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Needletime - was it good or bad for radio?
chemical2009b
Posts: 5,250 Forum Member
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I was too young at the time but I think needletime was a good thing because it allowed more creative radio unlike the tight playlists you normally get nowadays.
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There was no creativity at all. I suffered The Jack Emblow Novelty Quartet, Max Jaffa, The Cliff Adams Singers and Music While You Work with the Black Dyke mills band playing The Beatles blasting out from the factory Tannoy system. It was all unbelievably awful, we had to wait until the evening for the phasey sound of Radio Luxembourg to give us the music we wanted. We adored the pirates when they started and it was them that put an end to the Musicians Union stranglehold on our music.
Agreed, all types of popular music stagnated because of the union restrictions.
Funny then that The Beatles and UK pop explosion took place whilst needletime was in full force (it was well established by the time pirate radio came on the scene). The early days of Radio One (with tight needletime) led to many hours of what became classic sessions, still in evidence in these post needletime days. Though it was a pain as a youngster to have to tune into weak AM signals to get my pop fix, I think that pop fix was all the more creative because so many key artists grew up hearing the strange mix of styles that the average person heard, and the need to play live tracks on the radio to get heard. Every challenge has a positive spin off.
In contrast to the above, in our days of unlimited needle time our commercial stations hardly do anything to progress music. The trend towards narrowcasting won't do much either as people need to hear stuff they don't neccessarily think they will like to find out what they might also like. Not sure what challenge would bring about improvement here. Perhaps a requirement to play a certain proportion of newly released recordings might wake them up.
One final point. The BBC Light Program did a daily show (I think it was 1 hour at around 4.30pm) called "What's New", where they played a large proportion of the week's new releases. I seem to remember reading somewhere that they could get an increase in the needletime limit by playing new releases in that format.
But I don't think the union was particularly interested in the new pop groups, I presume they would have to join the union but the union would be dominated by traditional musicians who would see them as outsiders.
I would never want to lose the beeb as most of my listening is bbc however if it didn't exist the commercial stations would be more diverse. Do you honestly think that commwrcial radio would be the same if the bbc didn't exist?
Sometimes yes.
Extensive and quality news bulletins, local and IRN. Plenty of traffic news (Eye in the Sky helicopters on many stations). Business news, not just 'showbiz fluff'.
Local band sessions. OBs galore. Radio cars (even buses) Drama departments. Station engineers. Vast record libraries, with librarians. Geniuses like Kenny Everett. Ads limited to 6 minutes averaged per hour (and shorter breaks not 5-6-7 minutes long).
Strong personality DJs with proper names, not one-word-names squeaky voice-on-a-sticks between the same music heard an hour earlier and unable to say anything other than generics or X-factor etc crap.
But sadly often too expensive to sustain.
Other times, well, try listening to any old un-scoped airchecks of non-big-city ILRs before the needletime was relaxed.
The endless reading out of long horoscopes between records.
The lists of lost pets.
The selling of household junk on 'Radio Marts'.
The (now well known Director of Programming) padding out by reading out the entire contents of listeners request letters.
The sheer unaduterated 'DJ waffle' of the lowest possible cost.
If needltime had been relaxed from the max 9 hours total per 24 hour day in the 1980s, well before the AM/FM split and SAW era, to some sort of more realistic compromise to retain 'quality' but without the excess levels of repetative music now, perhaps many struggling stations might have survived or indeed prospered singly or as smaller still-British groups and the 'GWR' era of mergers and sell-outs and financial collapses might have been mitigated a bit.
What we have now has gone far too far the other way.
Smelly fridges. The stink of fish in the (local station) building. Pointless, lifeless speed-links. 10-ad breaks, with no theoretical limit to the amount of ad time per hour. Non-geographical 'local' non-info. 5-word weather. Most stations owned by foregners as tax-generous non-profit-making finncial devices, and probably no chance of conglomerates being broken up as happened to many over-sized US giants in the past (try 'Ma Bell' ATT etc) or being 'owned by local businesses' ever again.
