Rise and Shine

I woke up this morning (duh-duh-da-duh-duh) to an interview with Brendan Shine on Radio 1. He's an old Irish country singer (Irish country being a very unique and selective musical genre) who had a huge hit in 1979 with a song called 'Do you want your old lobby washed down?' I remember singing it with my mother on the way to school when I was a nipper.

Anyway, it was a nice little interview, made all the nicer by the fact that i was listening to it through that lovely drowsey 'Saturday morning, don't have to get up for work' feeling. During the interview he was asked about the 'lobby' song. It really was a massive hit in Ireland back then and is pretty much what he's remembered for. The interesting thing was that he attributed the song's popularity to the fact that RTE Radio 2 was launched in 1979 and the airplay it got there propelled the song to the top. It's true - I remember it was always on the radio back then. This got me thinking: What would it take for something like that to be played on the radio today? It just wouldn't happen. I remember listening to Larry Gogan's chart show in the early 80s and amongst the usual hits of the day - Kajagoogoo, Duran Duran, Queen, Joe Dolce etc., you'd have Irish curios like Paddy Reilly's The Fields of Athenry (number 1 for about 231 weeks in the '80s), the Furey Brother's Sweet Sixteen, Foster and Allen 's Bunch of Thyme (i think that's what it was called) and many others. Nowadays you wouldn't have a chance of getting anything like this on the radio.

Is this a good thing?

To show you how bad things are with mainstream radio, here's an example of something I heard on (I think) xfm in London last week. The DJ was taking requests from listeners and amongst the kinds of things you'd expect to hear on a popular radio station in 2007 - Lily Allen, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys and the like, came a request to hear Prince's When Doves Cry. The DJ played it and afterwards said something along the lines of this: 'See - we'll literally play anything on xfm'!! I nearly fell over! Have we reached the stage that one of the biggest hits by one of the most popular and influential recording artists of the last 25 years is being percieved by broadcasters as a bit leftfield and obscure? I mean has it really come to that? If that's the case, then Brendan Shine really has no chance!

Incidentally, Brendan has a new single out. It's called 'The first time you called me granddad'. They played a bit at the end of the interview and it's lovely. But it's Saturday morning, I have a free weekend and maybe I'm just feeling benevolent towards popular music's forgotten men. Men like Brendan Shine. And Prince. And it's not often you'll see those two side by side!

Finally, on the subject of Radio 2 or 2Fm or whatever it's called nowadays, I read that when it was launched in 1979, its slogan was "Comin' atcha". 28 years later, their slogan is "Livin' the Life, Lovin' the Music".

The more thin's change....