Bob Stanley chats to Brian about music radio in the early 1960s
We were only allowed to play 8 records each week
Brian Matthew
These days, it couldn't be easier to hear a new record - tap the name into a keyboard, and bingo. Back in the early sixties, it was a different matter. Over coffee and biscuits, Brian Matthew tells me about one of the major problems he had on his weekly BBC show, Saturday Club. "We were severely limited to the amount of records we could play on Saturday Club. Nobody believes this today, but there was a ration called 'needle time' which meant, although we were doing a two hour programme, we were only allowed to play eight records each week. All the rest had to be our own recordings, or done live in the studio. So that's why even The Beatles, on their first appearance, were live on a Saturday morning in a little complex of studios. I sat on one floor doing links, and then you went down a flight of stairs to a bigger studio which is where the group or band were doing their numbers. I'd go down to interview them and then have to run back upstairs to my studio. Terrible rigmarole! But we could only play a very limited number of actual records."
This strange state of affairs was largely due to the musicians union, the MU, as Brian explains: "There was a t agreement between the BBC, the MU and the record companies - who weren't too pleased about it, but they had to go along with it. You'd do as much as possible promoting their records, but with, well, rather limited resources," he laughs.
Understandably, pop pickers looked elsewhere - and the only 'elsewhere' in the early sixties was Radio Luxembourg. Broadcasting from a huge transmitter in the Duchy, the signal would maddeningly fade in and out, which meant you might hear a terrific new single but have no idea what it was. It was a commercial station, and the programmes were sponsored by different record companies. "I'd been on staff at the BBC for six years" Brian re, "three years as an announcer and then I became a producer. By that time I'd started doing Saturday Club and the BBC said they were quite content for me to go on as a producer as long as I kept presenting Saturday Club. So I was doing both jobs for three years, at the end of which I was getting all sorts of offers, including from Radio Luxemburg, but wasn't allowed to do any of them as a BBC member of staff, understandably. I there was a lot of real heart-searching - should I go freelance? Trembling, I gave it a go. The BBC wanted me to continue presenting Saturday Club - and Easybeat on Sunday - and as a freelancer they immediately started paying me four times as much as I'd received for presenting them as part of my work as a BBC announcer!"
