Radio 1's 50th birthday: The legends, songs and shocking scandals that have rocked the station since 1967

BBC Radio 1 turns 50 this weekend. It’s been a constant presence – to varying degrees – in the life of David Barnett

Boys are back in town (l-r): Radio 1 DJs Tony Blackburn, Stuart Henry, Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart, John Peel and Dave Lee (Rex)

Radio 1 first aired on 30 September 1967, famously with Tony Blackburn spinning the inaugural disc of The Move’s “Flowers in the Rain”. This was exactly two weeks after my parents got married.

They were in their early 20s, and Radio 1 was for them. After two decades of the Light Programme, which saw young people seeking musical solace in the off-shore pirate broadcasters such as Radio Caroline, the BBC wanted to win back the youth. The Summer of Love had just happened; the Baby Boomers were emerging as a social and economic force to be reckoned with.

I don’t think my mum and dad thought of it that way, though. They just wanted to listen to some good tunes. So when I was born, two years, two months and 11 days after Radio 1 burst on to the airwaves, it had slowly become the go-to station for the youth. Slowly, because it wasn’t quite an instant hit; the BBC was still establishment, still The Man, and if the mantra of the Sixties was to never trust anyone over 30, what were the hip young things meant to make of DJs such as Jimmy Young, who was 44 in the year that the station launched?

Still, by the time I arrived, Radio 1 was ready to soundtrack my life, which it has, in one way or another, ever since. I was born on a Sunday, the day that the chart was unveiled. It was called Pick of the Pops then, and on that day Alan Freeman revealed to the nation that holding the top spot, as it had since mid-December, was “Two Little Boys” by Rolf Harris.

Which has always been a point of contention to me. Emerging as the Hippy Sixties handed over to the Glam Rock Seventies, I always wanted to be born under a cooler musical star. But it was not to be. Twee and sentimental, that song later took on an altogether darker hue, as Operation Yewtree began to pick at the scab of abuse that most of us were unaware of at the time but which, as we look back, necessarily colours our memories of some of those stars of radio and music.

You spin me right round: Tony Blackburn was the first presenter on Radio 1 (Alamy) (Alamy Stock Photo)

Still, the radio was a constant presence in our house when I was growing up, the default entertainment. TV was put on for specific programmes during the daytime – Pebble Mill at One, to watch over lunch (or dinner, as we called it), children’s shows at after-school time – but never left burbling in the background. That was the job of Radio 1.

I often wonder how I know intimately the lyrics and middle-eight breaks of songs from the Seventies that I’ve never owned in physical form, and it must be through the osmosis of radio in my early years. The first record I ever owned was directly due to Radio 1. Of course it was, but I’m not talking some classic pop seven inch. I’m talking Pops for Tiny Tots, which the internet tells me was released in 1975, when I was five. The sight of the sleeve, featuring a line-up of photogenic kids with Tony Blackburn’s grinning mug in one corner and a drawing of his imaginary dog Arnold in the other, brings a Proustian rush of memories, as does the track listing… Jon Pertwee singing “The Ugly Ducking”, “Thumbelina” and “Old McDonald Had a Farm“, June Whitfield’s “Nellie the Elephant” and “Puff the Magic Dragon”, and an orchestral arrangement of the Rupert the Bear theme. The tracks were introduced by Blackburn, ably assisted by Arnold. Just a sound effect, though, I never considered that Arnold was anything other than a real dog that sat with Blackburn in his radio studio.

Radio 1 was playing in the mornings, when I set off from school, and it was on when I got home. News was broken on the radio… nothing short of a nuclear war would interrupt the pre-scheduled TV shows that were on in the day, and – does this need to be said for younger readers? – we had no 24-hour news channels or internet.

As the 1970s became the 1980s, I started high school and began to hack out my own musical tastes, though at this stage still informed by what I was hearing on Radio 1. The charts assumed huge importance… for a while I knew, everyone knew, what was in the top 10 and what position the tracks held. We would listen at home, or in the summer months out in the fields with at first transistor radios and later ghetto blasters, to the countdown, cheering when our favourites hit number one. A vivid memory: a line of boys, standing on a soot-blackened wall bordering our school playground, leaping into the air because Adam and the Ants’ “Stand and Deliver” had hit the top spot.

