Annie Nightingale No Longer Presents

[Guy Profumo]

Annie Nightingale, the self-styled wicked witch of the wireless has died, aged 83


https://www.nme.com/news/music/broad...ged-83-3569896

[Duncan Gardner]

RIP.Cant believe she was 83

[Nocturnal Submission]

Ah, she was excellent. Great on the radio and TOGWT.

RIP

[delicatemoth]

From the thread title I thought this was gonna be Maureen Lipman.

I really liked Nightingale when I was a kid. She played lots of odd records. I think I first heard Bonzo Dog Band on her show.

[George C.]

Threw a plastic pint glass at her once. It was empty mind. Probably because the music she played was rubbish!

Don't know if Felicity, I guess so remembers her visit to Wolves Poly...

RIP AN.

[Sean of the Shed]

I'm no angel when it comes to thread titles, but even I wouldn't have gone for that, self-styled or not. It's too reminiscent of fucking Thatcher for starters.
Annie Nightingale was a legend and a pioneer, both as a woman and a DJ. She was a shining light amongst the darkest days of mysogyny and exclusivity on Radio 1 during the days of Savile, Tidybeard and the Hairy Cockflake.

[Sean of the Shed]

Also can't really pay tribute to her without playing this.

[RobW]

"Anne Nightingale what's your blinking game; I waited for your roadshow, but your roadshow never came, Anne the DJ, Anne the DJ, Anne the DJ..."

Don't think I ever realised just how old she was tbh, despite the fact that she was at Live Aid and I would have seen her on archive footage of TOGWT. What a life. RIP.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Really good BBC obit for one of their own: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27506885

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Read her autobiography* last year, fascinating life and she didn't just stumble into being a pioneering female presenter, she campaigned hard to get her foot in the door at Radio 1 - who then seemed to use her as a reason not to bring in other female presenters, seeming to think that as long as they had one that was ok.

Probably like many of a similar age, my main association with her is the Sunday night request show - I would have known that she presented OGWT but that was a bit earnest and grown up for me at the time.

*first book published by White Rabbit Books, as their Twitter pointed out this afternoon.

[Jah Womble]

I can remember her from the early seventies on R1, so the age thing was less of a surprise to me. Between 1970 and 1982, she was the only female DJ on the station, which seems frankly bizarre now. (That said, from the other stations to which I listened regularly, I can only really recall Samantha on Radio Caroline during the seventies.)

Annie N was more than decent on OGWT as well - contrasting well with Whispering Bob (who's a lot easier to listen to in his older years).

RIP indeed.

(Agree with SotS re the thread header. It doesn't seem appropriate at all.)

[torres]

Yeah. Need that thread title changed. Loved her Sunday night show and as mentioned TOGWT.

A true female pioneer. Rest easy Annie.

[Hot Pepsi]

Also can't really pay tribute to her without playing this.

What is her connection to that?*



It's easy to shit on the Baby Boomers because they include people like Trump and Blair and Bill Clinton and all kinds of other smug, self-important shits who refuse to get off the stage.

But it also includes all those people like Annie Nightingale. I'd never heard of her before today, but having read up, she seems like somebody who really believed in the Magic of Rock and Roll. I do too.

Now, it's been widely observed that rock n' roll is now fully out of ideas and is entirely backward-looking. There were people saying that as early as 50 years ago. Maybe sooner. I think it started to go backwards in the 90s. Whatever.

But I think most everyone agrees that it hasn't been at the center of popular culture for about 20 years. And I'm ok with rock and roll leaving the center of pop culture. Folk music had that spot for a while. Jazz had that spot before that. Before that it was, I dunno, opera or whatever. That's fine. All of those forms are still around and still inspire people.

But that shift means that we are rapidly losing the last people who can actually remember when rock - or maybe popular music in general - felt like the most vital and magical and important thing in the world. What happens to rock and roll when nobody alive remembers when it was young?

Of course, we have hip-hop now. But that is, as we've been told a few times this year, 50 years old now. And I'm not sure it is as forward-looking and novel as its fans imagine.


And, as I tried to explain before, I just don't see that kind of enthusiasm for popular and/or youth culture among Young People These days.

I don't agree with much of my generation that music (or TV or movies) was "so much better" in our day, not only because I'm smart enough to see the obvious cognitive bias there, but also because I really love a lot of the music from younger people. And there's a lot of stuff I don't love, but that I can at least sorta "get."

That's fine with me, but that's actually a problem, isn't it? Shouldn't the Kids These Days be coming up with more stuff that is new and exciting that old people like me find weird and scary? If they're not, does that mean they have given up?

Same with fashion, the kids I see around either look like they're dressed to take a nap or they're wearing the same things we wore in the 90s, which was also very Napcore. Whatever technology makes hair dye more vibrant seems to have improved, and challenging gender norms was not as common in my day as is now, but I mostly see looks that would have been cool when I was their age.

