Martin Bridgeman

You know me, music has always been my go-to: it’s been medicine, balm, inspiration, fuel. Radio too: warm comfort, pushing images and pictures long before television, songs and chat, information, comment and a world of opportunities. It evokes strong memories. It fascinates me still and will never lose its charms. 

As I type, I’m listening to an album I searched for literally decades and found via an independent record store a few weeks back. It’s a slight thing in the great scheme of it all but it brings me great comfort and memories of listening to the radio growing up in Dublin. The album is called “Astaire” by Peter Skellern and it brings me back to the late 70’s. Thankfully the record is in near perfect condition but the little click, here and there, raises a smile, an occasional reminder of its composition and its age. The arrangements are just about perfect, heavenly choral arrangements and a wonderful English colliery band from Grimethorpe…Skellern’s voice is almost slight, feathery touched but sweetly tuneful and sincere and he displays the songs from the Great American Songbook to their very best. 

This particular Peter Skellern album was a regular on the BBC Radio 2 playlist back then and my mother Maisie and I agreed on it being a first class collection of tunes at the time. A rare agreement. These tunes are mostly taken from the 1930’s Fred Astaire movies, my mother’s pop music. Maisie and my father Mick spent time in Liverpool during the Second World War and she loved her radio and I imagine the daily check in with her style of music on the ‘Light Programme’ as she called it, was a buzz for her. Her big music love was Deanna Durbin, but was a big fan of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald. Me? Not so much, a bit too over the top for my tastes. I did admire her other love, the tenor Enrico Caruso, but I had my own favourites. 

We had transistor radios in the kitchen and in bedrooms but we had a valve radio in the back room where we spent most of our shared time. The first thing that Maisie did every morning was to switch it on before she put on the kettle for the first of many pots of tea. It hummed insistently to life through the house and usually its first output was “O’Donnell Abú”, its tinkling, reassuring  familiarly the daily start to the broadcast day on Raidio Éireann. Like many people of her time and in the times before social media, her day (and mine) unconsciously revolved about the radio schedules and I remember her commentary on news and her singing along to her favourite songs. Growing up in the 60’s we had what were called ‘Sponsored Programmes’ too and the variety of styles and the formats format lodged deep, the personalities like Larry Gogan, Brendan Balfe, Ronnie Walsh and Frank Kelly bringing the musical variety to our daily soundtrack. All these sounds and voices surrounded me and I have no doubt but they inspired me too. Sitting at the dinner table we just let the radio wash over us, a friendly voice, an interesting fact, a documentary, comedy. And music. Lots of music.

I spent ages as a child rolling the radio dial across from Athlone to Ankara to Hilversum and beyond, it’s warm tone making the exotic local and possible. I listened to Fab 208 and the World Service on the transistor radio in my room, the signal wavering with the weather, lovely in its way but no match for the valve job downstairs. When the weather was right you could get a clear signal on some of the BBC channels but it had to be late at night so I wasted many’s the battery in the 60’s falling asleep to my little red Phillips radio with the black leatherette cover. On the up side I did have some great music wend it way in to my brain. Much as I liked the music under the pillow it was no match for the valve radio’s warmth. 

Mick was a fan of a good melody, a fan of close harmony and liked his jazz ‘cool’. He played piano and was a busker, a player who could follow a singer, teasing out the tunes. His family were parlour room singers, harmonising the old songs. I saw them together once at a wedding and it was a powerful early memory of blood harmonies. Seamless, easy. He had a light baritone voice himself, melodic and soft but very much there.

He was more a fan of Bing than Frank, loved Gigli and the crooners. He also really admired the Beatles and especially loved their harmonies. He mused that they must have been listening to the “greats” as he called them and defended them against anyone who just saw them as head shaking teenage delinquents (usually Maisie, it has to be said).

He also loved the Goons and that was another shared of our radio moments.

His Sunday ritual was late morning mass, then in for a pint and an initial read of the papers and catching up. Then it was home for dinner (in the middle of the day), switching the radio to the BBC Light Programme and their comedy shows, the silly flicking sound s that came out of the radio when moved the dial a taste of the some of the madness to come.

