Poets, pop singers and radio listeners tuning in to home across the airwaves. But first, the joys of reading a newspaper…
I’m of the generation that still enjoys a good print version. It’s the feeling of it between the fingers, the rustle of the pages, the ease of turning it back and creasing the page you’re on.
Or there’s the ability to fold a broadsheet vertically and read it whilst strap-hanging on the Tube. Try it. See how impressed the strangers around you will be as you lurch into Embankment, descending with your Gannex coat and umbrella over one arm, and your newspaper still rigid and readable in front of you.
Then there’s the frisson of the blackness left on your fingers. Not quite sugar from the biscuit jar, but a sure sign that you’ve been reading something engrossing.
This reflection came about from a piece in the Times Literary Supplement. Why do I have a subscription to this? Well, for a start it’s much easier to make sense of than the London Review of Books. I dare you to try and compare them. I’ve done that so you don’t have to.
The TLS persists in short(-ish) reviews, which are clearly marked at the top of each page by genre: history, philosophy, food, gardening, sport, arts, fiction, poetry, and so on. This clear signposting, together with well-written sub-heads and attractive/relevant pictures, makes the weekly newspaper an easy read. It also means that if you get baffled/frustrated/annoyed by the reviewer’s opinions you can jettison one article and move on to the next. It’s page-turning, not doom-scrolling.
However, I was intrigued by a short piece on the back-page diary (written by “M.C.” no relation) in issue 6357 from the 31st of January 2025.
M.C. talked about the passing of the Irish poet Michael Longley (b. Belfast 1939, d. 2025). What intrigued me was Longley’s ability and willingness (sometimes uncertain) to voice up his own poems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Longley
His poetry has the ability to move the listener as well as the reader. I feel a lump in my throat when I hear “Ceasefire”, and the companion piece, “All of These People”. Watch and listen. Here’s Michael Longley introducing and reading “Ceasefire” (1998).
And click here to listen to an audio recording of him reading “All of These People” (2007).
Poetry can have strong and deep emotional reactions. I’ve previously written about growing up in Leicester; about my parents’ link with Phillip Larkin whilst he was a librarian at the university before his final move to Hull. And about my visit to the Uni bookshop to get his celebrated/infamous High Windows as soon as it’d come out.
So, from Michael Longley, I’d now like to share other poets with Irish roots.
Musicians born at the end of the Second World War have often written songs about romanticized notions of youthful radio listening in the late 1950s. Van Morrison (b. Belfast 1945) has always had a nostalgic heart for radio and is a prime example of this tendency.
- Brown Eyed Girl (1967) (“…with a transistor radio…”)
- Wavelength (1978) (“…When you get me on / Get me on your wavelength / Ya radio, ya radio, ya radio…”)
- On Hyndford Street (1991) (“…On long summer nights / As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg…”)
- Caravan (1970) (“…If you will, turn it up, turn it up / little bit higher, radio”)
Read more about “Caravan”, and other tunes, here: “So ya know it’s got soul… radio”. https://prefadelisten.com/2019/04/26/turn-your-radio-on/
Then read more about Van Morrison, and how he leads off my academic work, in my chapter 1 before you buy here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/61c091c75f150300016f10af
Details of how to buy the book itself are here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/radios-legacy-in-popular-culture-9781501388231/
Then there’s Van’s 1990 duet with Paul Durcan (b. Dublin 1944), “In the Days Before Rock ‘n’ Roll”, which appeared on Morrison’s album Enlightenment.
I’ve written about that here. https://prefadelisten.com/2021/11/15/broadcasting-into-the-void-part-four/
I get emotional listening to this. For me, it’s a perfect synthesis of words, melody, chord changes, and nostalgia.
Durcan begins by declaiming his poem in a halting single-syllable style as a string section gently takes up the melody. He lists the names of stations printed on the dial of an old valve radio including Luxembourg, Hilversum, Budapest and Athlone.
