Tuesday 28 August 2007

A Nightingale sang...



BBC Radio 1 has announced that Annie Nightingale's Request Show is being revived for one night only to mark the station's 40th anniversary. The two-hour show will be broadcast on 30 September 2007.

Annie Nightingale (unbelievably, she is 67 years old!) was the first female presenter on BBC Radio 1, and since the death of John Peel in October 2004 has been its longest-serving presenter. Her career at the station is more than twenty years longer than that of the second longest-serving presenter, DJ Pete Tong.

I used to love her Request Show! Coming as it did straight after the Top 40 - a show that in its heyday in the late Seventies and early 80s was an absolute essential in any youngster's listening week - Annie brought to the airwaves a selection of those bands that never made the high points of the charts at that time, but were somehow cooler and less esoteric than those that John Peel played.

Pioneering such artists as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Joy Division, and anything from punk to acid house, she has now carved a late-night niche with her breakbeat and chillout shows for the post-clubbers who tune in at 4am to hear her.

How fantastic to have little part of my adolescence back, albeit briefly. (And we won't even mention The Old Grey Whistle Test!)

Read the article on Gigwise

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