RADIO GAGA

Chris Vezey is right to criticize the bland playlists adopted by 99% of music radio stations (Letters, RC 337). In my experience, however, his station Big L is a shadow of its 60s heyday and no more than another ‘Gold’ station itself. You’d wait a very long time before you’d hear Skip Bifferty, July, Anne Briggs or Captain Beefheart on Big L, and as for a Neil Young song that isn’t Heart Of Gold or a Van Morrison song that isn’t Brown Eyed Girl… forget it!

Looking at the fantastic array of compilations and re-issues every month in RC it truly staggers me that none of these radio stations liase with Ace, Trojan, Repertoire etc to provide an up-to-date, almost contemporary, ‘oldies’ station. Wouldn’t the labels also benefit from such an arrangement? There’s a gaping hole in the market that isn’t (and outside Peel, Lamarr and the occasional Radio 2 or Radio 4 documentary has never really been) catered for.

What on earth is the merit in 2007 of playing Pretty Woman, Satisfaction and She Loves You when a station like Vezey’s could corner the market in exclusively playing the recent mammoth Motown Box Sets, the recent Doors, Trees and Sly Stone reissues, and the huge number of rediscovered albums which are advertised in each month’s RC?

by Sean Perot
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