Sounds of the 60s
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Sounds of the 60s was a long-running Saturday morning programme on BBC Radio 2 that featured recordings of popular music made in the 1960s. It was first broadcast in February 1983 and introduced by Keith Fordyce who had been the first presenter of the TV show Ready Steady Go! in 1963.
Subsequent presenters included Simon Dee, the first voice to have been heard on Radio Caroline in 1964, and Brian Matthew (b.1928), who had introduced Saturday Club on the BBC Light Programme until 1967. Matthew first presented Sounds of the 60s in April 1990 and was still doing so in 2006, his place being taken temporarily in September 2006 by former Caroline and Radio 1 disc jockey Johnnie Walker.
Matthew, who made the programme very much his own, turned it into something of a cult, one aspect being its very own slang: "SOTS" (acronymn of the title); "avids" (listeners); "the Vocalist" (the show's producer, Roger Bowman). There were also well-researched features, such as an "A to Z of the Beatles", and "SOTS" T-shirts for listeners whose record requests were played. Although the playlist was almost entirely restricted to music recorded in the 60s, space was found for a time for so-called "roots" records from the 1950s, while recordings from that or earlier decades that re-entered the sales charts in the 60s were also eligible.
For several years Radio 2 carried a complementary show of music from the 1950s, Sounds of the 50s, which was presented by singer and entertainer Ronnie Hilton. In the noughties there was also Sounds of the 70s, a title first used in 1970 for a daily late-light show of "progressive" music on Radio 1.