Sound of the Sixties: DJs outside Broadcasting House at Radio 1’s launch in 1967 (Rex) (Rex Features)

Radio 1 and Top of the Pops were parts of the same tapestry, the latter TV show the place where we saw bands performing (or, more likely, miming) to the songs we heard on the radio. It was where faces were put to names, not only the artists but the DJs, the people behind those disembodied voices that brought comfort and solace. Bruno Brookes, Gary Davies, Steve Wright in the Afternoon (his full name), Mike Read (but not the one off Runaround).

Which isn’t to say we were slavishly in thrall to Radio 1. I somehow knew it was establishment, not edgy. I can remember burning to hear the Sex Pistols, which Top of the Pops quickly rushed over in the chart countdown (even though they had two songs in the chart that week) and we were firmly on the side of Frankie Goes to Hollywood when Mike Read refused to play “Relax”. Radio 1 DJs were kind of like our parents… we liked them, really, but we knew they were old and sometimes fuddy-duddy, and we put up with them so we could have the music.

Until the middle of the 1980s, when I was a teenager, and my musical tastes began to diverge from Radio 1’s diet of pop and middle-of-the-road music. I was discovering brave new musical worlds, and the BBC just wasn’t exploring them with me. My music came from my local independent music shop, and for a long time I just didn’t bother listening to Radio 1 any more. I sat in my room playing vinyl, and by the time I had learned to drive and bought my first car, I would create carefully curated tapes to listen to while driving. And then somebody told me about John Peel.

Peelie brought me back to Radio 1. I never got the habit of listening to the radio in the evening – from teatime, when my dad got in from work, it was the news, then perhaps Crossroads, top-flight football perhaps (on terrestrial TV!), sitcoms, Coronation Street, light entertainment shows. But suddenly a vista of after-dark radio presented itself. And not only was John Peel playing exactly the sort of music I liked, he was introducing me to new stuff. Punk songs I’d been too young for, world music I’d never considered, electronic music that was so fast it made my heart pound.

Can’t tell me nothing: Kanye West being interviewed by Radio 1’s Zane Lowe

For many years, John Peel embodied Christmas as much as Quality Street and The Snowman, thanks to his annual Festive Fifty countdown of the year’s best (sometimes it was all-time best, sometimes it was more or less than 50 – that was the beauty) music. Even now, I can’t listen to “Can’t Be Sure” by The Sundays, which to my unalloyed joy topped the Festive Fifty in 1989, without coming over all Christmassy.

Sometime in the early 1990s I came back to daytime Radio 1. I’d have been about the same age as my parents were when the station launched, and the laddish behaviour of Chris Evans and his ilk spoke to me… they went out on the lash, like I did, they sometimes didn’t turn up for work. Britpop was emergent and the Spice Girls were about and music was fun again, and Radio 1 and I intersected again for a while. The DJs started broadcasting from Ibiza over summer, and the evenings were given over to dance music to get you in the mood for clubbing on a Saturday night.

But by the early 2000s, I’d begun to drift again. Working on a local newspaper desk, I had gravitated to Radio 4 in the early mornings to get a handle on current affairs before starting work. I can remember when our first child was very small, dropping him off at a party one Sunday morning, and discovering Jonathan Ross’s Radio 2 show, which started the gradual migration – for me and for many of the Radio 1 DJs I’d listened to in my youth, Steve Wright in the Afternoon, Simon Mayo, Johnnie Walker – along the dial until that became my permanent BBC station.

Change on the air: Clara Amfo hosts the UK Top 40 Chart Show (Justin Sutcliffe)

Until a couple of years ago, when my kids got to the age where they were appreciating their own music rather than the stuff I tried to foist on them, and suddenly in the car we were listening to Radio 1 again. It’s a Radio 1 that’s at once instantly familiar and yet utterly alien. I don’t know who these enthusiastic young people are who seem to have come fully formed from YouTube to sit in those hallowed studios. I largely hate the music, which all sounds the same, anodyne and like it’s been knocked together for 30 bob with some background track downloaded from the internet, and the chatter seems dull-headed prattle.

But – just as nuclear submarine captains are allegedly told that in the event of atomic catastrophe if the Radio 4 Today programme is still broadcasting then England, in some part, endures – I’m kind of glad that Radio 1 is not only still around but back in my life, even intermittently. So happy birthday, Radio 1. You’re older than me but not by much, and I’m pleased you’re in fine fettle at your age. I’ve still not forgiven you for “Two Little Boys”, mind.