Climaxes, Covid and Conclusions
by Roger Hill
The Popular Music Show team, circa 2017.
This history of the longest-running alternative music programme on UK radio now takes on a different voice and texture, for many reasons. It has a lot of years to catch up on, basically the mid-20-teens until 2025, and it is the story of an end, the eventual retirement of that programme after 48 years. Whereas previous chapters of the story on this web-site were neutral and narrative, this last section is told in the first person from the very individual perspective of someone who produced the programme over 43 years of its existence and, although in this period there were always others involved in presenting and producing the programmes, I am probably the one best-equipped to recall the many episodes of its progress towards its eventual end.
And so we chart the show’s epic climactic phase when it probably did as much as any comparable programme to take music radio to spectacular heights, through to its later BBC years, via a year lost to the pandemic, with a renewed brief for a different kind of broadcasting. And then The Popular Music Show was ejected from the BBC and took up residence on two digital radio stations in Liverpool before calling it a day nearly two years later. The early history had been epochal but the last ten years were truly and overwhelmingly eventful.
And so we chart the show’s epic climactic phase when it probably did as much as any comparable programme to take music radio to spectacular heights, through to its later BBC years, via a year lost to the pandemic, with a renewed brief for a different kind of broadcasting. And then The Popular Music Show was ejected from the BBC and took up residence on two digital radio stations in Liverpool before calling it a day nearly two years later. The early history had been epochal but the last ten years were truly and overwhelmingly eventful.
Steve Reich with Roger, late 2016.
This history has been quite loose in its narrative but for these latter years it needs to include a lot of specifics. The climactic year is 2017, the year of the programme’s 40th birthday, but to get a sense of how that came about we need to start with an account of 2016. In that year the Programme team was swelled by the arrival of Andrew Hunt, already an eminent experimentalist on the local music scene. George Maund would soon be called in to manage the weekly Gig Guide and help out with the programme listening which, thanks to the ease of promotion through E-Mails, was reaching serious oversupply. Even with the two hours from midnight on Sunday to 2.00 a.m. being given over almost completely to music we couldn’t use more than about 20 tracks in each show. That left a lot of music not to play, and a lot of agonizing over choices. We were now at the stage where each programme was produced and presented by a different member of the team in rotation and I had ceded a lot of the content selection to the others whilst retaining a kind of oversight of what “PMS”’s musical character needed to be. This all seemed to work reasonably well. Everybody from the team actively involved in a live programme was paid, usually one presenter and one assisting. But we were attempting all kinds of special features and the overall management of production took up a lot of additional time. A list of many of our “special operations” in 2016 will give some idea of the challenges we set ourselves. (If you want to pick up on the details go to our playlists on this site),-
“Where Are You Now?” – an occasional feature which legitimized a focus on veteran musicians by asking them that question and featuring some of their latest material alongside a personal favourite. (I was never keen on nostalgia broadcasting)
“In Situ” – a bespoke soundtrack – a set of commissioned pieces to accompany a soundwalk round Liverpool City Centre, in an “ambient adventure” which actually happened on Light Night that year.
“The Trawl” which started out as “The Net Detective” - a response to the burgeoning amount of “loose sound” out there on the Internet and our wish to broadcast the latest and most fascinating illegitimate music creations. The curation was taken on by Andy Hunt who “trawled” regularly for us.
“Lost Vinyl/Found Vinyl” – our gesture towards keeping vinyl in view and on-air (which of course soon was overwhelmed by vinyl’s new-found - and expensive – prominence in music sales)
“Beats For Ringo” – the latest in a series of commissions projects tiptoeing round the Fab Four, following similar tributes to Cilla and “Love Me Don’t”.
A regular series of in-house sessions produced and engineered by Rory Ballantyne, mainly with local musicians.
“Where Are You Now?” – an occasional feature which legitimized a focus on veteran musicians by asking them that question and featuring some of their latest material alongside a personal favourite. (I was never keen on nostalgia broadcasting)
“In Situ” – a bespoke soundtrack – a set of commissioned pieces to accompany a soundwalk round Liverpool City Centre, in an “ambient adventure” which actually happened on Light Night that year.
“The Trawl” which started out as “The Net Detective” - a response to the burgeoning amount of “loose sound” out there on the Internet and our wish to broadcast the latest and most fascinating illegitimate music creations. The curation was taken on by Andy Hunt who “trawled” regularly for us.
“Lost Vinyl/Found Vinyl” – our gesture towards keeping vinyl in view and on-air (which of course soon was overwhelmed by vinyl’s new-found - and expensive – prominence in music sales)
“Beats For Ringo” – the latest in a series of commissions projects tiptoeing round the Fab Four, following similar tributes to Cilla and “Love Me Don’t”.
A regular series of in-house sessions produced and engineered by Rory Ballantyne, mainly with local musicians.
Arnold Dreyblatt with Ex-Easter Island Head in the performance space of BBC Merseyside, circa 2018.
Major programme events in 2016 were an interview with American minimalist master Steve Reich, in Liverpool for a performance of his “Different Trains”, and the exhumation of a half-hour recording of local proto-rock band Death Kit from 1972, but maybe the strangest and most wonderful “PMS” happening of the year was when we received a Help! call on a Sunday from Ex Easter Island Head, organizers of a workshop and performance event with Arnold Dreyblatt, the veteran New York experimentalist (now based in Berlin). They had lost their venue for the performance and could we help? We took a unilateral decision (unknown to the BBC management who would have cited many protocols to forbid us) to record the music in our Performance Space that night for broadcast later and so, with the collusion of the trusty Tommy the Security man, admitted a furtive audience (sworn to secrecy - and to a silent pause after the music had stopped to avoid giving away when the music was played out what we’d done) to an hour of highly superior improvised sounds with Arnold and Ex Easter Island Head collaborating. Part of the joy of producing “PMS” in its many manifestations over the years has been the chance to make such spontaneous and risk-taking moments happen.
And the music we were playing in 2016? Well, here’s a selection from the playlist for the 29th August,-
Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return – Soundmaps Vol 2 – Mi Last Drop
“Khmer Rouge Survivors”
Neil Young
“Hardcore Sounds from Tehran”
We ended the year’s broadcasting on Boxing Day with Kevin McManus, local music supremo, choosing his cardinal Merseyside music tracks.
And the music we were playing in 2016? Well, here’s a selection from the playlist for the 29th August,-
Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return – Soundmaps Vol 2 – Mi Last Drop
“Khmer Rouge Survivors”
Neil Young
“Hardcore Sounds from Tehran”
We ended the year’s broadcasting on Boxing Day with Kevin McManus, local music supremo, choosing his cardinal Merseyside music tracks.
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And so to 2017, the annus mirabilis, not just for us but on our behalf for music radio generally. We wanted to make as big a fuss as we could of the fact that, as the longest-running alternative music programme on UK radio, we had reached 40 years and were still going strong. As ever it seemed to us that the BBC would never shout about us because we were on local radio (Network got all the attention) so we had to shout about ourselves. We had a lot of juggling ahead of us – stuff from our Archive, sessions, interviews, whilst featuring at any and every music event in the area – Sound City, Light Night, etc, - and proving ourselves the most creative broadcasting team around. And in the heart of that was “Forty for Forty.” Could we commission 40 original pieces of music and sound art from local musicians and feature one a week for 40 weeks? We would certainly have a go, and with a great surge of team-work and loving commitment from the music community we did just that. Each week from February to November, we broadcast a new and specially produced piece of music from 40 local artists and friends of the programme. We kept the brief very open and invited the artists to respond to either the numbers 1-40, or the idea of "40" or "Birthday" or "1977" or "Longest-running".
