I have thoroughly enjoyed trawling through the archives (a long way to go yet!) and there is so much I want to write about. However, I will start with one of the DJs I was most hoping to discover old clips of -
Mark Radcliffe. It’s great to hear old shows of his as I didn’t think anything would exist so it’s been a wonderful surprise! I’ll start with one from the era when I first discovered him…
Cures For Insomnia with Mark Radcliffe, 14th January 1983 (PICC-489):
As soon as I heard the Alexei Sayle ident at the start I was immediately transported back to being 10 years old. Also that jingle “Mark Radcliffe: half man, half biscuit” has stayed with me ever since and I remeber thinking of Mark’s show when the band Half Man Half Biscuit appeared on the scene a couple of years later. I hadn’t realised Cures For Insomnia was three hours long but I’m guessing I usually fell asleep before the end, appropriately enough! At least as it was a Friday night I was allowed to stay up later as no school the next day.
I probably listened to this show as I remember hearing “The Cutter” by Echo & The Bunnymen for the first time on there though I guess he will have played it more than once.
Shame the songs are all cut short on the tape (especially the lesser known tracks) but you still get a feel for how the show came across at the time.
What strikes me listening to this show all these decades later is how little music seemed to get played. I always think of Mark as playing a lot of music on his Piccadilly shows but maybe I’m thinking more of his 1986/87 programmes when he returned to Piccadilly and was also Head Of Music at the station. Seemed to be a lot of chat with the “alternative travel agent” guest Philip Gordon and a fair bit of that hasn’t aged well: bad foreign accents and references to women’s bodies in travel brochures. All done in good humour I guess but very “of its time”. I suppose it was a send-up of Piccadilly’s “holiday month” or whatever it was though so I’ll let them off.
Other points of note include Mark saying he doesn’t like Killing Joke (I’m sure he changed his mind many years later) and a jingle recorded by
Chris Sievey and
The Freshies.
It’s such a shame that this appears to be the only surviving Cures For Insomnia as I would love to hear others. I first discovered the show in late 1982 and Mark’s dry humour and noticeable love of music really struck a chord with me. I loved the daytime shows on the station but it was wonderful to know that there was an alternative to all that. It’s clear that John Peel was a big influence on Mark’s style of presenting but to me as a 9/10 year old, Peel was still “that man who presents TOTP once a month” and it would be a good five years or so before I became a regular listener to his Radio 1 show, so Mark was “my” John Peel as was
Tony The Greek a couple of years later.
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