The Birth of Pop: Saturday Club on the Light Programme
On 30th September 2017 we mark the 50th anniversary of the transformation of the BBC’s Light Programme into Radios 1 and 2; and of the Home Service into Radio 4. (The transition from the Third Programme to Radio 3 took a little longer).
The Light Programme and Home Service were both, in their different ways, creatures of wartime. The Home Service was created on the outbreak of War in September 1939, as a merger of the former ‘National’ and ‘Regional’ programmes: it was feared that enemy bombers might use differential signals from regional transmitters as navigation guides. The Light Programme on the other hand was launched as the War ended, in July 1945, making use of the old ‘National’ longwave frequency which was now freed up again. When they were laid to rest in 1967, the Home Service was therefore only 28 years old, and the Light Programme a mere 22. Their middle-aged successors, Radios 1, 2 and 4, have lasted much longer.
The History Project has three wonderful interviews with radio producers who lived through this era. Between them, Bernie Andrews (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/bernie-andrews), Bill Bebb (http://historyproject.org.uk/content/0591), and Jimmy Grant (http://historyproject.org.uk/interview/jimmy-grant) were key players in BBC popular music – pop, rock, jazz, folk, blues, skiffle and the rest – from the 1950s to the 1980s.
The show that brought the three of them together was Saturday Club – or, as it was called for its first two years, Saturday Skiffle Club – which went out on the Light Programme. The brainchild of Jimmy Grant, it launched in 1957 as a Saturday morning showcase for contemporary skiffle. The term ‘skiffle’ first appeared in American music in the ‘20s, but in Britain in the ‘50s it was being used loosely to indicate a wide range of contemporary music including folk, blues, jazz, rock & roll, and pop.
When the BBC launched Radio 1 ten years later, it signed a raft of deals with record companies which created a positive incentive to focus on ‘needle time’ – playing tracks from commercially-released records. This signalled a major shift away from the music culture which Saturday Club had nurtured since 1957, because although it had always included some needle-time, the programme's first love was live music. It would get bands or performers in – or it would go out to them – to record unique sessions especially for the show. This was central to its identity; it wasn’t just music radio, it was music-event radio, and the event might be anywhere: in October 1965 Saturday Club went to Copenhagen. In his interview Bill Bebb recalls this culture-shift, and remembers saying to himself: “I’m not here to pick records, I’m here to make music”.
Saturday Club limped on for a few months after the Radio 1 launch, and the Keith Skues show continued its sessional focus for a while after that, but by 1969 it was over. Pop-chart needle-time ruled the roost. So let’s finish with a couple of Saturday Club line-ups from its glory days.
The Radio Times advertised the 1958 Christmas holiday show, on Saturday 27th December (http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/90c5aba39c134d49af0d55b5f1d863ef) as “The best of today's 'pop' entertainment”. Heading things up were Cliff Richard and the Drifters – the band’s name-change to ‘Shadows’ was yet to come. Johnny Dankworth was there with his jazz orchestra. And there was “Folk, skiffle, and spasm music from Glasgow played by Joe Gordon and his Folk Four and Fionna Duncan”.
Just over four years later, on 26th January 1963 (http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/0bb3f5a6a9154dd18a50e49e24fafcd3) the Beatles made their first appearance on Saturday Club, in a show produced by Bernie Andrews. Also on the line-up were ‘chirpy Cockney’ Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, crooner Vince Hill, and jazz trumpeter Alan Elsdon and his band. Two weeks earlier the Beatles had released their second single, Please Please Me, so I reckon listeners back in January 1963 must have been treated to their own special Saturday Club rendering of that number, plus maybe a reprise of the Beatles’ earlier breakthrough hit Love Me Do.
Beatles fans can find more in Bernie Andrews’s interview. He was a close personal friend to them, and to Brian Epstein, and John Lennon referred to Bernie fondly in the last interview he ever gave, the night before he was shot dead.
Martin Spence
