Robert Elms
BBC London 94.9
Monday to Friday 1200 – 1500
Saturday 0900-1200
Tony Hadley with Robert Elms in the BBC London 94.9 studio (image from the Robert Elms Facebook site)
If you live in London, Robert Elms’ radio show will have something good for you; it’s as simple as that. It’s so full of good stuff, you don’t even have to like the presenter, though it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t: Elms is a man who pulls off the difficult trick of being simultaneously urbane, urban and suburban without breaking a sweat; he’s neither highbrow nor lowbrow. The basic premise of the show is simple: he invites a large cast, both regular and irregular, of clever and creative people onto the show, and revels in their cleverness and creativity. On things he knows about – and there are few areas of London culture that Elms doesn’t know something about, especially if it involves music or fashion – he’s a great enthusiast and sharer but, when new experiences or insights are on offer, he is content to sit, as it were, with us in the audience, and lap them up. It’s not all about Robert: he likes nothing better than a caller bringing a tale of a forgotten London shop or club, a legendary gig or a fragment of industrial archaeology – in short, raw oral history.
Some recent examples: two old Jewish geezers come on to talk about the cloth trade in the East End, which used to be massive but now seems to consist of, well, just two old Jewish geezers. Elms loves encounters like these, and Martin White and Philip Pittack return the love by coming across like a pair of cheerful Arthur Daleys, alternately deprecating themselves and shamelessly bigging themselves up. You don’t hear patter like this much these days.
Here’s a clip of Robert talking to music historian Russell Clarke, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Routemaster, about the launch of Stiff Records in 1976:
Historian Alwyn Turner comes in to plug his book A Classless Society: Britain in the 90s. On the rise of Britpop: ‘Britpop stops being interesting the moment it gets branded as Britpop.’ Turner then makes a related point: that post-war Britain has extended a strong cultural influence over Europe in terms of pop music and art. Elms suggests the word ‘hegemony’: it is the perfect word. Listening, I offer up thanks for a conversation that uses such words without pretension. On the whole, though, Elms tends to keeps things demotic. Trying to define the Nineties, he asks Turner, tail wagging, ‘But were they fun? the Eighties were fun, it was all picket lines.’ Elms is a working-class boy made good. My reaction: good. But, trawling the web, it’s not hard to find sneering about it.
Sir Bob Geldof turns up as one of the show’s ‘Listed Londoners’, a feature in which a notable personality explores their London connections by way of 15 standard questions about his or her favourite places to walk, eat, have a night out, etc. Only a few minutes into the interview, discussion on London architecture & social housing evolves into Sir Bob quoting Wordsworth’s Upon Westminster Bridge, in his delicious, grumpy voice, in an effort to portray the early morning view over the Thames as the sun rises and the first airliners fly upriver:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
After explaining the origins of old Boomtown Rats songs in the ill-deeds of big corporations or individuals, and complaining that he could write those same songs today, Sir Bob, who is nearly 62, asserts: ‘All generations fail, but our generation seems to have failed more spectacularly than most.’ This brings the conversation onto one of Elms’s favourite territories, ie youth culture/subculture. The 53-year-old Elms counters, claiming ‘our’ – that is, Elms’s – generation has helped make race and sex discrimination a thing of the past. Sir Bob admits, oddly, that he’s never really thought of it like that, then launches straight into a colourful sketch of the Irish music scene of the mid-70s, the background of myth, blues and fantasy woven by the likes of Van Morrison, Phil Lynott & Rory Gallagher, against which he wrote his first songs, inspired by Canvey Island rockers Dr Feelgood.
The talk doesn’t always hold together – it’s clear that, however much he might want to, sharp-dressing London soul boy Elms doesn’t really share a generation with raffish Irish bad boy Geldof, and his often-repeated assertion that youth culture ended with acid house largely because there are no youth fashion trends any more is arguable to say the least – but it doesn’t matter. This is not what the radio industry appallingly calls ‘chat’, this is conversation.
Apart from Monday’s Listed Londoner, among the show’s other regular features are:
- Whose London? on Tuesdays, basically an excuse to isolate and delve into an aspect of London life or history.
- Notes & Queries on Wednesdays, where listeners phone in with odd questions about idiosyncratic aspects of London life
- Cover to Cover on Thursdays compares original tracks with a cover version. Elms plays judge to the listeners’ jury; it’s always good to hear real people say exactly what they like about music.
- The Fourfer on Fridays, where listeners vote on their favourite song from a particular singer or group and Elms then plays the four most popular, followed by Funky Friday, which needs no explanation whatsoever.
There are regular spots on food, architecture, film, gardening and linguistics. Callers play a big part in the show, and Elms attracts the best. If you listen to talk radio at all, you’ll know that really matters: so often it’s a dull, predictable caller who triggers the tune-out impulse.
The music that spaces out the talk is, to my 50-year-old ear, satisfyingly adult; Elms is in a very small club of presenters who are unashamed fans of jazz and jazz-influenced music: in the last week or so, he’s given us vibes man Milt Jackson, French-American jazz chanteuse Cécile McLorin Salvant, José Feliciano, Nat King Cole, Jamie Cullum and the amazing Gregory Porter, who I’d never heard of. The jazz ices the more solid cake of soul, reggae, funk and rock, mixing oldies with newer talent; in the last week or so: The Stylistics; Al Green; Sly & The Family Stone; Tyrone Davis; Morcheeba; Jimmy Cliff; Dawn Penn; Alice Russell; Bowie; Dylan; Elton John, Mick Flannery; Leslie Mendelson. I’ve read that Robert Elms never plays the Beatles. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but a 2009 BBC News story quotes him thus: ‘I just think they are either childlike and simple or rather leaden and pompous – one or the other all the time. For me they turned something that was once sexy and raw and had roots, into something that was totally soulless, playground sing-along music.’ Well, it’s a free country, Robert. But that cap, if it fits, doesn’t just fit the Beatles.
The show has regular live music, often from relative newcomers, and this is a big part of its attraction. The artists don’t always take over the show – “OK, it’s time we heard (yet) another track from our guest band” – sometimes getting just one live song and a four or five-minute chat – so if you don’t take to them you don’t have to tune out. Last Friday saw Ciyo Brown in the Elms studio – which I’m betting is not huge – playing a sort of jazz-reggae fusion that sounded a whole lot better than that phrase.
Robert Elms is a survivor from BBC London 94.9’s previous incarnation as GLR (Greater London Radio), a station whose listeners’ love of its non-commercial, no-playlist music policy was, in the end, not matched by their numbers: GLR was forcibly – and, initially, unsuccessfully – remodelled as a much more speech-led station. The BBC’s then Director of National and Regional Broadcasting, one Mark Thompson, said ‘We want to evolve GLR, so that it really becomes the place where people go for quality speech radio.’ (Really, Mark? Not Radio 4?) Somehow the Robert Elms show has managed to do just that, while retaining, in its broad and intelligent music offering, more than a dash of the old GLR.
The programme exists, essentially, in the intersection of working-class life and the national culture, whatever that is, exactly. You might find that hard to accept when listening to Elms swapping restaurant tips with some overpaid glitteratus, but I’m willing to bet Elms would argue that spending your hard-earned on good food and wine is no more ‘selling out’ than spending it on good music.
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