On Friday 5th December some Piccadilly Radio alumni got together with the partners and volunteers who have been involved over the last year on the National Lottery Heritage Fund supported project to celebrate the project’s achievements and have some lunch. It was a lovely event and it was great to see partners making new connections with each other. So many people expressed so much enthusiasm about what happens next that it really felt like the start of something rather than the end!
First up, I put together a (fairly vanilla) bloopers montage from some Piccadilly Newsfile tapes I’ve been digitising recently. The final bit of it about making risque films available in Manchester libraries in 1983 sums up my feelings about putting Piccadilly Radio’s X-rated blooper reels onto the Sound & Vision pods. I look forward to the first complaint!
I wasn’t convinced at first that these Newsfile tapes deserved doing (we have EVERY news bulletin from 1983, for some reason!) But actually, quite apart from the benefit of getting all the newsreaders’ voices in the digitised collection, the tapes have thrown up some lovely bits of Phil Wood, Susie Mathis and Dave Ward’s DJ shows just before the news and Jim Hancock’s shows just after them. This is the sort of live output with quizzes, phone-ins, jingles and catchphrases that don’t survive elsewhere in the archive.
Next up it was Ceej Hamand from the Greater Manchester Hip Hop Archive who gave a brilliant presentation about the week-long hip hop workshops in August. Young music fans were introduced to the sound archive (including Stu Allan’s Bus Diss shows) and trained up to become audio engineers. You can find out more about these workshops at the Unity Radio site.
Ashley Kennerley from the Manchester Digital Music Archive was up next to introduce the Piccadilly Radio Archive pages on the MDMArchive website. These pages provide a searchable catalogue of the collection, a growing biography section which organises online content into the Piccadilly People who created it, as well as some pieces of personal curation by project volunteers.
The curated pieces include John McCready on his introduction to Stu Allan, Neil Barker on the only surviving Cures for Insomnia show and Jon Horrocks on how Piccadilly Radio epitomised Manchester’s love of football, celebration and music.
Phil Knowles took a slightly different slant to his curated piece – he edited together a package summarises Piccadilly Radio’s coverage of a Manchester City European tie he attended aged 17 but couldn’t remember well!
For me one of the big advantages of the excellent MDMArchive is that it provides a space which brings together the main archive of the radio station with the treasured bits of audio that people have recorded at home and posted online at Youtube, Mixcloud and Soundcloud. I hope that over time the page will grow and become a useful place for people to start their Piccadilly Radio research.
Legendary ALL FM DJ Vicky Richardson presented next, explaining how Piccadilly Radio’s female DJs including Susie Mathis and Becky Want inspired her to be on the radio. Vicky recently deposited her cassette of Piccadilly Radio’s most epic ever quiz when Vicky held champion Mark Adderley to six draws in 1983 on Phil Wood’s Music Match quiz!
A group of ALL FM volunteers has been delving into the Piccadilly Radio archive and receiving radio production training. I’m really looking forward to listening to their Piccadilly Radio shows which are going out today (Monday 8th) and next Monday 15th at 3-4pm on ALL FM on 96.9FM and the
ALL FM website. Here’s a little teaser.
Next the project oral historian Sam Smith and I introduced the oral history strand which has so far resulted in ten interviews that you can listen to at the library. These have been really fun to do – they capture what it was actually like to be a DJ, newsreader, engineer or manager at the station. These stories provide really valuable context to the audio that went out on air. On this blog you can listen to
a few clips from Mike Hopwood’s interview alongside some of the shows he’s talking about.
Here’s a slide that shows in numbers what the project has done over the year.
It’s amazing to think that if you were to listen to the archive it would take you 5 weeks and 3 days of non-stop listening! I’m so grateful to all of our volunteers who have put in hundreds of hours of their time summarising shows and curating their favourite bits. Towards the end of the project I have been trying out different ways of producing machine-created summaries, which is going to be a game-changer for us. But there’s always going to be value in sitting down and spending quality time with the audio.
We have put a few clips on Soundcloud and a few whole shows on Mixcloud but for copyright reasons the bulk of the material is, for now, available in the library only. Of course everybody’s first question is ‘why isn’t it all online?’ Well, no promises, but we’re working on it. I found it really funny recently to hear the complaint that you can only scrub through the audio on Mixcloud if you have a pro subscription. I was very tempted to say, well, it’s radio. Sit and listen. That’s the point!
- Mike Shaft’s Taking Care of Business (25 cassettes)
- Harry Ogden’s Folkspan (18 cassettes)
- Phil Wood’s jingle, ident and music radio carts (47 cartridges)
- Mike Sweeney’s Mick Jagger interview on reel-to-reel
- James H. Reeve’s Pocket Emissions
- Tim Grundy’s journey across the Pennine Way, 8 cassettes
- Mike Sweeney’s Sports and Social Club
- Dave Ward at the M.E.N.
- The Bradshaws cassettes volumes 1-4
- Stu Allan’s Bus Diss, 1987-1988 (8 CDs)
If you have anything you’d like to loan for copying or deposit with us please email archiveslocalstudies@manchester.gov.uk. There’s nothing quite like the time machine effect of listening to off-air radio as it was enjoyed in the 1970s, complete with jingles, adverts and interference!
The archive is available on the Sound & Vision pods at Manchester Central Library. You can search or browse for the stuff you want in much the same way as the BBC’s iPlayer. To check what’s in the collection before you visit, search the
catalogue at the MDMarchive.
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