This weekend Brian Matthew will present his last-ever Sounds of the 60s show on Radio 2. Now 88, he’s been in charge at breakfast time on Saturdays since 1990, his gravelly voice deepening and getting hoarser with the years. You could tell he was well past his clubbing prime, or for that matter being able to dance along to Bryan Ferry. Yet this has never mattered. Matthew’s band of devoted listeners have cherished his weekly two hours on air precisely because of his age. It has meant he was there when those classic Sixties’ records were made. He met the Beatles in their prime, and Dusty Springfield, Steve Winwood, Alan Price, Sandie Shaw. He knows exactly who was in what band when because he saw them performing on stage back in 1966 or visited them in the recording studio. When he adds the back story to a song or album, he’s not reading from the sleeve notes or a script prepared in advance by a diligent researcher, but coming up with facts embedded in his memory.
Knowledge, experience, authentic taste, though, are not enough to make a great radio DJ — someone who we will come back to week-on-week, and not just for their choice of music. There’s an essential but intangible extra quality shared by Matthew and those other great names on 2’s honour board — Terry Wogan, Jimmy Young, Desmond Carrington. Call it connection, maybe, or lack of self-consciousness, or the imagination to translate the microphone into a person, to look beyond the studio and their own self-image and know their audience, really know them as individual people, not just a blank statistic.
Take Jo Whiley, for instance, who hosts the evening show on Radio 2.
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