I loved the silly voices and the floating flights of fancy but a good deal of the Goons’ humour went over my head back then. It seemed as if I was missing something. Mick would often laugh out loud and take off his glasses to wipe away the tears and I would be left wondering. Maisie would just mutter that they were all “eejits”. I learned later that Spike Milligan would just throw in the punchlines of tasteless or smutty jokes as a way of further subverting or inverting the scripts but letting in the audience in on the gag. There was also an anarchy borne of his experience and the shared madness and horrors of the Second World War, something I’m sure resonated with Mick And Maisie’s wartime experiences in Liverpool. The absurd was never far away. That realisation came much later. Back then it was silliness and laughing and that suited me fine.

I remember the first Sunday dinners and the initial few weeks after Mick’s funeral with just Maisie and I. Somehow the radio helped fill in the silences that we had to get through while we figured things out. Eventually we smiled more and the laughter came back in its own time.

Maisie bought me my first record player shortly after Mick passed and it did help. It also gave me more of my own space in a way. I was just thirteen so there was need of that space for her too of course.

We still ‘shared’ the radio but I suppose I just had to strike out on my own musical path. I started not liking the old stuff and spent more time with mates and the transistor in my space.

Back in the 70’s I was listening to David Bowie, Horslips, Thin Lizzy, Queen, The Beatles, Kraftwerk, Steely Dan, Tangerine Dream, The Clash, the Sex Pistols and The Bothy Band among others which often caused friction but a closed door was usually the answer to that one. Me to mine and she to hers. We had to fall out about something I suppose, so the odd row about ‘that noise’ was fine by me. I truly had a sneaking regard for her music but I largely kept that to myself. I had to make the effort to be cool, you know? 

I remember discovering that I could plug in a long cable from my three-in-one to the cable TV box and pick up a high quality radio signal so that became my way to hear what John Peel was playing more clearly also and the World Service and BBC3 (The Third Channel) and BBC4…and it was also a reason for Maisie to  complain occasionally about the ‘that feckin’ wire’ running along the floor from the back room to the front room (her ‘parlour’ which I acquired pfor my teen years). The walls in that house in Brandon Road were dense and thick (not unlike myself) and beyond the abilities of regular DIY tools and so many attempts over the years were made to thread cables through without success.

I would often emerge from my music to hear hers wafting in from the Phillips Bakelite radio on the medium wave, the songs all valve warm and enchanting in their way. I had my prejudices for sure I also I suppose and did affect a dislike for some music but I do think that as I got a little older I stopped caring about genres and trying to stay cool. Music is music, like it or don’t, don’t slag off another person’s taste. It’s as different as we all are and to look down on someone about their musical taste is just being, well, a snob. Maisie showed that to me in her way. In retrospect.

Our second ‘battle zone’ was our television. I remember the ‘rows’ about the Old Grey Whistle Test and Top Of The Pops, and, later, MT USA. We devised or negotiated a form of compromise which involved me getting to watch the programmes I wanted but having to put up with her comments from behind her newspaper. Mostly we just gave each other a bye but I did laugh to myself at many of her comments. Too many to mention but, in summary, her opinion was that the lot of them were ‘all on drugs’ and most of them needed a hair cut. Probably true in most cases.

That said, I didn’t put up too much of a fight if there was a good musical on. I drew the line at Deanna Durbin, but if Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland or The Marx Brothers were on it was a no brainer.

All of these memories came from putting on one album. Like all good music it can bring a tear or a smile and often both and these memories, deeply buried, can rise beautifully to the surface. I look up now from the keyboard and see the valve radio on the shelf in front of me and remember the days where we just listened and enjoyed what it sent out.

I remember taking extra care to lift it off the shelf and place it carefully on the back seat of the car after we had finally cleared out the house in Brandon Road. I see it every day in my room and every day another memory comes to me. A tear sometimes, a smile mostly. 

Some people use the phrase ‘buzz’ to describe fun times. With me, maybe it’s the ‘hum’.

So here’s to Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald, Deanna Durbin, Enrico Caruso, countless dance bands, the emerging pop of the 1960s and Sunday lunchtime comedy on the Phillips Bakelite radio in the back room. With Mick, Maisie and me, our perfect family unit and then with Maisie and me. Both gone now, but always in my heart.