Back To Blackburn

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Tony Blackburn’s autobiography would be a syrupy, showbiz affair but, nope, Poptastic: My Life In Radio finds the 64-year-old DJ well and truly dishing the dirt.

A good bit of it is flung at John Peel who Blackburn accuses of cynically identifying a gap in the market, and then proceeding to plug it for 36 years.
“I remember coming across him once in 1967, sitting alone in a studio surrounded by records,” he writes. “‘Have a listen to this’, he said in his customary drawl. ‘What a load of crap!’ But he seemed to undergo some kind of instant revelation, because he added, ‘Hey, I think I can make a programme out of this lot.’ Days later, he was hosting a new, late-night show called The Perfumed Garden where he spoke in a soft, monotone voice, and read the blurbs from the back of record sleeves. I thought the stuff he played was almost without exception completely awful. I called it ELP – as in Extremely Loud and Pretentious.”
In Dublin on a whistle-stop promotional tour, Blackburn reflects: “There are only a few mentions of John in the book, but because of who he is everybody’s picked up on them. The idea that I waited for him to die before hitting back is nonsense. There was always a public sparring match between us, though privately he did once say to me that he thought what I’d done for soul music was great. I was very touched.”
Indeed, Blackburn was among the first DJs on this side of the Atlantic to play Motown, and is cited by Jazzie B as one of the people who paved the way for Soul II Soul.
“It gets lost among all the other stuff,” Tony concludes, “but the bottom line is I love music and I love radio.”