It's impossible to narrow down that generous outpouring of creativity to a small number of highlights. You can catch all of them on the part of this site dedicated to “Projects”. They make a great listen. We set out in February in the company of Neil Campbell and closed the sequence in November with a dedicated song from Half Man Half Biscuit. Somewhere well into the sequence on Light Night in May we convened an audience in the Music Room at the Philharmonic mid-evening for a performance from Philip Jeck (turntables and genius) and Jonathan Raisin (keyboard and genius) of a specially composed/created piece called “40 Times”. For a full half-hour a full audience was held rapt by the delicate atmosphere and poetry of the music. 40 years was worth it for that one moment.
2017 was a triumph of commitment and teamwork and living proof of the respect in which the programme was held and not just locally. If it had been done by a Radio 6 programme there would have been no end to the fuss made of it. Even then it would be hard to do justice to the amount of liaising, tape transference (a reel-to-reel machine was commandeered for our needs), programme and engineer support, Powerpoint-creating, publicity seeking, and general doings-about-town – oh and regular weekly broadcasting - which made our year-long celebration work. And all this on no special project money, abundant good-will, and an absolute belief in what we were doing. And just to make life difficult, but demonstrating my absolute faith in the “PMS” team, I took off in August in that year for a three month journey across Central Asia and returned a bit prematurely in October, after two near-death experiences, in time for the end of Forty for Forty.
It's impossible to narrow down that generous outpouring of creativity to a small number of highlights. You can catch all of them on the part of this site dedicated to “Projects”. They make a great listen. We set out in February in the company of Neil Campbell and closed the sequence in November with a dedicated song from Half Man Half Biscuit. Somewhere well into the sequence on Light Night in May we convened an audience in the Music Room at the Philharmonic mid-evening for a performance from Philip Jeck (turntables and genius) and Jonathan Raisin (keyboard and genius) of a specially composed/created piece called “40 Times”. For a full half-hour a full audience was held rapt by the delicate atmosphere and poetry of the music. 40 years was worth it for that one moment.
2017 was a triumph of commitment and teamwork and living proof of the respect in which the programme was held and not just locally. If it had been done by a Radio 6 programme there would have been no end to the fuss made of it. Even then it would be hard to do justice to the amount of liaising, tape transference (a reel-to-reel machine was commandeered for our needs), programme and engineer support, Powerpoint-creating, publicity seeking, and general doings-about-town – oh and regular weekly broadcasting - which made our year-long celebration work. And all this on no special project money, abundant good-will, and an absolute belief in what we were doing. And just to make life difficult, but demonstrating my absolute faith in the “PMS” team, I took off in August in that year for a three month journey across Central Asia and returned a bit prematurely in October, after two near-death experiences, in time for the end of Forty for Forty.
Half Man Half Biscuit (?) live in session at Radio Merseyside's performance space.
Two years away was an international crisis which would impact on all our lives, but for the “PMS” team 2018 was business as usual, with an acceptable if temporary scaling down of efforts after the birthday year. We had always been led in our programming by our resources and three of these resources provided regular programme features in 2018-19. There was still “Lost Vinyl” and the perennial selection from “The Vault”, (evoked on-air as a deep, dank and dusty stone chamber but in actuality a routine metal cabinet, then cupboard, which held a trove of CDs and vinyl accumulated over the decades of promotional listening and playing). Many, many good things came out of the Vault at the behest of the Programme Support person each week, usually to finish off the Gig Guide. The new resource, though I had been accumulating it over those same decades, was my own World Music Archive and from this each week I chose a recording for broadcast under the heading “Re-Discovered World”.
We did have one or two adventures in 2018, including Light Night in May for which we commissioned music – “Music For Retail” – from four local artists to be played in shops in central Liverpool during the day-time and evening of Light Night. Naturally we (re)played them on-air in due course, several times.
Whilst “PMS” was in ‘adventurous music business as usual’ mode though changes were occurring around us. Andy Hunt petitioned to leave the team to attend to his rapidly-ascending career as a sound-virtuoso, but we coaxed him back monthly to continue his “Trawl” feature for us. Meanwhile at the radio station technical moves were happening. The local radio broadcasting operation had gone automatic and digital at the Millennium with the Radioman system and it was now time for another overhaul. The new arrangement was billed as a streamlining and cost-saving measure. To achieve this each local radio station had its master-server (on which its digital operation depended) removed and all digital action was transferred to two national servers, one in the North, one in London, so that the radio desk now triggered circuits and sound-resources stored on those servers. Everything was now broadcast via London effectively. We never discovered if money was actually saved but it was clear that a major element of local autonomy had been removed. What this meant in practice at Radio Merseyside was a major refit and a lot of training over a long period. In the process a whole live-broadcast studio disappeared and on a daily basis the two remaining studios were usually either live or being set up to take over at the change of segment.
Since for “PMS” this meant almost no studio availability to record sessions from this point on most of the original live music we used came from three other sources, each of which we had been relying on more and more in the run-up to our Birthday year. Bands could use their own money and studio access to record things specially for us – this also naturally applied to lap-toppers who anyway made their sounds digitally. We could commission Rory Ballantyne to record sessions in his own studio in the North Docks area. We could also record at, or sometimes got recordings from the desk at, live concerts, mainly in the Philharmonic Music Room. I’m not suggesting that these were insufficient substitutes for our traditional in-station sessions – there was a lot of magnificent music to be had – but there was always something about the concentration and intimacy of those late sessions in Radio Merseyside which gave us the feeling of being a musical household. Compared to John Peel’s Maida Vale recordings ours were intimate and domestic, but also epic and mighty on-air thanks to our succession of great team-members who presided over them, of whom Rory was just the latest.
We did have one or two adventures in 2018, including Light Night in May for which we commissioned music – “Music For Retail” – from four local artists to be played in shops in central Liverpool during the day-time and evening of Light Night. Naturally we (re)played them on-air in due course, several times.
Whilst “PMS” was in ‘adventurous music business as usual’ mode though changes were occurring around us. Andy Hunt petitioned to leave the team to attend to his rapidly-ascending career as a sound-virtuoso, but we coaxed him back monthly to continue his “Trawl” feature for us. Meanwhile at the radio station technical moves were happening. The local radio broadcasting operation had gone automatic and digital at the Millennium with the Radioman system and it was now time for another overhaul. The new arrangement was billed as a streamlining and cost-saving measure. To achieve this each local radio station had its master-server (on which its digital operation depended) removed and all digital action was transferred to two national servers, one in the North, one in London, so that the radio desk now triggered circuits and sound-resources stored on those servers. Everything was now broadcast via London effectively. We never discovered if money was actually saved but it was clear that a major element of local autonomy had been removed. What this meant in practice at Radio Merseyside was a major refit and a lot of training over a long period. In the process a whole live-broadcast studio disappeared and on a daily basis the two remaining studios were usually either live or being set up to take over at the change of segment.
