the redemption:

So, you're looking at the radio now, saying 'what happened, Simes?' Well... Tony's leg never grew back, but his heart did...

The lack of any serious radio audience research allowed Bates to make grandiose claims for this daily spot of mawkishness. Sometimes, this would take the form of tales of hardened lorry drivers being forced to pull over to the hard shoulder of the M1 lest their floods of tears lead to multi-car pile-ups (although that would, at least, provide a fresh supply of "Julie was trying on the wedding dress when a policeman called at the door - it was Jack, he'd been killed in an accident" stories to keep the feature going.) Always, though, there was Bates' boast at the end:

Tell me your story, and I'll tell eight million other people

It's interesting that, despite these enormous audiences hanging on every twist and turn, nobody has seemed much interested in attempts to resurrect the feature in Bates' post-Radio One life. He's popped up doing it on Sky One, TalkRadio and Classic FM but (adopts gravelly voice, fades up Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet by Henry Salomon & His Orchestra) the spark had gone and, although Simon was keen to try again, the audience... well, the audience had moved on, found other obsessions. And so the tantalising question remained: had Our Tune been popular because it was on during the day on the biggest radio station in the country... or could, as Simon seemed to believe, have Radio One been so popular because of Our Tune?

To be fair to Bates, as Out On Air in Radio 4's Archive Hour pointed out a few weeks back, he was open to all-comers for Our Tune, and did feature gay relationships, something still fairly unusual to hear about on Radio One out of the context of "this is a youth issue with a telephone helpline attached". On the other hand, the way he'd build up to these stories - building a protective zone of repeated warnings ("some of you might be shocked, there might even be complaints") rather than slipping them in in a matter-of-fact fashion - suggested that he wasn't entirely comfortable featuring tales of man-on-man heartbreak and was probably only doing the queer ones because he'd run out of "normal" letters.

So, yes, Our Tune is well known. Less well recorded, though, is Mike Read's similar - some might even say copycat - feature which ran in the Breakfast Show. While Bates appealed for stories of the biggest romances and largest disasters, Read slowly carved out a niche for himself which sought out tales of First Love. In place of the Love Theme from Romeo And Juliet, there were the Walker Brothers, and - by the nature of the stories - much was played out in classrooms, common rooms and playing fields, which sat well with Read's other big feature, Schooldesk. (This was little more than hoping Mike Read would read out the name of your school - simple pleasures in those days, kids.)

In those days, Read provided the only public outlet for people, looking back fondly on a love which had been strong, burned with passion, and - usually - had been ended by circumstance or puberty, never to be regained. These days, of course, Friends Reunited performs a similar function, but in place of a TeaHee mug and a chance to hear a song you once snogged to, you get a messy divorce and the chance of a disastrous old-time's sake bunk-up.

Bookmarks: Some other things to read on the web

Stylus revisits the first fifty Sarah Records releases:

Another Sunny Day returns with “I'm In Love With A Girl Who Doesn’t Know I Exist,” the track Sarah detractors would often cite as Exhibit A in their case against the label’s proclivity for sad bastard pop. (Conversely, Haynes said it was one of the most perfect releases in the entire Sarah catalogue.)

Sure, the single is pure schmaltz, evoking modern acts like Aberfeldy – gushy guitar lines, near whining vocals, and Williams revealed to be naive to a fault (“So many times this has happened before / But I never knew that love could make you feel so sore”) – but it’s got subtle, ironic flourishes, too, like that dance-like bass drum featured in the beat. And checking in at just 1:40, one gets the impression Williams got over his romantic mugging rather quickly.

David Hepworth's And Another Thing revisits his twenty year-old Best Albums top ten. Since only time can tell if we stand the test of time, do the choices still stack up?:

1. I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight by Richard & Linda Thompson
Frankly I don't believe in these lists at all but this is still a masterpiece. I picked it for what it represents and I might well do the same again tomorrow.

Idolator watches and transcribes Anne Coulter reviewing Rage Against The Machine:

And, by the way, they are also very unfamiliar with D.C. gun laws if they think they can shoot the president, because no guns allowed.

QVC is the new musical tastemaker, reports the Wall Street Journal, watching Neil Sedaka pitch up and flog scary numbers of albums amongst the cubit zirconium:

During Mr. Sedaka's live performance April 19 at the channel's West Chester, Pa., headquarters, QVC sold nearly 19,000 copies of his new CD, according to his label, about 78% of his first-week sales. That figure helped vault "The Definitive Collection" -- which includes new material and well-known songs such as "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" -- to No. 22 in the Billboard 200, according to data released Wednesday by Nielsen SoundScan.

During the show, the 68-year-old musician's wife watched from the green room as the sales mounted in real time. "She called it 'the slot machine,' " Mr. Sedaka remembers. "It was quite shocking to see how many people would buy off QVC."


Each of the four acts QVC has featured this year has either jumped onto the album chart or seen spikes in record sales after its appearance. In March, the country-rock group Alabama sold more than 21,000 copies of "Songs of Inspiration II" on QVC, the channel says -- or as much as 81% of the figure that landed the album at No. 33 on the chart. After a February performance to promote a special edition of their 2006 album "Let Love In," the Goo Goo Dolls returned to the chart with 15,000 copies sold that week, according to Billboard.

The DigiCreamTimes remembers how Simon Bates suffered for our entertainment:

Radio One disc jockey Simon Bates needed a medical check-up today when he returned to Britain at the end of his round-the-world charity race.

After suffering a severe stomach upset for the past eight weeks, he said he felt weakened and "slightly malariafied" after his travels, which raised £300,000 for Oxfam. Food poisoning, heat exhaustion and a septic foot added to his troubles during the 78-day journey. And on reaching Dover at dawn this morning he quipped: "One thing I have discovered on this trip is there are more cockroaches than people in the universe."

There's a guy... let's call him Simon...

and there's a station, we'll call it LBC. And they were together, but then... Why is it we only ever hear of Simon Bates when he's being sacked?.