Brian Matthew
Broadcaster whose radio shows Saturday Club and Easy Beat introduced the post-war generation to the latest teenage sounds
BRIAN MATTHEW, who has died aged 88, was a distinctive voice on BBC Radio for more than half a century, having launched one of the first pop music shows on the old Light Programme in 1957, introducing British youngsters of the post-war baby boom to the teenage music revolution.
Since 1990 he had hosted the popular Sounds of the ’ 60s nostalgia show on Saturday mornings on Radio 2, playing listeners’ requests for 1960s records.
Throughout the late 1950s, as host of Saturday Skiffle Club (the “skiffle” bit was dropped after a year), Matthew proved hugely influential in shaping the popular music tastes of a generation of listeners weaned on Workers’ Playtime and Music While You Work, but who were impatient to hear the new sounds that were taking the pop charts by storm.
In January 1960, while remaining on Saturday Club, broadcast mid-morning, he also launched a companion show, Easy Beat, “new on the Light on Saturday night”, which ran until the launch of Radio 1 in 1967.
By the time the Beatles burst on to the scene in 1962 Matthew had established himself as the people’s tribune of pop; oddly, clad in a smart suit and tie, his clotted-cream baritone and silken, slightly knowing style absolutely hit the mark when he interviewed all the up-and-coming bands in the Merseybeat boom.
The Beatles themselves “dropped in for a chat” on the 400th edition of Saturday Club in June 1966, joining other acts like Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Billy Fury, Marianne Faithfull and Humphrey Lyttelton.
Matthew always informed his approach with a solid and shrewd grasp of developing trends. When, in June 1957, Saturday Skiffle Club finally broke the BBC’s iron resolve to foist anaemic, middle-of-the-road fare on its Light Programme listeners, Matthew tore in by playing Last Train To San Fernando by Johnny Duncan and his Blue Grass Boys, then No 1. Cliff Richard having failed an audition for the first programme, Elvis Presley featured the following month with his first British No 1 All Shook Up, causing BBC management to fret about the high proportion of American songs featured on the show.
With a paltry weekly budget of just £51, the producers were obliged to limit the numbers and sizes of groups that they booked; Lonnie Donegan’s fee of 40 guineas blew the budget and earned a reprimand for Matthew’s production team. As the skiffle craze ran out of steam, Matthew attuned himself to discovering the next big thing in popular music.
He believed he had identified it early in 1961 with the emergence of traditional (trad) jazz. In a bold stroke, Matthew enlivened the previously staid musical menu on Easy Beat by featuring the Kenny Ball Jazzmen, one of trad’s leading exponents. Originally booked for just four weeks, the group stayed on the show for seven months without a break.
The following year, in his book Trad Mad (1962), Matthew predicted that trad would soon replace rock and roll in teenage affections. But then came the Beatles.
Brian Matthew was born on September 17 1928 in Coventry. His mother was a professional singer and his father, a mechanic and amateur musician, conducted the Coventry Silver Band. Leaving Bablake School, Coventry, he joined the Army to do his National Service, pestering his CO to let him try his hand at broadcasting on the British Forces’ Network during a posting to Hamburg in 1948.
Not only did he read the news and introduce records, but Matthew also acted in plays and sketches, notably Trevor Hill’s adaptation of The Adventures of Robin Hood, in which he played King Richard opposite Nigel Davenport as Robin; Cliff Michelmore was Little John, Raymond Baxter Guy de Guisborne, Geraint Evans the minstrel Blondel, and Keith Fordyce Will Scarlett. Among assorted foresters were Roger Moore and Bryan Forbes.
On his discharge Matthew enrolled at Rada in 1949 and subsequently appeared in repertory with the Old Vic Company, where he met Pamela Wickington, whom he married in 1951. Accepting that he would never fulfil his ambition to be a leading actor, from 1952 to 1953 Matthew presented on Radio Netherlands Worldwide, based in Hilversum.
Returning to Britain, he worked as a milkman in Coventry before successfully auditioning as a BBC announcer; he joined in July 1955 and was a staff announcer and producer for six years.
Having ridden the skiffle wave in the early months of Saturday Club, Matthew ushered in the age of mainstream pop, introducing all the coming acts of the day, among them Adam Faith, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Craig Douglas, Bert Weedon, Acker Bilk, Lonnie Donegan, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chris Montez, Tommy Roe, the Beatles, Frank Ifield and Kathy Kirby.
Each week, until the programme was wound up in 1969, he interspersed their (often live) performances with interviews, frequently drawing from the artists quotable quotes that were recycled in the popular and music press. The Saturday Club sessions that survive represent a unique archive of the development of British music and secured Matthew’s place in broadcasting history.
He continued in interrogative mode from 1973, presenting My Top Twelve on Radio 1, inviting music stars – such as Bryan Ferry, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart, Joni Mitchell – to select a dozen of their favourite tracks to make up an imaginary album and to chat about their career.
Meanwhile throughout the early 1970s he hosted an easy listening early evening music show, After Seven, on Radio 2. For 12 years from 1978 Matthew presented Radio 2’s culture magazine Round Midnight, featuring music and interviews with personalities from the arts world.
Unlike Saturday Club and Easy Beat, which had been recorded at the BBC Playhouse Theatre off Trafalgar Square in front of a live audience, Round Midnight came from a bunker-like basement studio at Broadcasting House. Occasionally Matthew would take the show on the road with special editions from the Chichester, Belfast and Edinburgh Festivals.
In November 1982, one such edition furnished him with what he considered the high spot of his career, when he introduced an all-live broadcast from Queen’s University, Belfast. “Students queued to thank me,” he recalled. “The courage was theirs, the privilege mine. I cried.”
In 1990, when Round Midnight was axed, the BBC moved Matthew to present the Saturday morning Sounds of the ’60s show. While it remained a hugely popular fixture on Radio 2, some critics lamented the fact that the pedestrian “that was, this is” format represented a waste of Matthew’s talents.
On television Matthew was probably best remembered, with Keith Fordyce, as one of the presenters on the 1960s ITV pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars.
No one could have doubted his influential role in post-war popular culture, although he was obliged to dismiss as “flattering, but inaccurate” an assertion by Princess Margaret at a BBC high-table lunch at which she accused him of “starting all the pop DJ lark”.
In 2008, the year that marked 50 years of Saturday Club, Matthew presented a retrospective edition of the programme on Radio 2, and won a Sony Gold Award in recognition of “a truly outstanding contribution to UK radio”.
When in January 2017 he was said by the BBC to be stepping down permanently from Sounds of the ’60s on the grounds of ill health, Matthew described the announcement as “balderdash” and insisted he had been forced out. During his last show in February 2017, he told listeners he had “enjoyed every minute of my 27 years in the chair” as he played his final track, Last Night Was Made For Love (1962) by Billy
His outside interests included sailing his boat Round Midnight, travelling and DIY. But his abiding passion was the theatre: an extension to his house in Kent incorporated a stage