Since for “PMS” this meant almost no studio availability to record sessions from this point on most of the original live music we used came from three other sources, each of which we had been relying on more and more in the run-up to our Birthday year. Bands could use their own money and studio access to record things specially for us – this also naturally applied to lap-toppers who anyway made their sounds digitally. We could commission Rory Ballantyne to record sessions in his own studio in the North Docks area. We could also record at, or sometimes got recordings from the desk at, live concerts, mainly in the Philharmonic Music Room. I’m not suggesting that these were insufficient substitutes for our traditional in-station sessions – there was a lot of magnificent music to be had – but there was always something about the concentration and intimacy of those late sessions in Radio Merseyside which gave us the feeling of being a musical household. Compared to John Peel’s Maida Vale recordings ours were intimate and domestic, but also epic and mighty on-air thanks to our succession of great team-members who presided over them, of whom Rory was just the latest.
Eric Chenaux in the Portico Library.
This pointing outwards beyond the radio station initiated another of our adventurous projects. What about recording artists on location, as it were? Playing in unusual and acoustically-interesting alternative spaces? It all started with Rory’s trip to London to record the extraordinary vocal artist Ka Baird under a canal-arch. It followed with a recording of guitar-stylist Eric Chenaux before a gig in the Portico Library in Manchester, and continued with Arabic percussionist Simona Abdallah who was rained off from performing in the grotto in Sefton Park and improvised instead in an empty lecture theatre where you could hear the blinds rattling. There was so much scope for adventure in this idea – it would have been good to have carried it forwards.
Our interest in the wider world also took the form of “Immigrant Music” where studio adventurer Alex Germains, aka Germanager, worked with musicians who had come from abroad and had made their home in Merseyside to create specially hybrid recordings. Add in a special session from London-based producer-performer Lou Barnell (whom I’d encountered at the Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre), a couple of domestic sessions from Nick Branton and Trio Amelie, and an interview feature with Natacha Atlas and it’s clear that “PMS” did not let its listeners down in these two years. But if you look at the play-lists it’s the sheer diversity and individuality of the music played which stands out. I said then that I wondered if any other music programme had a wider range of musical content than ours. With the advent of celebrity curation and Guilty-Pleasures-style selections, I can’t now be sure, but our team’s fascination with and delight in the unusual and the remarkable would still be hard to beat. When I look at the lists I feel a great nostalgia – not for particular pieces of music and tracks a lot of which, if I’m honest, I can’t now remember, even if I was the one broadcasting them, - but for the sheer possibility of all that music. We had the whole world, past and present and future, in our hands. And so we proceeded even as news came in at the end of 2019 that something was on its way from China.
Our interest in the wider world also took the form of “Immigrant Music” where studio adventurer Alex Germains, aka Germanager, worked with musicians who had come from abroad and had made their home in Merseyside to create specially hybrid recordings. Add in a special session from London-based producer-performer Lou Barnell (whom I’d encountered at the Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre), a couple of domestic sessions from Nick Branton and Trio Amelie, and an interview feature with Natacha Atlas and it’s clear that “PMS” did not let its listeners down in these two years. But if you look at the play-lists it’s the sheer diversity and individuality of the music played which stands out. I said then that I wondered if any other music programme had a wider range of musical content than ours. With the advent of celebrity curation and Guilty-Pleasures-style selections, I can’t now be sure, but our team’s fascination with and delight in the unusual and the remarkable would still be hard to beat. When I look at the lists I feel a great nostalgia – not for particular pieces of music and tracks a lot of which, if I’m honest, I can’t now remember, even if I was the one broadcasting them, - but for the sheer possibility of all that music. We had the whole world, past and present and future, in our hands. And so we proceeded even as news came in at the end of 2019 that something was on its way from China.
George Maund recording a Live Session as 'Unicursal', 2014.
By New Year 2020 it was clear that the Covid pandemic was going to have far-reaching consequences for everybody and that the BBC would need to respond to the situation. We all expected that local radio would play its part, as a regular relayer of social arrangements and government measures, also a cheerer-up of the community, and so it was, but almost inevitably, as the BBC was the national broadcaster, changes to the service were more serious and swingeing. In anticipation of major local outbreaks of health crises the local radio service was “proofed” against collapse by co-ordinating all 39 of the local stations into a grid of four-hour slots across the day so that broadcasting could shift across from each to each as necessary, and within those slots music and news were synchronized. All specialist programmes were discontinued and the general listening diet was reduced to features about positive developments (“Make A Difference”), generic, mainly centrally-programmed music and updates on Covid-related matters. I don’t remember ever feeling quite so part of the national service as during that period – local radio had been commandeered as if in wartime and brought firmly into the fold. That said an early hope that, as a programme broadcasting live at the end of a day, “PMS” might be allowed to continue during the emergency, was dashed early on – there would be technical difficulties in integrating us into the national join-up overnight, we were told.
What ensued was a year we called “in exile”, during which we produced musical compilations for Mixcloud, using our usual plentiful supply of new tracks and sounds. These can still be listened to on https://www.mixcloud.com/pmsradio/playlists/in-exile/
It was a way of connecting with our perennial alternative music-addicts during lock-down and was enjoyable but no substitute for actual on-air broadcasting. As the year wore on and Covid outbreaks seemed to come and go with lockdowns and respites another thing became clear. Something like the previous radio station offer was being gradually re-introduced, but with an agenda. This regularization and synchronization of local radio would be an opportunity for senior BBC managers who had never quite “got” what made the local connection so alive to neutralize its appeal and, as ever, reduce costs. One part of that agenda was ageist, inasmuch as older presenters were gently eased out of their slots, as part of a generation shift. Although our programme team was generally younger than average I was certainly in the target area for removal. Some specialist offerings disappeared completely and meanwhile new more generic slots involving younger more diverse presenters started to appear. There was more than a whiff of machination about all this even at station-level and when we pleaded for re-admission to the on-air family we were told that there wasn’t much “wiggle-room”. But we persisted, and projected, and in January 2021, a year after discontinuation and as part of a general resumption of full service we recommenced broadcasting.
There had been conversations with the Station Manager and some conditions for resumption had been set – yes, generally, to the “PMS” musical palette, no, to long tracks, a requirement for some diversity of content, and a strict rationing of the programmes to one hour fortnightly within the Friday evening four-hour slot. We had already got some retaliation in first with a plan and this was more-or-less what we followed – new music, local music, some commissions, spoken-word, short features, a minimal gig-and-event guide, etc. We never got to the bottom of the fortnightly thing – was it about money, or what? Many laborious explanations were offered, none particularly convincing, even as we were given guesstimates about listening figures (we were buried in a four-hour slot, and these were measured generically as a single week-day) suggesting that we got more people listening than we did when in our previous late-night slot. In the end I concluded that the Station Manager was under pressure from above to ditch us entirely and that this was the best, almost symbolic, compromise he could manage.
What ensued was a year we called “in exile”, during which we produced musical compilations for Mixcloud, using our usual plentiful supply of new tracks and sounds. These can still be listened to on https://www.mixcloud.com/pmsradio/playlists/in-exile/
It was a way of connecting with our perennial alternative music-addicts during lock-down and was enjoyable but no substitute for actual on-air broadcasting. As the year wore on and Covid outbreaks seemed to come and go with lockdowns and respites another thing became clear. Something like the previous radio station offer was being gradually re-introduced, but with an agenda. This regularization and synchronization of local radio would be an opportunity for senior BBC managers who had never quite “got” what made the local connection so alive to neutralize its appeal and, as ever, reduce costs. One part of that agenda was ageist, inasmuch as older presenters were gently eased out of their slots, as part of a generation shift. Although our programme team was generally younger than average I was certainly in the target area for removal. Some specialist offerings disappeared completely and meanwhile new more generic slots involving younger more diverse presenters started to appear. There was more than a whiff of machination about all this even at station-level and when we pleaded for re-admission to the on-air family we were told that there wasn’t much “wiggle-room”. But we persisted, and projected, and in January 2021, a year after discontinuation and as part of a general resumption of full service we recommenced broadcasting.