The poem evolves into the chorus, sung by Morrison, and evokes the simplicity of youth in the late 1950s: being able to listen to American artists such as Elvis, Fats Domino, Muddy Waters and Ray Charles on these foreign stations long before they were broadcast by the likes of the more conservative BBC.
The Hammond organ is played by Georgie Fame, and he uses it to create the sound of Morse code interference, whilst Morrison imitates the noise of radio static – familiar to those of this generation who had spent their evenings searching across the medium, long and short waves for foreign stations playing their favourite music. The effect is to recall the writing of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
And then, riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of short to bend of bay, which brings us to James Joyce (b. Dublin 1882, d. 1941).
Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake between 1923 and 1939 whilst living in Paris. I reckon it’s a book about listening to the radio. It was likely that he tuned into what he called Radio Athlone (later known as Radio Éireann), which would have been an audible yet a weak signal with some interference especially after dark. As well as listening to Irish radio he would also have been able to pick up the BBC, the English language programmes of the commercial stations across Europe and, as a multilinguist, he would have been capable of listening to a range of other broadcasters.
What he was doing in Finnegans Wake was attempting to mimic the sensation of listening to a radio, possibly a valve set tuned to a distant medium wave station in the evening, “picking up airs from th’other over th’ether”, as he expressed it. ([1939] 2012 Wordsworth edition, p. 452 line 13.)
From Paris, Athlone and Dublin, there’s a link in that same year of 1939 to Ealing Studios in West London – and perhaps the most badly-timed cinema release. Ever. In July of that year an upbeat film with a European theme is released in cinemas. Just two months later, Hitler invades Poland. The joy of that movie now feels like an uncomfortable joke.
Let’s Be Famous (1939) features Jimmy (Jimmy O’Dea, b Dublin 1899, d 1965) as an Irish shopkeeper and Betty (Betty Driver (b. Leicester 1920, d. 2011) as a girl from Liverpool. Driver later starred in Coronation Street (ITV) from 1969 to 2011.
They each travel to London thinking they’re going to appear on national radio: she on “Radio France”, a fictional commercial station in Europe, he on the BBC.
The key storyline, about competition in the radio industry, was soon overtaken by the outbreak of war. Radio Luxembourg closed on 21 September 1939; Radio Normandy’s English broadcasts stopped in that same month; and Radio Paris was commandeered by the French Vichy Government in June 1940.
In the film, Jimmy’s fellow villagers try to listen to him, but have trouble tuning the wireless:
‘Ah, wait now. That set was made in Ireland. Maybe it won’t work on English stations’. ‘Like Rafferty’s? That can only get Athlone and Moscow.’
At a stroke, the technical problems of tuning in a wireless in the 1930s are encapsulated in portrayals of stereotypes of the rural Irish and, perhaps unintentionally, referencing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Again.
Amongst the other famous names I could mention are W. B. Yeats (b Sandymount, Dublin 1865, d 1939) who broadcast and wrote for the BBC during its early years. For more intriguing detail about him, read Emily Bloom (2016), The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931–1968, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Then there’s Louis MacNeice, Beeb man, playwright and poet. He was born in Belfast in 1907 (d 1963) and during his days at Oxford knew W. H. Auden and C. Day-Lewis.
He worked for the BBC as a radio producer from 1941 until his death in 1963. If you want an example of his unapologetic metropolitan view of life at the Corporation read his book, I Crossed the Minch (1938), an account of his trip to the Hebrides. Naïve Southerner just about sums it up.
There’s much more about these poets, writers and musicians in my book. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/radios-legacy-in-popular-culture-9781501388231/
So, this piece has – amongst other things – shared a series of links between Belfast, Dublin and Leicester. Who knew three cities could nurture such creativity…?
But to finish, a delightful version of “On Hyndford Street”, recorded live on Cyprus Avenue, in 2015. The significance of that will not be lost on you.
Pre-fade Listen 