Skinny Dipping

It all came back to me today.

The mind is a wonderful and mystical thing.

It only takes a small trigger in the form of a sound, a smell, a taste, as a recognition of something to bring back a certain time in your past. It could be a good memory, an event you would rather forget or deny it happened altogether or something that has just vacated completely the grey matter and comes hurtling back into your consciousness. I

In my particular case it was a voice on the radio.

I have wracked my deepest memory banks, my personal hard drive to try to recall the last time I actually last heard the unmistakable tone of Richard Skinner.

In the early 1970's he was a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio One mainly as a presenter of the topical Newsbeat Show. From this low key role he graduated into a mainstream programme slot taking over from Mike Read in a primetime early evening weekday presentation.

In 1984 he took over the Sunday Top 40 Chart Show which in our house was a must listen event just to be able to participate in the chatter in the playground when returning to school the following morning.

Arguably, the peak moment of his career on the airwaves was his announcement on July 13th 1985 of "It's twelve noon in London.........." which launched the worldwide epic that was Live Aid.

Thereafter, in my perception he disappeared from the public gaze, at least on a national broadcast basis but did perform on a number of regional and local stations up to the present day.

Today he was filling in for a regular on the digital Planet Rock and his voice immediately took me back to my teenage years when I first became an avid listener of radio.

His voice also reminded me how much I used to shout at his faceless persona because of his most annoying, persistently annoying habit of calling my favourite bands by a shortened version of their full and proper names.

For example, after I had sung along, word perfect, to such songs as "Town Called Malice" and "The Bitterest Pill" his dulcet tones would let the audience know that they were listening to "Jam".

In my understanding and I am sure in 99% of the population of reasonable education "Jam" is not a tight three piece mod band but a preserve usually made from fruit, sugar and water and presented in a glass jar under a wax seal.

Similarly, the final strains of "Too much too Young" and "Ghost Town" were attributed to "Specials". I can only visualise from this two things. The first is a blackboard in a restaurant advertising one off or promotional fare and secondly a delicacy that was produced by my Mother consisting of deep fried battered apple fritters.

In the same plane of annoyance was the association of those anthemic songs "London Calling" and "Should I Stay or Should I go" to a bit of civil unrest and friction or an unfortunate and accidental bump of the head on a low slung object.

The list went on.

"Hold me Now" and "Doctor Doctor" were apparently by an identical pair of offspring sired by a Mr and Mrs Thompson.

Even mega bands did not escape the treatment with "Roxanne" and "Message in a Bottle" being , it seems, performed by generic fully paid up members of the constabulary.

My indignation would erupt in expletives and frustration at this sloppy broadcasting but as with most influential sources such as radio even some of my friends started to suffer from an allergy to using "The" and gradually the same slack and lackadaisical practice permeated into everyday language and became acceptable as the norm.

It is clear from todays blast from the past involving Richard Skinner that he has not altered at all in his accrediting of tracks to anything else but the actual bands and I found myself in the same frame of mind in 2013 as I had in 1984 which was a massively retrograde step.

My enjoyment of "Winds of Change" and "Big City Nights" is now irrevocably spoiled whenever these iconic rock songs are performed by predatory anthropods.