There had been conversations with the Station Manager and some conditions for resumption had been set – yes, generally, to the “PMS” musical palette, no, to long tracks, a requirement for some diversity of content, and a strict rationing of the programmes to one hour fortnightly within the Friday evening four-hour slot. We had already got some retaliation in first with a plan and this was more-or-less what we followed – new music, local music, some commissions, spoken-word, short features, a minimal gig-and-event guide, etc. We never got to the bottom of the fortnightly thing – was it about money, or what? Many laborious explanations were offered, none particularly convincing, even as we were given guesstimates about listening figures (we were buried in a four-hour slot, and these were measured generically as a single week-day) suggesting that we got more people listening than we did when in our previous late-night slot. In the end I concluded that the Station Manager was under pressure from above to ditch us entirely and that this was the best, almost symbolic, compromise he could manage.
Adam 'In Atoms' Cooper in Live Session.
Returning to the airwaves was a restricting affair. Only one of us was, with the BBC’s lock-down policies, allowed to be physically in the station to broadcast, while mails and calls were monitored by a “PMS” team-member listening at home. In the studio there was a lot of swabbing down surfaces and faders with anti-biotic wipes. But we had a programme and for just over two years we played our new format for all it was worth. We presented on a rota, Rory, Karen, George and I, and the programme structure was relatively strict. Even so, with all the restrictions and formalities, it was nothing short of heroic what we managed to do with the show in one hour a fortnight. Alongside as much new music as we had space for from the overflowing promotional mail diet, we featured a regular “Short”, a spoken-word piece, and kept faith with local music throughout the hour, including new local releases.
We were under some pressure to feature material from a BBC arrangement, “Uploader”, which allowed listeners to upload their own material – music, speech, scripts, etc, for possible broadcast, but there was little enough to choose from and almost nothing which suited the programme. We went digital and electronic for one of the quarters of the show, but I was adamant that we restrained ourselves from the most extreme sounds which we had previously let loose in the early hours. I felt, and felt that others felt, that the nation, and the local listenership, was under some social duress and a degree of consolation and comforting was in order. This also meant that we featured some unusual mainstream tracks from our Vault and every programme took us back to our capacious Archive for some unique gem from the past.
As a programme which hadn’t over the decades given much time to interviews and audio features it was a new skill to record “Recommends”, in which a local artist, or one of the team, highlighted a number of local arts offerings. These included, for example, gig previews, new books recommended by Maria from the independent bookshop News From Nowhere, and reviews of major art-shows by Gen Baker (she of Zombina and the Skeletones who became something of a regular correspondent for “PMS”). Within the four-quarters format of the hour we ingeniously squeezed versions of our old favourites, “The Trawl” from Andy Hunt, and what we called Micro-Mixes. These 15-minute marvels compacted great musical taste into short listening pleasures, and the Micro-Mixes came from a wide range of sources – Jacques Malchance, for example, with an Arab Music mix (to celebrate the Arab Arts Festival), nationally-renowned sound artist Lou Barnell, the now-legendary local night Sonic Yootha, local mixer Joe McKechnie, ditto Germanager. It was possible to petition the manager for some extra, interim Friday slots when the opportunity was good enough. On Light Night we got in a tour of the venues and an ambient improvised live mix. We did specials of World Music and local Music and during the period celebrated the programme’s 45th birthday and the 40th anniversary of my first presenting the programme.
Quite what this all meant for our relationship with the listening public is hard to say. We were, and pretty much always have been, resolutely live as broadcasters, rejecting the idea of pre-recorded programmes unless in exceptional circumstances. We were now a universe away from listeners’ letters and regular communications. Phone calls were rare, live E-Mail messages the same. We allowed ourselves to envisage in mid-evening (9-10 p.m.) people driving round with the radio on, others in retreat from mainstream television, alternative music fans looking for their regular fix, programme friends keeping the faith, and so on, but we were never sure, so we lived off 40 years of the faith, the faith that remarkable music would always have an audience and discerning listeners would always exist. For all that it was hard to feel confident that the radio station was doing its best to promote our show. What surrounded us was so much another kind of radio, formulaic, personality-dependent, trivia-fixated, do-gooding programme-mongering that it was a challenge for the station as well as us to keep a focus on what we were doing. Respect was paid to our longevity and we were regularly referred to as “legendary”, but the implications of that respect were never faced up to.
We were under some pressure to feature material from a BBC arrangement, “Uploader”, which allowed listeners to upload their own material – music, speech, scripts, etc, for possible broadcast, but there was little enough to choose from and almost nothing which suited the programme. We went digital and electronic for one of the quarters of the show, but I was adamant that we restrained ourselves from the most extreme sounds which we had previously let loose in the early hours. I felt, and felt that others felt, that the nation, and the local listenership, was under some social duress and a degree of consolation and comforting was in order. This also meant that we featured some unusual mainstream tracks from our Vault and every programme took us back to our capacious Archive for some unique gem from the past.
As a programme which hadn’t over the decades given much time to interviews and audio features it was a new skill to record “Recommends”, in which a local artist, or one of the team, highlighted a number of local arts offerings. These included, for example, gig previews, new books recommended by Maria from the independent bookshop News From Nowhere, and reviews of major art-shows by Gen Baker (she of Zombina and the Skeletones who became something of a regular correspondent for “PMS”). Within the four-quarters format of the hour we ingeniously squeezed versions of our old favourites, “The Trawl” from Andy Hunt, and what we called Micro-Mixes. These 15-minute marvels compacted great musical taste into short listening pleasures, and the Micro-Mixes came from a wide range of sources – Jacques Malchance, for example, with an Arab Music mix (to celebrate the Arab Arts Festival), nationally-renowned sound artist Lou Barnell, the now-legendary local night Sonic Yootha, local mixer Joe McKechnie, ditto Germanager. It was possible to petition the manager for some extra, interim Friday slots when the opportunity was good enough. On Light Night we got in a tour of the venues and an ambient improvised live mix. We did specials of World Music and local Music and during the period celebrated the programme’s 45th birthday and the 40th anniversary of my first presenting the programme.
Quite what this all meant for our relationship with the listening public is hard to say. We were, and pretty much always have been, resolutely live as broadcasters, rejecting the idea of pre-recorded programmes unless in exceptional circumstances. We were now a universe away from listeners’ letters and regular communications. Phone calls were rare, live E-Mail messages the same. We allowed ourselves to envisage in mid-evening (9-10 p.m.) people driving round with the radio on, others in retreat from mainstream television, alternative music fans looking for their regular fix, programme friends keeping the faith, and so on, but we were never sure, so we lived off 40 years of the faith, the faith that remarkable music would always have an audience and discerning listeners would always exist. For all that it was hard to feel confident that the radio station was doing its best to promote our show. What surrounded us was so much another kind of radio, formulaic, personality-dependent, trivia-fixated, do-gooding programme-mongering that it was a challenge for the station as well as us to keep a focus on what we were doing. Respect was paid to our longevity and we were regularly referred to as “legendary”, but the implications of that respect were never faced up to.
Martin Smith in session with Chloe Mullet and others.
