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Castaway
1 appearance
Broadcaster known as Whispering Bob, hosted The Old Grey Whistle Test and had a long BBC radio career.
On the island
Eight records
And this particular DJ railed against this. So I really identify with this fellow. His name is Rex Bob Lowenstein.
Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Me Wrong)
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
And of course, one of the absolute links between Nashville and Robert was Alison Krauss and the Raising Sand album. So I thought it would be very appropriate to play a track from that.
Well, it's the first single I ever bought. I was on holiday with my mum and dad in Cromer, and we walked past a coffee bar and this record was playing on the jukebox, and I just thought, wow
And he gave me a copy of Forever Changes by Love. And when I got home and put it on, I put the needle on the vinyl, and the first track that I heard was this one. And it's Alone Again.
John having introduced me to Jeff Griffin and Jeff giving me this four-week stint sitting in for John, this was the very first track I played on that very first paragraph.
This song really kind of just explains all that [about Nashville].
I just absolutely fell in love with her music and it turned out that the session she did for my programme was the first radio session she ever did and she represents the new generation of country artists.
Stand by MeFavourite
Simply, this is my favorite record of all time. […] from the moment I first heard it. This is where a John Lennon connection comes in, because I I was hovering on playing John Lennon's version of this. But this is the original version.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:40Do you still feel like a lucky man?
Absolutely. I I mean, I can't believe it really that I'm still here and right in the middle of everything. You know, I just thought of thank my lucky stars.
Presenter asks
4:46Where did the Whispering Bob bit come from?
Well, going into a television studio for me was an entirely different experience. And from the moment I sort of stepped into the studio, I felt slightly overwhelmed by it all. And whenever I spoke, my voice seemed to echo back off the walls at me. And there's a real kind of one-to-one feeling about radio. There's an intimacy to it that I was trying to create when I went into Whistle Test. But both of these aspects then led to me being quite softly spoken. And it was within weeks, really, that I think it was a journalist called Michael Watts in Melody Maker coined the whispering bob phrase, and it's kind of stuck ever since.
Presenter asks
17:07What sort of advice did [John Peel] give you?
just to be myself. I mean, he believed in me, he was prepared to step forward and help me and put me in touch with Jeff Griffin. That was the producer that that he introduced me to. And even now, it feels like one of the biggest moments of my entire life, you know.
The keepsakes
The book
Cricket Ratings website data (compiled as a book)
there's a website called Cricket Ratings. You can call up any player in history and get their stat, the way that bowlers and batsmen have been rated through the years. I would like to be able to copy off the information from this site and take that information in the form of a book.
The luxury
bearing in mind my now love of gardening, I was thinking I can begin to kind of grow stuff on the island and become more and more sort of self sufficient in that way. So I'd like I'd like to take a greenhouse.
Presenter asks
17:51Can you describe to me the professional technique, the way that the craft works of being a good DJ? What does it take?
Well, I build my own programs. I still do pick every piece of music you hear me play. And so the first aspect of it is programme building. And the imprint in my mind, if you can picture it as a wave shape. Each piece of music somehow blending and lending itself to the next piece of music. And you've got moments of high tempo or intensity, and then you bring that back down again. You can hardly even tell where one track ends and the next begins. To me, then, that's most of the work done, if you know what I mean. All then I do on air is just provide a turning of a page as I move you from one track to the next. And then it's about the amount of information that I'm giving you. So you're able to follow through on it. And if you like it, then you can get it yourself.
Presenter asks
18:49At the time, did people talk about [Jimmy Savile]? Were people aware that there was something that was going on that shouldn't have been going on?
I don't think so. I th you know, for me personally, it was just this was somebody I didn't like. I mean, I never spent any time in his company. […] The last time that that I saw him at all was about probably six or seven years ago. There was a Radio Academy event. He was in his shiny jumpsuit with medallions and everything, and I was sitting with my wife Trudy, and he came up and sort of grabbed her arm, kissed up her arm. And you know, it's just there, you just didn't get a good atmosphere off him at all. So he was never somebody that I spent any time around.
Presenter asks
20:33Tell me about the arrival of punk then, because that did not sit at all easily with you. Is it true that you got in a proper dust-up with the Sex Pistols?
Yeah, and there's always been a kind of misinterpretation of this because at the time, Whistle Test was an album programme, and you had to have an LP out to appear on the show. Punk and New Wave exploded on singles that we weren't playing on the program. Plus, I mean, if you're a young kid coming through and you're seeing this guy on Whistle Test, who's now 30 years old, long-haired, hippie, white, middle-class, stadium rock-loving, I represented to them everything that they were trying to break away from and despised. And so, this all then eventually reached a moment where a friend of mine, George Nicholson, a recording engineer, and I called into a place called the Speakeasy in central London. […] somebody came over to me and said, when are the Sex Pistols going to be on Whistle Test? And I said, Well, give us a call in the office. It didn't matter what I said. He took this haymaker swing at me, and all hell broke loose. […] Symbolically, a group of people got in between them and me, and it turned out to be the Prokulharan road crew. I mean, it's just the perfect snapshot. I know. So they surrounded me and got me out of the building. And people ever since have said, oh, Bob Harris hated punk. Well, no, I didn't. But it's hard to remain objective when what's happening to you is everywhere you go now there's an element of violence being directed towards you. It's not an easy thing to cope with.
“I can't believe it really that I'm still here and right in the middle of everything. You know, I just thought of thank my lucky stars.”
“Music from the heart, really. I think you can always tell when people don't really mean it, and you can always tell when they really do. There's a soul and a heart about the music. That's that's what I look for.”
“And I remember probably as a three, four, five-year-old, growing up with what was a radiogram in the corner of the room, quite a big chunky piece of furniture. And we used to sit round listening to listen with mother. You know, my mum had the radio going absolutely the whole time, and I'm sure that's where my love of radio began.”
“I still think, honestly, that what I'm doing now is only just a slightly bigger version of that [record hops in the cellar as a teenager]. Honestly, I think that, you know.”
“I'd been making up my imaginary r virtual radio program since I'd been about twelve or thirteen years old. And it's like the footballers say, well, that ninety minutes I'm out on the pitch, the rest of the world falls away. You're just concentrated on that moment. And that's exactly how I feel in the studio.”
“I thought, oh, this is it. I really thought that I was going to be badly damaged in the experience of this.”