Sounds of the sixties
“The directorgeneral himself had called on BBC staff to throw open the windows and clear the place of its ‘ivorytower stuffiness’”
t 7am on Saturday 30 September 1967, in a windowless studio in London, a pop revolution was ignited. Watched by his producer, the 24-year-old disc-jockey Tony Blackburn switched on his microphone, welcomed listeners across Britain to “the exciting new sound of Radio 1” and placed onto his turntable ‘Flowers in the Rain’, the latest single from The Move. “It wasn’t one of my favourite records,” Blackburn later confessed, but “I wanted something nice and happy, something that reflected that era.” As the “Summer of Love” – a season of flower-power, love-ins and teach-ins – reached its psychedelic close, the BBC unveiled a new radio station dedicated to the latest tunes. The newspapers were agog. The talked of a “gimmick-ridden” corporation declared it “Auntie’s first freak-out”.
