For most of the week, the majority of attention from the world’s news media was on a political conference in Milwaukee which showcased the likely next leaders of the American government. Of course, this all got wiped off the news agenda shortly after it finished when a very dodgy software update became the news, except that most news outlets were severely hampered by it and could barely report on it.
Anyway, the focus on Milwaukee reminded me of one my favourite performances by Jerry Lee Lewis, singing What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.
Apologies for not getting around to a Sunday Share post over the last few weeks.
This week we resume the series with one of my favourites. Longtime top-rating Sydney breakfast radio host Alan Jones had the very distinctive opening instrumental portion of this song as his theme music. Although only played briefly a couple times per day, there was no doubting what show you were listening to when this came on.
Although actually I did get confused one morning when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh as he was on around the same time as Alan and sometimes used this as bumper music. In my half-awake mode at the time I was slightly confused as to which station I had tuned into and why Rush was filling in for Alan!
As for why it’s one of my favourite songs. I am in awe at the effortless power and range of Laura Branigan’s voice. A marvel of musical talent.
For eleven years, John Kerr hosted New Day Australia on weeknights on a number of stations across Australia, headquartered at Sydney’s 2UE. For much of that time he used a very fitting song to end his broadcasts, with lyrics noting that “we’ve talked the whole night through”. It was the song Good Mornin’ from Singin’ In The Rain.
Later, when John hosted the weekend version of New Day Australia, he occasionally used the song to end the show, however for a lot of his weekend reign his show ended on 2UE earlier than it ended on the network so there wasn’t really an appropriate time to play the song. John moved to the Gold Coast while still hosting the weekend edition of New Day Australia and 2UE graciously paid for flights and accommodation in Sydney so he could continue to host the show, however eventually John retired from commercial radio. Thankfully John didn’t give up radio altogether and these days hosts an excellent country music show on Friday nights on Gold Coast community radio station 94.1FM.
Sean Hannity tends to have very very long openers for his show, combining clips of multiple songs with clips of various politicians and newsmakers. Unfortunately with the lengthy commercials breaks it does eat into the useful program time in each hour, but I digress.
For a few years around 2009, Sean used the chorus of Martina McBride’s Independence Day as one of the bits of music in his opener. It is a very powerful piece of music. I wish he still used it to this day, but alas.
Back when Jim Ball was the overnight host on Sydney’s 2GB, he used Paul Kelly’s “Sydney From A 747” as his theme song, at least until circumstances changed.
When Macquarie Radio made an arrangement with Pacific Star to turn Melbourne’s 3MP 1377 in to Melbourne Talk Radio MTR 1377, Jim’s show was networked into Melbourne and it became inappropriate for Sydney From A 747 to continue to be used for the show. Instead, he opted to use Peggy Lee’s “It’s A Good Day” which had previously been used as his closing theme.
There was a period of time where Jim moved to 2UE (where he was again syndicated) and then moved back to 2GB. My recollection of this is hazy but I think the Peggy Lee song continued to be his theme music during this time.
For the majority of Rush Limbaugh’s 30+ years on the air, th instrumental portions of this song greeted the airwaves at six past the hour, three times per day, five days per week. It became as much an icon of the American media landscape as Rush himself. There was a clever edit at about the 30 second mark to jump to another instrumental section around the 2:28 mark which was Rush’s cue to begin talking.
Rush picked this song as his theme song primarily due to its strong unique bass line, but the irony of a conservative using a very anti-conservative song wasn’t lost on him. There’s a funny loophole in the way royalties work in American radio that using a short clip of a song doesn’t necessarily result in a requirement to pay royalties for its use, so Limbaugh, albeit playing 40-ish seconds of the song across hundreds of radio stations, used the song royalty-free for many years. Eventually EMI issued a cease-and-desist order and Limabugh temporarily stopped using the song. However the song’s writer Chrissie Hynde was interviewed and stated her parents loved Limbaugh’s show and she didn’t mind her music being used in that way. It also helped that around that time, Rush was vocally opposing a plan by the EPA to test chemicals on animals, putting him in rare agreement with PETA which was one of Chrissie Hynde’s favourite organisations, so a payment arrangement was reached and Rush used the song forever more.
After Rush’s passing, the theme song continued to be used during the guest hosts which filled his timeslot and for about a year by Travis Clay and Buck Sexton whose show Premiere Radio moved into Rush’s old timeslot. They now use a different piece of music.
