At the beginning of School of Rock (Saturday, Radio 4, 10.30am), his three-part series about the bands that have played our universities and the people who booked them, Andy Kershaw vouchsafed the not terribly surprising information (for those who have followed the career of this most driven of music obsessives) that he chose to go to Leeds University because it was a hotbed of the Devil’s music and he wanted to be in the middle of it all.
And was he? Well, put it this way — as social secretary to the Leeds Students’ Union, not only did he book John Martyn on several occasions, he even carried his guitar for him. So, no, not really.
Leeds, of course, was a place spoken of in hushed tones whenever Soc Secs or their close relatives Ents Secs gathered. For it was here, on Valentine’s Day 1970, that The Who put on a show so incendiary that Live at Leeds is in most people’s concert album Top Ten. The Rolling Stones also played there, as did Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, Bob Marley . . . and the beer was thruppence a pint or whatever.
Things have gone downhill since then — everything’s become much more professional — but the subject has a past glorious enough to slake anyone’s thirst for watercooler moments. And if Kershaw had chosen to stock episode one with tales of drunkenness and cruelty on the campus circuit we’d have been talking of a Sony Award already.
But being a man of scrupulous fairness to his subject he opted for a strictly chronological story, starting in the Fifties with a bunch of dear old jazz types whose memories of the time boiled down to: “Undergraduates . . . such fun . . . drink . . . reefer . . . people sitting on the stage.”
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Which rather left the seekers after hotter pop poop twiddling their thumbs and looking at their watches. Luckily things warmed up with memories of seeing Jimi Hendrix, supported by Jethro Tull (all for 3s 6d), or having the great Peter Green stroll onstage to play the blues for four or five hours.
Tomorrow’s instalment will feature Kershaw’s personal reminiscences from his time at the sharp end. Me, I’d have scheduled those first.
If School of Rock will get better, the musical satirist Mitch Benn’s Crimes Against Music (Tuesday, Radio 4, 6.30pm) can only do so.
For the purposes of this latest series Benn has adopted the whimsical fancy of pretending to be on a tour of the United States from which he was swiftly ejected and wound up in Canada.
The conceit would have worked had the sitcom component actually been funny (a sample: the traffic report on the radio station in the small town of Moosebutt, Saskatchewan: “There has been some traffic”). It might have saved itself had the songs threaded through the narrative been better; but only the Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam pastiche — “I’m being shadowed by CIA goons/ goon shadow goon shadow” — raised more than a grimace.
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What worries me is that unless he raises his game over the next three weeks Benn might undo the good done by that magnificent two-minute rock opera of The Very Hungry Caterpillar he gave us on The Now Show a few weeks ago. Yup, he was a giant in them days.
PS: “It wasn’t so much a crash as a collision”: Radio 5 Live’s motor racing correspondent David Croft finds a pause in the hurly-burly of the British Grand Prix to draw what might be seen as an overly exact distinction.