In today's MediaGuardian section, Martin Kelner sings the praises of Mike Read - no, really:
There is one man standing firm against the virus of triteness infecting our disc jockeys' computers, one man reminding us of what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music. Take a bow, Mike Read.
Yes, that Mike Read. Frankie Goes To Hollywood Mike Read, Saturday Superstore Mike Read, the Mike Read chucked out of the jungle first, whose number one fan revealed she had named her washing machine Mike Read as a kind of tribute. So he carries a lot of baggage - there is more; Tory politics, tennis with Cliff Richard, a play about Oscar Wilde slaughtered by the critics - but he remains a superb disc jockey. He is presenting the morning show on a station called Big L 1395, from studios above a shop in Frinton, via a transmitter in Holland.
Big L is now owned by a couple of Essex entrepreneurs, and run by former programme controller of Classic FM and Radio 2 producer Chris Vezey. But you get the impression nobody is making a fortune from it. Not many of the adverts I heard - a guy selling CB radios in Northampton, for instance, and a commercial cleaning company in Holland - sounded like big earners.
For Read it is clearly a labour of love: "It's what radio used to do. Broadcasting, not narrowcasting. It's a really broad spectrum; Morrissey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a sprinkling of new songs like Steve Earle and Sharon Shannon."
In my view, though, the glory of the station is the old stuff. The first time I logged into Read's show on bigl.co.uk, I heard Tell Me from the Stones' first album, Child Of The Moon from Their Satanic Majesties, and Jagger and Richards' As Tears Go By by Marianne Faithfull. Next time, I heard Jackie Blue by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and I was more or less hooked.
As well as Read, Radio 1 veterans Adrian John and David Hamilton broadcast on Big L, and they all share a big house in Frinton when they are working. Vezey often cooks them dinner. It is the Smashie and Niciness of all this that has attracted most of the publicity, which tends to ignore the delightful randomness of the music. Big L even dares play 50s tracks during the daytime, and when other stations offering "variety" are endlessly rotating the same songs you have been hearing for the past 30 years. That is surely something to celebrate.