40-odd seconds of intro music might seem like an awful lot, but for whatever reason it has been the standard in syndicated talk radio in the US for a long time. My theory is that as they generally run on a 40 second delay, allowing them to dump a short portion of the delay if necessary without coming out of delay completely, having the long intro allows the show’s producers to be entirely sure they are in delay when the broadcast begins. It also allows affiliate stations to be a little bit late getting into the show without missing anything, and run their own idents over the intro. One of the best examples of this is from this clip from KXNT Las Vegas in 2009 (April 27, to be precise) where the board operator did a masterful job of crossfading the weather bed with Rush’s into under newsreader Kristen Flowers and putting a hybrid station ID / Rush show announcement to air over the intro before Rush began to speak.
“I saw a UFO and nobody believes me” and if you described seeing some of the odd alien creatures in this video, I’m not surprised they don’t believe you!
Jeff Wayne’s musical rendition of The War Of The Worlds is a true masterpiece. And I always get a bit of amusement from the assertions early in the piece from the expert astronomer that nothing could possibly live on mars, let alone be coming from there to invade.
There is a highlight right at the end in the epilogue where NASA have sent a rover to Mars and then lose communications with it and the rest of their facilities (including one in “Can-Berra” which great considering I live in Canberra) and another invasion begins.
Some songs are a real product of their time and a glimpse into the prevailing mindset of the day. This is one of them.
From a time when the cold war and nuclear armageddon seemed to be a real and imminent threat, and UFO sightings were a dime a dozen, along came a song from The Buchanan Brothers to combine the two with a dose of religious advice. A real time capsule of its day.
Somewhere around 2006 to 2008, a new and bizarre twist on the gameshow format took over the wee small hours of television both in Australia and the UK, maybe elsewhere too. It was a live-to-air interactive gameshow which tried to get viewers to call in to answer extremely simple questions for a chance to win cash prizes. The catch was that these shows were really there to make money for the networks by requiring viewers to ring premium rate phone numbers for a chance to get through, and most of the time the callers did not get through but were instead put on a callback list, and eventually when a producer decided enough money had been made, one of those callers would be called back at random…in the middle of the night, when the majority of the target audience was inebriated or crazy.
In between calls it was the host’s job, with some support from the crew, to fill time with whatever their imagination could dream up. Many many hours of filling airtime while the hosts slowly went as crazy as some of the callers.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well…one of the hosts of the British version of Quizmania, Greg Scott, was the subject of more than a few peculiar live-to-air moments and managed to roll with most of them very well indeed. This has been one of my favourite video clips on the internet for many years. My favourite moment is the caller who seems to have called the wrong channel with an answer to a question on a competing show on another network.
Eventually these shows died off almost entirely, although there was a studio in the Czech Republic churning out dozens of versions this type of show for various countries only a few years ago. As free-to-air TV viewership dwindles, it’s hard to see how this type of thing would make enough money to pay the bills these days. It was a strange form of fun while it lasted.
There are many more peculiarly translated songs that I could share with you, but I’m going to end the series of translated songs today, at least for a while, with this one which is my favourite of all of the translations. A translation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
I hope that you have enjoyed this and been very happy about these fabrics. A change of pace is upon us next week for The Sunday Share.
In recent weeks I have shared with you some videos of Weezer covering various songs while being impersonated by other people in the video clips. This week, for the last Weezer clip I will be sharing with you, the band will actually appear!
This is another cover which I prefer over the original. Pumped Up Kicks, originally by Foster The People. Unfortunately Weezer have never officially released a cover of this song and I wish they would, so a video from one their concerts where they have performed it will have to do. This one, despite Rivers Cuomo seemingly forgetting the words, is probably the best quality of the concert videos in terms of the performance combined with picture quality.
All I can say is: thank goodness ABBA had a good grasp of the English language and didn’t have to rely on dodgy automated translations.
Somehow I don’t think predictions about future digital video technologies or all-seeing wifi would have been received quite as well by the public. Brexit predictions at Eurovision would have been bold indeed!
The last time we saw Weezer a couple weeks ago, we didn’t actually see them because they weren’t in their own video clip, instead having other people parody them. I sense a theme here because this week, once again, they’re not in their own video clip.
Instead, we’re taking a trip back in time through the magic of acting, and meeting Weezer’s lead singer’s teenage band as they perform the big hit of the day, A-Ha’s Take On Me.
As it happens, I actually prefer this rendition of the song over the original. The original is an irreplaceable classic, of course, but this one makes me want to turn the volume up and hear it a few more times in a row!
(You, of course, are free to not do that if it is not your desire…)
We’re off to Africa again this week. Unfortunately something went awry in translation so it’s not entirely clear where we’re going, but at least the catering is good, well, some of the time…