By 2023 the writing was on the wall and we were one of the earliest programmes to be jettisoned as part of the 6-month clear-out of old radio stock, but we had a good going of it. For much of the 20-teens we had been pre-occupied with broadcasting sessions and concerts live from far-flung places. The tech was in place for quite some time, and we had used a version of it on Light Night, but not for programmes living on a shoestring as we were. In the end it was the support of an adventurous Station Engineer which allowed us to realize our dream. Much earlier we had nearly linked up with Pop Levi in in their sunny afternoon in Los Angeles to broadcast some songs live, but problems with signal and band-width (?) meant that we ended up recording the band and playing it out later that night. Our first live band relay was with our old friends Psycho and Plastic in Berlin during our 45th Birthday programme and we also succeeded in relaying most of a concert from the Kazimier Stockroom (so near to the radio station that you could see it from the Foyer) featuring Manchester wunderkind Carmel Smickersgill. This proved the possibility and who knows what heights of adventure we might have attained if we had continued with the BBC, but we (and the world) had to be satisfied with a single triumph, - and what a triumph it was.
In its closing period starting with lock-down “PMS” had been adopted by Radio 6 refugee and Mersey music super-fan Izzy Hughes and it was through Izzy’s connections with Estonia (where she has subsequently gone to live) and an Estonian band Shelton San that we took up the idea of a live Gig link-up with Tallinn. Radio Merseyside Chief Engineer James Wilson and “PMS” tech-wizard Rory Ballantyne presided over a technically tense but ultimately successful live concert-broadcast of the best noise Estonia could throw at us.
Here is what others said about it all,-
“Shelton San are a three piece noise rock band formed in 2002 from the small Estonian music scene in Tallinn. Though most of their career has been based in Estonia, recent events led to Shelton San working with the UK. On the 1st January 2023, Shelton San were the first Eastern European band to do a session for the BBC in 32 years. This session was by invitation of legendary broadcaster Roger Hill who presented the Popular Music Show for 45 years (which makes him the longest serving broadcaster on UK radio ever). The session was live broadcast directly to the BBC from Estonia”. (Darla) [NB some of the above assertions are inaccurate]
“The concert was recorded at Terminal Records & Bar in Tallinn on January 13, 2023 and broadcasted live by BBC Radio Merseyside's "The Popular Music Show". [The ensuing vinyl release] includes an LP-size two-sided insert with an interview and band photo.” (Discogs)
Whatever the heroic dimensions of what we did that night it was true that almost nobody was doing what we were doing, just as no other BBC programme had attempted such a diverse, wide-ranging and inventive, creative programme of broadcasting experiments, sustained over several decades. We had kept the faith.
Then we were shown the door, with, it has to be said, a measure of generosity which is the best that a national broadcasting service in thrall to management dogmatists can manage for a long-running production. During April and May of 2023 we were given the opportunity to create a long sequence of special programmes, focusing on the most eminent aspects of our output – Commissions, World Music, Local Sessions, Spoken Word, Interviews – culminating on Friday 19th May 2023 with a three-hour special which you can hear via this site’s front page. In it we did our best to take the long view of our achievements whilst reflecting our personal feelings in taking leave of a radio station which had, at its very best, given us the space and time to excel and embody the highest ideals of local radio. Check out our playlists and our commissions and sessions and special broadcasts on this site to review a wondrous array of adventurous music radio.
In its closing period starting with lock-down “PMS” had been adopted by Radio 6 refugee and Mersey music super-fan Izzy Hughes and it was through Izzy’s connections with Estonia (where she has subsequently gone to live) and an Estonian band Shelton San that we took up the idea of a live Gig link-up with Tallinn. Radio Merseyside Chief Engineer James Wilson and “PMS” tech-wizard Rory Ballantyne presided over a technically tense but ultimately successful live concert-broadcast of the best noise Estonia could throw at us.
Here is what others said about it all,-
“Shelton San are a three piece noise rock band formed in 2002 from the small Estonian music scene in Tallinn. Though most of their career has been based in Estonia, recent events led to Shelton San working with the UK. On the 1st January 2023, Shelton San were the first Eastern European band to do a session for the BBC in 32 years. This session was by invitation of legendary broadcaster Roger Hill who presented the Popular Music Show for 45 years (which makes him the longest serving broadcaster on UK radio ever). The session was live broadcast directly to the BBC from Estonia”. (Darla) [NB some of the above assertions are inaccurate]
“The concert was recorded at Terminal Records & Bar in Tallinn on January 13, 2023 and broadcasted live by BBC Radio Merseyside's "The Popular Music Show". [The ensuing vinyl release] includes an LP-size two-sided insert with an interview and band photo.” (Discogs)
Whatever the heroic dimensions of what we did that night it was true that almost nobody was doing what we were doing, just as no other BBC programme had attempted such a diverse, wide-ranging and inventive, creative programme of broadcasting experiments, sustained over several decades. We had kept the faith.
Then we were shown the door, with, it has to be said, a measure of generosity which is the best that a national broadcasting service in thrall to management dogmatists can manage for a long-running production. During April and May of 2023 we were given the opportunity to create a long sequence of special programmes, focusing on the most eminent aspects of our output – Commissions, World Music, Local Sessions, Spoken Word, Interviews – culminating on Friday 19th May 2023 with a three-hour special which you can hear via this site’s front page. In it we did our best to take the long view of our achievements whilst reflecting our personal feelings in taking leave of a radio station which had, at its very best, given us the space and time to excel and embody the highest ideals of local radio. Check out our playlists and our commissions and sessions and special broadcasts on this site to review a wondrous array of adventurous music radio.
Rory engineering a live session with Simon Jones (back left) and (presumably) Noise Club.
We could feel relatively secure in our taking the forced leap from the BBC because we had already established a relationship with Melodic Distraction. The locally-based digital station had been in operation since 2015 and already had a strong reputation as a home for alternative broadcasting across a wide range of programmes, from poetry, speech and documentary as well as the full gamut of alternative music. They had their own sequence programmes and, although they provided a perch for individual DJ’s and their mixing, they also allowed for shorter commitments and occasional single broadcasts. When we returned to Radio Merseyside in 2021 after lockdown we had also taken up a regular Saturday afternoon monthly slot at MD, “PMS Extra”, even as we were broadcasting on Friday nights at the BBC. This was seen by the Radio Merseyside Manager as a sufficient compensation for our losing an hour of our original airtime and having our broadcasting brief more strictly controlled, and he allowed us to do what otherwise was anathema to the BBC, to mention on their airwaves the existence of another station and programme. There was, after all, now nothing like “PMS” on Radio Merseyside to compete with. We did of course also mention Radio Merseyside on Melodic Distraction.
Our monthly visits to MD were always happy ones. At first we sashayed out to the Baltic Triangle to their ground-floor shop-window studio where I, for one, had to adjust to broadcasting standing up and in full view of both street passers-by and a continuous web-cam trained on us as we broadcast. It was all very different from the BBC but then we still had the BBC and between the two programmes we could cover most of our original range of music and commissions. Then MD moved temporarily to the bottom of Seel Street where the pavement antics of Liverpool’s most intense party-zone, even on a Saturday afternoon, gave us a few distractions as we played our stuff, but it was only a matter of time before we moved with the station to their new customized premises off London Road in the newly christened “Fabric District”, an area which was promoted as the city’s latest cultural zone, with bars and workshops and cafes. Indeed the Melodic Distraction premises was essentially a shipping container stacked above an open-air bar (although it fairly soon became a closed-in bar) with capacity for parties and gigs and eating as well as drinking, The one-room studio would act as a hub for business recording like podcasts, and the downstairs could be hired for private parties. There was a business-model behind all this but we didn’t enquire too much about it as the novelty and freedom of broadcasting in such friendly and congenial circumstances had won us round to the cause. We paid our modest dues out of what was left of monies we’d got from selling unwanted CD’s and vinyl and got on with the monthly job.
