Listening to BBC 6 Music – aren’t I always? – the brilliant DJ Huw Stephens starts to play a record, realises he is talking through the introduction, stops the record and then starts it again, this time without talking through the introduction. Give that man a round of applause. DJs talking through the introduction of songs represents a major bane of my life.
I don’t know when talking through song intros began. The AI function on Google suggests it was during the 1950s that this became prevalent. It says: “This technique, often called “talking up the ramp” or “talking over the intro,” was designed to add energy, maintain “forward momentum,” and prevent listeners from easily recording clean copies of songs onto cassette tapes.” Contrary to popular knowledge, while I was around briefly in the late 1950s, I was way too young to listen to the radio and know what the hell was going on. By the time BBC Radio 1 opened in 1967 I was familiar with the DJ’s modus operandi. If there was an introduction, the idea would be to prattle all the way through it, up to a split second before the singer started to sing.
I cannot name the first time I was pissed off hearing the intro talked over, but I definitely remember a few early examples. I adored The Beatles’ Get Back, released in 1969, and for me it’s one of the great intros ever. The Rolling Stones Honky Tonk Women was another. Jimmy Miller’s cowbell and Charlie Watts drum groove are highlights of the song. They are not there for some wazzock to prattle through. But prattle they did. As for Derek and the Dominos’ Layla: the whole point of the song is that introductory riff. How this added energy and maintained forward momentum is beyond me. And let’s not forget that 1970’s Layla and other assorted love songs was the last decent album Eric Clapton ever made.
Fast forward to 1973 and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, in my view the greatest debut album ever. On it come two singles, two all time great songs, Do It Again and Reelin’ In The Years, both with stellar intros and naturally DJs everywhere did their very worst to it. Talking through the intro of Reelin’ In The Years is, to be sure, sacrilegious.
Indeed, Reelin’ In The Years begins not with a standard introduction but a guitar solo – and not just any guitar solo. Elliott Randall‘s opening gambit, plus the solos well into the song are the stuff of legend. We are talking greatness here, but that wasn’t enough to stop DJs talking. Sure, Donald Fagen’s vocal was brilliant, too, but without Randall’s genius it was a very good song. With it, we had a classic. My feelings went between frustration and downright anger. Yet with some DJs, it was even worse.
The Dan’s Do It Again came in at 5:56 minutes long, Reelin’ In The Years 4:37. A radio edit of the former was released for radio stations, which omitted Denny Dias’s electric sitar solo and Donald Fagen’s ‘little plastic organ’ that followed the bulk of the song, while it proved impossible to do the same for Reelin’ so DJs talked through it. It wasn’t just my beloved Dan, though: most songs with intros offered opportunities for DJs to interrupt.
Deliberately or not, The Beatles often released songs that had no intros at all. Can’t Buy Me Love, Hello Goodbye, Paperback Writer, We Can Work It Out (almost: there’s one chord at the start), Hey Jude, Help! and many more dared the DJ to babble, The Beach Boys with Good Vibrations, Bill Withers with Ain’t No Sunshine and the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin, too. This miserable pattern was bad enough in the days when we only had the BBC and, on a clear evening, Radio Luxembourg, but now we have scores, maybe hundreds, of so-called independent stations where music has been reduced to secondary interest after the incessant chatting of the presenter (I am loathe to call many of them DJs because frankly they aren’t, but that’s another story).
The legendary Stevie Wright In The Afternoon on BBC Radio 2 was a perfect example. Undoubtedly a brilliant and indeed visionary DJ, nonetheless his show was what is known as Zoo radio. And there was never a song that couldn’t be talked through, beginning and end. Worse still, Wright often sang along with songs and didn’t even bother to tell the listener what s/he was hearing. Unforgivable in my view. Whether it’s a hugely popular daytime show, a specialist programme or just some independent slop like Heart or Smooth, isn’t the music a priority?
Even on the best music station of them all, BBC 6 Music, there are DJs who are known to talk through intros and to cut records off. And it still drives me mad. My advice to the radio industry, which I know pays close attention to everything I write, at least in my imagination, is to stop chatting.
Yesterday, Huw Stephens struck a blow for musos everywhere who value the whole song and not just the singing bit in the middle. Some intros are the most exciting pieces of music ever made. The frequently mentioned Reelin’ In The Years, Guns N’ Roses Welcome To The Jungle, Metallica’s Enter Sandman, Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir, the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night: why would you not want to hear the intros?
This of course is never going to change. It’s been happening for maybe 70 years and maybe two minutes of music at one time is all we can stand. In which case, fair enough. I gave up listening to Radio 2 just at a time when I became old enough to become their target listener, which is to say old, because it was mainly golden oldies and in any event you never got to hear the whole song. And I would never listen to any commercial station, even at gunpoint. But please, let me listen to the music, as the Doobie Brothers so astutely put it, all the time. Now that was a classic intro. Stop talking through it, please.
