Two’s company | 26 August 2009

On Desert Island Discs the other week Joan Bakewell chose a couple of discs from the Sixties because, she said, ‘the music was better then’.

On Desert Island Discs the other week Joan Bakewell chose a couple of discs from the Sixties because, she said, ‘the music was better then’. On Radio Two on Saturday we had a chance to test this out when Johnnie Walker hosted the station’s annual trip into the archives. Soundscape of 69 took as its theme the year of John and Yoko, Paul and Linda, moonwalking and Vietnam. The news clippings were less interesting than I’d anticipated; in recent weeks we’ve heard so much from the Apollo mission, Londonderry and Woodstock that it all sounded rather familiar. But the music was fantastic.

I caught the programme while in the car and found myself singing along in a totally embarrassing way — ‘Because there’s something in the air…Because the Rev-o-lu-tion’s here…We have got to get it together now’, ‘Sugar Sugar…I just can’t believe the loveliness of loving you’, or even ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna’. On second thoughts, the lyrics were rubbish, but the rhythm, the beat, the subtlety and variety of those harmonics are just unbeatable. I’m biased, of course, it’s what I grew up with, but these archive programmes pin down a particular moment in time with such evocative exactitude.

Radio Two is on the up at the moment, taking 15 per cent of listeners in the latest figures (as opposed to Radio One’s 10 per cent and Radio Four’s 12 per cent). In the past, the station has struggled to keep up with the way listening habits have changed. In 1969, for example, while Radio One rocked to Hendrix and co.