Several months ago I blogged about the song “Oh Well”, a Fleetwood Mac song with which I thought I was unfamiliar, but when I heard it on a countdown of the best guitar riffs I realised the song had been used at the end of each episode of a radio series 25 Years of Rock which I had listened to and recorded as a teenager.
25 Years of Rock was a great mixture of news of the year, interspersed with songs from the same year. It was a fantastic way for me to not only discover some new music, but also to learn something about the events of those years.
Someone came across my blog about this, and sent me an email with a link to the entire series! Here it is – 25 Years of Rock. You can see from the file names that the series was broadcast in 1980, once a week running from June until the 7th of December (ironically, 35 years ago yesterday and also the day before John Lennon was murdered). I have just discovered in preparing this blog that the series is also now being repeated on BBC Radio 6, but this may not be accessible to those outside of the Disunited Kingdom. You can also see that the series was extended in 1985 to 30 Years of Rock, with 1980-1984 being added.
25 Years of Rock was first broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in 1980. It is currently being repeated on BBC Radio 6
I love such programmes, even as a teenager (yes, I was a geek back then too 😉 ), so I recorded the series on cassette tape. But, I only recorded the years which covered The Beatles, 1963-1970, and over the years I have lost the tape with the 1970 episode on it, but several years ago I transferred my copies of the 1963-1969 shows into MP3 files to listen to anywhere.
Having this link has enabled me to download the whole series, as I now have more interest in the music before and after the Beatles than I did as a teenager. The Beatles era is still my preferred period, but I have grown more eclectic in my old age 😉
In addition to including the link to the whole series, I have also created this video below (as today is the 35th anniversary of John Lennon’s death) of the part of the 30 Years of Rock episode from 1980 which has a few clips from Andy Peeble’s famous interview which he did with Lennon and Yoko two days before he was murdered. The clip at the beginning, where he is wishing everyone a happy Christmas, was broadcast on the 7th of December and I remember hearing it as I was at home revising for an exam. Little did anyone know what would happen the following day.
The Lennon Tapes is a book of the entire interview conducted by the BBC’s Andy Peebles with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the 6th of December 1980, two days before he was shot
I hope you enjoy listening to these programmes as much as I did and still do.
thecuriousastronomer 