Maybe can't blame the over-restrictive needletime for ALL of the past 20 years of declaine, but it was a cripling yoke on many a station's back. No doubt about that.
And yes, commecial radio would go further down the pan with the BBC as a counter-weight. NEVER let the Beeb get commercialised. Youll never know it until its gone.
If the torys had got their way a few years ago and sold off the then-mainstream Radio 1 to commercial advertising based interests, it would have wiped out most of the commercial stations within months.
If the ILR's could have just played Top 40 format in FM Stereo from Day One, what would they have sounded like? Would we still have had guys like Phil Easton on City or Robin Valk on BRMB? Or would we just have had endless David Soul and Brotherhood of Man...............
Hasn't it been argued many times here that the reason commercial radio sounds the way it does is that it uses formats to cherry-pick the audiences its advertisers want to reach? If the BBC didn't exist, would the advertisers suddenly want to reach over-50s, men, jazz fans etc?
A thoughtfull post
Listen to any old aircheck tape, and the music played was often ALL of the Top 40 as well as new entries, oldies, occasional album tracks, and so on (anyone got any old paper 'clock charts' perhaps?). Ok, some real-ILR-era chart hits sound very dated and 'my God, did I really spend my cash on such a bit of pathetic 7-inch vinyl dross by Bros?'
But at least a wider selection of music, not just the same tired 'recurrents' or whatever the apologists call them, or the same few from the current download top 10 that very few people have heard before they 'reach' the now very-narrow-demographic 'charts' or by 'artistes' 'owned' by the radio companies that play 'their' music?
It wasn't, listen to last nights Radio 2 documentary quoting musicians, pirate broadcasters and people like Bob Harris who went on to become a broadcaster. The offshore pirates started in 1964, the pop explosion occurred shortly after that. They broke bands and styles of music that within the needletime restrictions the BBC at the time didn't feature. You're also forgetting Radio Luxembourg, and that some people, including many who became musicians in the 60s, tuned into AFN at night, the lyrics in Van Morrison's The Days Before Rock N Roll mentions that. The style of music Ronan liked and was intended to feature more on early Caroline was mostly ignored on the BBC.
The R&B, blues, jazz (not trad) and rock n roll influence in 60s UK music did not come from listening to the BBC.
Newly Pressed according to the schedules here and not always one hour. New release review programmes didn't count toward needletime. But the BBC was conservative in musical terms with the releases they played.
The Marine (Broadcasting) Offences Act put an end to most pirate broadcasting in 1967.
Admittedly, one or two came and went afterwards - RNI, Caroline, Laser.
Needletime was still going strong in 1983!
On a different note, how anyone can be nostalgic for it is beyond me.
The positive side-effects everyone is describing here could be brought back by tougher OFCOM intervention/regulation - there's no need to breed big cats just to catch a mouse!
Nope, they don't in the States with no 'public broadcaster' radio other than NPR or psuedo-religious ones. Or the 'pills and sanitary aids' AM stations.
The 25-44 female is the prime target of Madison Avenue and anyone else is for the 'sidebands' and leftovers of US radio. And our lot just ape the yanks.
Enjoy the BBC - for 30p or so a day I dont understand all those who winge about paying their license - for those who hate the Beeb I'd suggest looking at their latest tesco receipt and see just how much/little/anything they can get for that kind of money - maybe an apple?
You're also forgetting Radio Luxembourg'
The pirates also had 'payola', the paid-for plugging of specific records or publishers. Something illegal on licensed radio in many countries back then - was a huge debacle over that in the States in the late 1950s involving some once-famous at the time disk jockey whose carreer was ruined as a result.
Also Luxy in the early 60s was near 100% 'paid-for record plugging', legal in the Grand Duchy, with 15 minute 'programmes' i.e. short chunks of airtime sold to record companies who would have half-a-dozen or more of their latest offerings sqaushed/truncated into each of their slots. And then teenagers went to their local record shops / booth to be able to hear the Luxy-played partial plays in full before deciding to buy them.
