Speechification

Sometimes you can hear Radio 4 creaking and groaning under the strains and anxieties of generation change. Somewhere during the Eddie Mair helmed* introspectionfest on the network’s 40th birthday someone claimed that Radio 4 was well up to date, because lots of people there were into The Beatles and The Stones. It’s weird because clearly the programme makers aren’t that old, it’s like the network is older than the people who make it. So you get Metal at 40 having to explain what heavy metal actually is before they can start. Good programme though, if you don’t know much about metal. A bit reliant on Emily Booth’s narration, not as many interviews as you’d hope, but any day the names Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi crop up on Radio 4 is a good day. I was especially happy to hear about Count Basie’s influence on Sabbath and the origin story for Smoke On The Water. And very, very delighted to hear talk of NWOBHM. (MP3 here)

*Just the mention of Metal has me writing like a Sounds reviewer

This entry was posted by by russell on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 10:40 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.