The Melodic Distraction premises always seemed to provide us with spectacular weather, - deluges, downpours, sun cracking the flags, big winds – and in the security of the studio we could comment on all that with a degree of amusement. We were still on cams and the Mixcloud link showed us that people were listening, watching, and it brought up their appreciations to be read on air. It wasn’t a big audience but it felt very present to us. And again we had the BBC programme to offer us more listeners and the time and space to answer other more complicated demands on our skills. But once the BBC was behind us we had the chance to go back to weekly broadcasts at MD and at the prime time of Sunday teatime. We took a well-earned break over the summer doing just our monthly hour and readied up for a September launch of the Sunday show.
Our monthly visits to MD were always happy ones. At first we sashayed out to the Baltic Triangle to their ground-floor shop-window studio where I, for one, had to adjust to broadcasting standing up and in full view of both street passers-by and a continuous web-cam trained on us as we broadcast. It was all very different from the BBC but then we still had the BBC and between the two programmes we could cover most of our original range of music and commissions. Then MD moved temporarily to the bottom of Seel Street where the pavement antics of Liverpool’s most intense party-zone, even on a Saturday afternoon, gave us a few distractions as we played our stuff, but it was only a matter of time before we moved with the station to their new customized premises off London Road in the newly christened “Fabric District”, an area which was promoted as the city’s latest cultural zone, with bars and workshops and cafes. Indeed the Melodic Distraction premises was essentially a shipping container stacked above an open-air bar (although it fairly soon became a closed-in bar) with capacity for parties and gigs and eating as well as drinking, The one-room studio would act as a hub for business recording like podcasts, and the downstairs could be hired for private parties. There was a business-model behind all this but we didn’t enquire too much about it as the novelty and freedom of broadcasting in such friendly and congenial circumstances had won us round to the cause. We paid our modest dues out of what was left of monies we’d got from selling unwanted CD’s and vinyl and got on with the monthly job.
The Melodic Distraction premises always seemed to provide us with spectacular weather, - deluges, downpours, sun cracking the flags, big winds – and in the security of the studio we could comment on all that with a degree of amusement. We were still on cams and the Mixcloud link showed us that people were listening, watching, and it brought up their appreciations to be read on air. It wasn’t a big audience but it felt very present to us. And again we had the BBC programme to offer us more listeners and the time and space to answer other more complicated demands on our skills. But once the BBC was behind us we had the chance to go back to weekly broadcasts at MD and at the prime time of Sunday teatime. We took a well-earned break over the summer doing just our monthly hour and readied up for a September launch of the Sunday show.
Karen and Roger in Melodic Distraction's Jamaica Street back yard.
What followed was swift and shocking, not merely to us but to the Merseyside music community as a whole. Four programmes into our tenure, on the Friday before the fifth show, Melodic Distraction declared itself closed with almost no notice, and shut itself down as a broadcasting outlet. Should we have been surprised? In retrospect there may have been subtle indications that the MD operation was not sustainable financially, but most outside people who presented shows might not have been blamed for taking the station’s existence for granted. It had a track record and continued to punch above its weight as a broadcaster.
So, once again and in quicker succession than before, we were radio orphans. Rory Ballantyne had decided not to come with us on our digital radio adventure because he needed to concentrate on his own studio operations, but Karen, George and I decided to take the autumn off and regroup whilst looking carefully for a new home, if such existed. It would have to be in Liverpool and hopefully central. If we were to pay for the privilege of broadcasting then it had to be affordable, and it needed to have at least some affinity with the kind of music “PMS” specialized in. We had a lot of contact with potential hosts, but many didn’t fit the bill. When we did finally find a station to suit it came from a recommendation from a London friend and it was almost literally under our nose, in the heart of the now-uber-trending Baltic Triangle.
Svara Radio was our home then until we took “PMS” off the air. As for Svara there was less to say. I think we knew that they were a radio home of last resort and that they probably wouldn’t offer us the audiences which we felt were appropriate for our pedigree and quality of output, but they were conveniently central to town when we hadn’t the stamina or tradition of hiking to far-flung studios to broadcast, they were gradually accumulating an all-hours service and they had sympathetic engineers to assist with the broadcasting. We paid £10 an hour for a year for a monthly two-hour programme and eventually settled into a rota’ed two-person line-up which gave time for each to get some momentum going before handing over. The last Sunday teatime of every month was pretty much the best slot we could have wanted.
So, once again and in quicker succession than before, we were radio orphans. Rory Ballantyne had decided not to come with us on our digital radio adventure because he needed to concentrate on his own studio operations, but Karen, George and I decided to take the autumn off and regroup whilst looking carefully for a new home, if such existed. It would have to be in Liverpool and hopefully central. If we were to pay for the privilege of broadcasting then it had to be affordable, and it needed to have at least some affinity with the kind of music “PMS” specialized in. We had a lot of contact with potential hosts, but many didn’t fit the bill. When we did finally find a station to suit it came from a recommendation from a London friend and it was almost literally under our nose, in the heart of the now-uber-trending Baltic Triangle.
Svara Radio was our home then until we took “PMS” off the air. As for Svara there was less to say. I think we knew that they were a radio home of last resort and that they probably wouldn’t offer us the audiences which we felt were appropriate for our pedigree and quality of output, but they were conveniently central to town when we hadn’t the stamina or tradition of hiking to far-flung studios to broadcast, they were gradually accumulating an all-hours service and they had sympathetic engineers to assist with the broadcasting. We paid £10 an hour for a year for a monthly two-hour programme and eventually settled into a rota’ed two-person line-up which gave time for each to get some momentum going before handing over. The last Sunday teatime of every month was pretty much the best slot we could have wanted.
Karen and Rory in Melodic Distraction's Jamaica Street studio.
As at Melodic Distraction we were broadcasting standing up and in front of a camera but at Svara the set-up was a tiled area with more of the DJ booth than the radio studio about it. Many if not most of Svara’s presenters didn’t trouble the airwaves with speech during their mixing so that mattered less to them but to us the spoken links we had spent decades perfecting often got lost in broadcast. The musical palette was pretty much as usual with me doing the retro and eclectic thing much more than I had done at Melodic and the BBC, and Karen and George sweeping up the latest sounds.
After a few months it was clear to us that even if we aggregated the live listening audience as registered on the Mixcloud feed with the after-show on-demand catchers-up we were still struggling to reach three figures in our listenership, something that neither our social media efforts or Svara’s promotion seemed to affect. This didn’t sit well with a programme which had enjoyed a long-standing and substantial audience for long periods of its broadcasting history, and by Christmas of 2024 we were resigned to finishing at the end of a year of broadcasting on Svara. With no other outlet or home to go to the only real option was to end the programme after 48 years on the airwaves. We called it a retirement, because it was a voluntary move and it did keep the option open for a return, also because we weren’t stopping our various individual activities and didn’t want to get a lot of valedictory messages.
For the final broadcast we brought a few friends into the studio and shared out the two hours between the three of us, a mix of new, local and classic which maybe a listener of 1977 might have related to. For the record (!) the final track played was 808 State’s “Lopez” – “Joy gives me my last regret”.