Shouldn't they be trying to be more...ummm.... offensive? It's like they've given up. Or maybe the cultivated "given-up look is exactly the transgression we need. I hope that's it and not that they're just too sad to bother.

Or maybe I've just gotten past the stage where I think that The Young People are doing is every strange and scary because I've seen the pattern repeat enough times.

I hope that's it. I hope they haven't just given up.




*I recall seeing that first when MTV let Doctor Demento take over the channel for a few hours one weekend. (Maybe it was the whole weekend). It was supposed to just be for a laugh, and most of the songs he played were just novelty/comedy bits, but that was really important to me because it introduced some bands I never would have heard of otherwise, including They Might Be Giants and Camper Van Beethoven.* In the mid-80s, a lot of stuff that was presented as "whacky" was actually just really really good.

[Sean of the Shed]

What is her connection to that?*

She would play that on her show whenever the mood took her. Probably just because she could.
Might be something more behind it that maybe Walt Flanagans Dog could tell us about if it's mentioned in her autobiography.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

There's a lot to think about there but I'd like to add something to it regarding the person in question - Annie Nightingale genuinely moved with the times, the obituaries today will talk about how she was there at the start of Swinging London and was friends with the Beatles and the Stones, but fast forward into the 21st century and she was still at what could be regarded as the cutting edge of dance music, and not doing it in a wacky "hey look how old I am and I'm still down with the kids" way. A lot of the 60s/70s crowd never moved on from that and spent the 80s onwards harrumphing about how "them young 'uns today can't rock and roll like we did etc".

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

She would play that on her show whenever the mood took her. Probably just because she could.
Might be something more behind it that maybe Walt Flanagans Dog could tell us about if it's mentioned in her autobiography.

Only mentioned in context of a Spotify playlist that someone put together of.songs they remember from her show, along with Nelly The Elephant, Elstree (by The Buggles) and Croydon (by Captain Sensible).

[Amor de Cosmos]

She was the first person to introduce Led Zeppelin as a band on live TV. Also the first to chat — briefly — to Jim Morrison on UK TV. She, along with Maureen Cleave, stood out because they were as good as, or more often, better than their male counterparts, not because they were women.

[Bored Of Education]

I love her introducing The Damned on OGWT.

[Hot Pepsi]

There's a lot to think about there but I'd like to add something to it regarding the person in question - Annie Nightingale genuinely moved with the times, the obituaries today will talk about how she was there at the start of Swinging London and was friends with the Beatles and the Stones, but fast forward into the 21st century and she was still at what could be regarded as the cutting edge of dance music, and not doing it in a wacky "hey look how old I am and I'm still down with the kids" way. A lot of the 60s/70s crowd never moved on from that and spent the 80s onwards harrumphing about how "them young 'uns today can't rock and roll like we did etc".

Yeah, that's a good point.

There are a few people like that who can recognize that it isn't the specific music style that matters, but the energy and attitude that goes into it. To some extent, I think Paul McCartney is like that. In interviews, he always seems to be excited to talk about something new he heard. And he's never grouchy. I suppose being richer than God helps.

But I've also noticed - and maybe this is a lie and just bias - that older women tend to be more open that that sort of thing than older men, although not always.

Our culture doesn't value old people nearly as much as it should (or at all). But now I worry that we're also not valuing youth enough, except as a lucrative demo for advertisers.

There's a great line from Tolkien in Return of the King. "Kings built tombs more splendid than the houses of the living and counted the names of their descent dearer than the names of their sons." He claimed to not do allegory, but that line in particular is one that has stuck with me and I think about it whenever I find myself getting nostalgic.

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Of all the people from that generation (over here at least) Elton John probably does most to support young music acts, and that isn't something I could have seen myself saying ten years ago.

[Hot Pepsi]

Of all the people from that generation (over here at least) Elton John probably does most to support young music acts, and that isn't something I could have seen myself saying ten years ago.

Elton John does not seem to live on the same planet as the rest of us, but he knows a lot about music.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Threw a plastic pint glass at her once. It was empty mind. Probably because the music she played was rubbish!

Don't know if Felicity, I guess so remembers her visit to Wolves Poly...

RIP AN.

No! What year..?

[Sits]

Annie Nightingale was a legend and a pioneer, both as a woman and a DJ. She was a shining light amongst the darkest days of mysogyny and exclusivity on Radio 1 during the days of Savile, Tidybeard and the Hairy Cockflake.

Well said.

RIP Annie, with thanks.

[tee rex]

Agree with others on the thread title. Please change it.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate the prejudices she faced. In the punk/new wave era I hung out and went to gigs with plenty of self-styled rebels, being all anarchic and alternative and anti-Thatch ... and thoroughly sexist. She was a chick who liked bands, therefore she had to be a slag. Not a universal attitude, but not uncommon either.

[Hot Pepsi]

People who imagine themselves to be progressive and transgressive can be very conservative in lots of important ways.