Sorry forgot the link, Light Programme schedules from 1962-1967, then 1967-1969 Radio One and Two
http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/radio1/listings1960s.htm
You may just have time to get the facts on what part of the UK pop explosion had already happenned before Radio Caroline by clicking here http://www.worldcharts.co.uk/archives/uk/uk60.htm - anything that has been in the chart for more than a couple of weeks was there before the pirates. As is often the case there is a lot of re-writing history for documentary purposes. I have no doubt that the pirates had an influence on pop during their brief reign, but it is usually overstated. As for live music, I am sure that the unionised musicians would not have been happy with the live sessions by The Beatles etc. in 1963 but it would have met the quota. John Peel's Top Gear in the early days of Radio One probably helped to break lots of British bands that might otherwise have struggled to get airplay because they did not make commercial singles. There is nearly always a plus side to adversity, as there is also a tendancy to re-write history and look at certain things with rose tinted glasses. Unfortunately a balanced factual history is usually dry and difficult to present.
Thanks for your patronising response, you usually do that in general not to one person in particular. What a link to a chart for 25 April 1964 has to do with all this is beyond my comprehension. You've also of course ignored the effects of Luxembourg and AFN I mentioned whilst doing so, most of the records in that chart are whatever EMI and Decca were pushing at the time in a record industry that was still conservative, apart from mavericks like Meek, did short recording sessions and tried to control the output of the musicians regarding pop as a transitory genre. That chart proves the point.
And on this messageboard where the 60s stops in April 1964 and UK pop music doesn't develop and get significant worldwide sales before then.
I could recommend several books on UK pop music and/or broadcasting with quotes from musicians and broadcasters who were there at the time, as was I, but doubt that you'd be interested as you've already dismissed a documentary based on quotes from them without even apparently listening to it.
Yes a few of the bigger ILR's were doing what Peel did with their early evening slots, it made a nice change from the housewife type drivel that was often on in the daytime.
John Peel was no fan of the Musicians Union
"‘I see that the Musicians’ Union are trying to stop foreign pop groups from appearing on English television. I quote from an official statement: “Pop guitarists strumming a few chords on a guitar can earn a fortune, especially when accompanied by frenzied contortions and sexually suggestive movements…This is absolute rubbish. the Musicians’ Union has to be the largest single retarding force to pop music in the world today." John in Petticoat magazine 1969.
The General Secretary of the Musicians Union had started his letter to the Director of Sound Broadcasting by referring to the previous year when
"On that occasion I expressed myself rather roughly, because our members, and in particular our Executive Committee, were, and still are, infuriated by the drip that some of these upstarts put in to print.’
and went on to say
"It is impossible to disassociate John Peel the journalist, if that is the right word, from John Peel the disc-jockey; for it is only because he is a BBC disc jockey, helping you to use up needletime, that any paper will publish his rubbish.
It is partly this nonsense that causes our members to criticise us for tolerating the Broadcasting of gramophone records at all, and if Peel and other rapscallions are allowed to continue making a parasites living out of the needletime arrangements, we shall be compelled to demand an ever greater reduction of the permitted time than our members already think should be made."
Hang The DJ! The Musicians’ Union and the early days of Radio 1
http://www.muhistory.com/?p=936
Is this a PRS requirement?
If there was no bbc then the commercial sector may not be as diverse as the bbc is in specialist programming but it would be a hell of a lot more diverse than it is now.
They don't do it now because the bbc have those listeners and they do it better and are usually more male skewed.
There is a much wider range of commercial radio formats in the states and they don't have a bbc.
Is that really true, though? Doesn't the US have a huge number of stations but the diverse and specialist programming is mostly on non-profit stations? Compare that with most countries in Europe - apart from the UK - where they have a strong national public service broadcaster but also a good range of specialist commercial stations. Having a very strong PSB and very strong, but very mainstream, commercial stations seems to be a peculiarly British ailment.