After a few months it was clear to us that even if we aggregated the live listening audience as registered on the Mixcloud feed with the after-show on-demand catchers-up we were still struggling to reach three figures in our listenership, something that neither our social media efforts or Svara’s promotion seemed to affect. This didn’t sit well with a programme which had enjoyed a long-standing and substantial audience for long periods of its broadcasting history, and by Christmas of 2024 we were resigned to finishing at the end of a year of broadcasting on Svara. With no other outlet or home to go to the only real option was to end the programme after 48 years on the airwaves. We called it a retirement, because it was a voluntary move and it did keep the option open for a return, also because we weren’t stopping our various individual activities and didn’t want to get a lot of valedictory messages.
For the final broadcast we brought a few friends into the studio and shared out the two hours between the three of us, a mix of new, local and classic which maybe a listener of 1977 might have related to. For the record (!) the final track played was 808 State’s “Lopez” – “Joy gives me my last regret”.
Rory and George in Melodic Distraction's Constance Street studio.
We might leave it there. There is a lot which can be said about our time on-air – and maybe there will be the occasion to write that long-read sometime. For now though a few reflections may be in order. My radio days will be notable in my life for a number of changing and developing relationships. The first of which has been a relationship with the BBC. I was taken aback to be invited to present a show for the BBC. It was after all the BBC, most respected and revered of institutions and most powerful in its reach.
When I actually arrived to take up the reins of “Rockaround” I was no stranger to the radio station, having been interviewed there many times. To be producing a programme was something else, though, and what made it manageable was the helpful staff “family” who supported me along the way. It was properly local. I imagine that to work there must have felt similar to those people who served under the British Empire in far-flung places. There was this big thing and you were a small but essential part of it. The work came with freedom and some autonomy, with independence, and the strong flavour of locality. It was often funny and endearing, sometimes surreal. It felt real, and I happened to be doing something I enjoyed, sharing music with people.
Eventually a new dimension appeared in the operations which took a few years to manifest. I may have started with a particularly favourable configuration of management, but by the late 80’s I had realized that my role had become defensive and therefore quite conservative. We were extra-ordinary and dispensable and I would have to devote a lot of time to securing the programme for the future, a retro-rearguard action of getting our retaliation in first which proved more exhausting as the years passed and which never really ceased to be needed. For forty years it was always, what should we do to ensure the survival of the programme? One answer was to be good, and popular, and to keep striving for better. We had to keep our successes in view, and talk them up, when simply making quality music radio should have been enough.
And as the corporation became more important, and more embattled, and more edgy, and swept us up in various changes and crises, so network and local broadcasting were distanced from each other, until, near the end of our time with the BBC, it became clear that, as a programme, we were so little wanted that the treatment we got was not much short of abusive. Respect had largely gone and the audience relationship which had buoyed us up in troubled times had now, like the Cheshire Cat, thinned out leaving an uncanny semi-smile. And however much I, or we, felt that we were the custodians of a valuable strand of radio production we had almost no support for doing so. And thus we went. I am still a keen supporter of the BBC but its ruthless insufficiencies had worn down my soul. As I said in my farewell speech to the station after 41 years of broadcasting, referring not just to us but to the station as a whole,-
When they took away our wings, we still found ways to fly
But we could do nothing, when they took away our sky.
When I actually arrived to take up the reins of “Rockaround” I was no stranger to the radio station, having been interviewed there many times. To be producing a programme was something else, though, and what made it manageable was the helpful staff “family” who supported me along the way. It was properly local. I imagine that to work there must have felt similar to those people who served under the British Empire in far-flung places. There was this big thing and you were a small but essential part of it. The work came with freedom and some autonomy, with independence, and the strong flavour of locality. It was often funny and endearing, sometimes surreal. It felt real, and I happened to be doing something I enjoyed, sharing music with people.
Eventually a new dimension appeared in the operations which took a few years to manifest. I may have started with a particularly favourable configuration of management, but by the late 80’s I had realized that my role had become defensive and therefore quite conservative. We were extra-ordinary and dispensable and I would have to devote a lot of time to securing the programme for the future, a retro-rearguard action of getting our retaliation in first which proved more exhausting as the years passed and which never really ceased to be needed. For forty years it was always, what should we do to ensure the survival of the programme? One answer was to be good, and popular, and to keep striving for better. We had to keep our successes in view, and talk them up, when simply making quality music radio should have been enough.
And as the corporation became more important, and more embattled, and more edgy, and swept us up in various changes and crises, so network and local broadcasting were distanced from each other, until, near the end of our time with the BBC, it became clear that, as a programme, we were so little wanted that the treatment we got was not much short of abusive. Respect had largely gone and the audience relationship which had buoyed us up in troubled times had now, like the Cheshire Cat, thinned out leaving an uncanny semi-smile. And however much I, or we, felt that we were the custodians of a valuable strand of radio production we had almost no support for doing so. And thus we went. I am still a keen supporter of the BBC but its ruthless insufficiencies had worn down my soul. As I said in my farewell speech to the station after 41 years of broadcasting, referring not just to us but to the station as a whole,-
When they took away our wings, we still found ways to fly
But we could do nothing, when they took away our sky.
The second relationship was with colleagues and collaborators and the listeners, and this was almost uniformly positive, as I reflected while accounting for our ending times. We may have been seen as broadcasters but for me the relationship was fundamentally educational. I learned from colleagues and I soon invited others in to help produce the programme and passed on what I knew to them, partly by example. There were many who came through the training we shared and the programme became a “we” not “I” production. When you added to that the basic function, derived from John Peel, of introducing listeners to new and unfamiliar music the work took on a challenging diversity, which was very rewarding. We then added the role of supporters of the music community to our chosen responsibilities which had its own rewards. We were part of a cultural flow and had a particular role to play. If all that makes us sound a bit virtuous it has to be said that we had great fun, enjoyed our eminence and thrived on all those relationships. I certainly would have lived a much less rich life without the friendships and collaborations which I developed through my 40+ years of radio work.
The other relationship which I want to mention in connection with my radio years is that which I had with music, and it ends with a bit of a confession. I entered Radio Merseyside as a kind of superfan, with a fanzine to run and a keen sense of the local music community and for many years presenting the programme sustained that as well as feeding off it. All that music arriving promotionally on a daily basis – what an adventure in listening and appreciation! And what a period to be processing it all into radio! I have always been treated as a bit of a know-it all when it comes to popular music. I guess the moment I realized that the processing had become almost impossible is hard to pinpoint but it came, maybe by the 1990’s, and by then the programme had voluntary assistance and production help to spread the task. There was never less than enough brilliantly individual music to be chosen and programmed but there was a great acreage of less-than-brilliant, less-than-individual frankly derivative music which needed a fair hearing, yes, but also to be jettisoned.
Meanwhile my role had changed and I now found myself as a kind of advocate of the new and different and a notable figure on the local scene. Unlike others I didn’t transfer my dedication to DJ-ing and the burgeoning dance scene, I stuck to the magic of the margins and the thrill of hard-to-pigeonhole. That was all less about the sheer pleasures of listening, finding favourite tracks and adopting new musical perspectives and more about enjoying having broadcasting as a means to change the world. I always said that we never played anything we didn’t ourselves like, but as time went on, as I said in the narrative of those years, I had a less and less strong bond with the music. There were things from those latter years which I will go to my grave having loved to devotion, - I can still be a bit of a superfan - but even those I found hard to slip into my listening whilst slogging through all that other stuff. I never was a trainspotter when it came to music, any more than my other life-expertises, and candidly there’s lots I can’t remember at all – the selecting and playing had been enough for me. We might have chosen a less lavish palette to attend to but my instinct was to explore the world and history for anything which captured the ear with authenticity.
All of this is a way of saying that by the time we closed down “PMS” I had absorbed enough music to last me several lifetimes and was well out of touch with the new. In fact I had reached that classic phase when that “new“ seemed a bit routine and derivative and even superficially showy. This wasn’t at all true of my fellow radio team-members who continued to find lots to excite and nourish in the latest things. I, though, needed a rest from all that processing, and managing, and here I am doing all that, and now with time to explore the many musics I didn’t do justice to in my long years of radio service. I still have a profound relationship with music but I am more Radio 3 than Radio 6 these days, and glad to have time to reflect on it all.
The other relationship which I want to mention in connection with my radio years is that which I had with music, and it ends with a bit of a confession. I entered Radio Merseyside as a kind of superfan, with a fanzine to run and a keen sense of the local music community and for many years presenting the programme sustained that as well as feeding off it. All that music arriving promotionally on a daily basis – what an adventure in listening and appreciation! And what a period to be processing it all into radio! I have always been treated as a bit of a know-it all when it comes to popular music. I guess the moment I realized that the processing had become almost impossible is hard to pinpoint but it came, maybe by the 1990’s, and by then the programme had voluntary assistance and production help to spread the task. There was never less than enough brilliantly individual music to be chosen and programmed but there was a great acreage of less-than-brilliant, less-than-individual frankly derivative music which needed a fair hearing, yes, but also to be jettisoned.
Meanwhile my role had changed and I now found myself as a kind of advocate of the new and different and a notable figure on the local scene. Unlike others I didn’t transfer my dedication to DJ-ing and the burgeoning dance scene, I stuck to the magic of the margins and the thrill of hard-to-pigeonhole. That was all less about the sheer pleasures of listening, finding favourite tracks and adopting new musical perspectives and more about enjoying having broadcasting as a means to change the world. I always said that we never played anything we didn’t ourselves like, but as time went on, as I said in the narrative of those years, I had a less and less strong bond with the music. There were things from those latter years which I will go to my grave having loved to devotion, - I can still be a bit of a superfan - but even those I found hard to slip into my listening whilst slogging through all that other stuff. I never was a trainspotter when it came to music, any more than my other life-expertises, and candidly there’s lots I can’t remember at all – the selecting and playing had been enough for me. We might have chosen a less lavish palette to attend to but my instinct was to explore the world and history for anything which captured the ear with authenticity.
All of this is a way of saying that by the time we closed down “PMS” I had absorbed enough music to last me several lifetimes and was well out of touch with the new. In fact I had reached that classic phase when that “new“ seemed a bit routine and derivative and even superficially showy. This wasn’t at all true of my fellow radio team-members who continued to find lots to excite and nourish in the latest things. I, though, needed a rest from all that processing, and managing, and here I am doing all that, and now with time to explore the many musics I didn’t do justice to in my long years of radio service. I still have a profound relationship with music but I am more Radio 3 than Radio 6 these days, and glad to have time to reflect on it all.
_______________________________________________________________
I invited other “PMS” team-members to contribute foot-notes to the above. Rory Ballantyne writes,-
There is very little that I can add to the main historical account from Roger Hill, but I can add a few personal highlights to go along with it and hopefully describe further what the show was about towards the end of its long and very storied run at the BBC.
My time working on The Popular Music Show started in 2012 and finished in 2023 as we left BBC Radio Merseyside. I took over from Colin Jones, an old classmate from Liverpool Hope, who at the time was producing the local sessions for the programme. It was a big opportunity for me to record and meet local experimental musicians in Merseyside and capture some live performances. Most sessions have their own special character or wow factor. Like cramming in two drum kits into a studio with Barberos, pushing the decibel limits with Alpha Male Tea Party, recording a 21 strong singing bowl orchestra, and utilising the performance space for the larger groups and ensembles.
We started to invite touring artists into the studio, which they generously did. I fondly remember Madagascan artist Hadja, Rhiannon Giddens, and Richard Dawson coming in to record mind blowing performances. It was a privilege to work so closely with them and it strengthened the programmes connection to the local gig scene. We eventually had the chance to broadcast some live performances from festivals like Liverpool Arab Arts Festival. I took myself and my trusty laptop to the Philharmonic Music Room to capture a desk recording and produce a mix ready to go out on air.
As mentioned earlier in this section, we took risks by challenging local musicians to create music for us, but the enthusiastic ones always delivered and astonished. Music For Empty Spaces is one of the projects we ran in late 2015, where we invited musicians to create music in response to a deserted space. Most of the artists made music about a space in Liverpool. Jonathan Raisin’s piece about the Futurist Cinema on Lime Street stands out personally as it responded to the changing nature of urban development in Liverpool at the time and it expressed what a lot of us were thinking and feeling at the time. That project deepened my appreciation of the fundamental nature that spaces and environments are for sound, music making, and culture. The music and Roger Hill’s introductory piece can be found over on the Projects section of this website, and it’s something that has really stuck with me. Similarly, the sound walk that we produced for Light Night in 2016 invited musicians to actively respond to various spots in the city centre, and it was a new type of project for us to pull off.
Eventually I was encouraged to start producing and presenting programmes, and we got to a stage where the entire PMS crew were presenting programmes on a rota basis. We created a zone of regular listening that tried to include and inspire every listener, artist, and music company we could reach. A lot of thought and careful curation and planning went into programmes and the frameworks allowed us make sure the programmes were diverse and balanced. Having each member of the team’s voices on the presenting mic added even more colour to the programme.
The beauty of opening up the show to diversity, experimentalism, and thinking beyond genre is that when immersed in all of this, one of the few things left to cling onto when navigating the production process is inspiration and intuition. A fond memory of creative radio happened in February 2022 when Karen Timms and myself produced a programme with the theme of ‘Trance’ for Melodic Distraction when we were doing PMS XTRA. Reading an issue of the Wire magazine got us thinking about entrancing music, and before we knew it, we had a full programme of tracks that all sounded varied and different, but all had that trance like quality. It wasn’t difficult to select the music because we already had it. Roger Hill and I got into a similar flow with a cello themed edition of PMS XTRA, and I was surprised at how easy and fun it was for us to fill a programme with tracks that included a cello.
I had my fair share of adventures while working on the programme, and took the opportunity to hit the road and record with various artists on location. I captured Simonah Abdullah improvising with a hand drum in a particularly fluttery room in Aigburth and recorded Eric Chenaux unplugged in the Portico Library in Manchester. Ka Baird and I found an inspiring spot underneath a canal bridge in London, and how could I not travel to Barcelona to meet local musician Nick Branton and collaborator Ferran Besalduch to record their saxophone improvisation in a lively sounding alleyway?! That was in 2017 for the 40th year celebrations. I’m bragging now, but these experiences highlight the type of music making that we encouraged and the level of creative ambition that we had at the time. And as Roger mentions, perhaps location recording was a thread that might have been worth exploring further.
Looking back after some time away from the role, it’s remarkable to think about the sheer amount of new music that we were immersed in on a regular basis. Most radio producers would have this experience of course, but we found ways to refresh our listening or push the show into different directions, and we were tapped in to so many niches. The PMS rivers were wide and ever changing.