Annie Nightingale: How Radio 1’s first female presenter and longest-serving broadcaster changed the industry forever
“Our disc jockeys are husband substitutes,” Annie Nightingale was told when she knocked on Radio 1’s door following it’s launch in 1967. So why on Earth, they said, would a woman would want to join the airwaves?
“They were bewildered,” Nightingale told Desert Island Disc’s presenter Lauren Laverne, during her appearance on the much-loved radio show in 2020.
The male bosses were bewildered, but Nightingale was determined. Not only was she the first woman to join the station, in 1970 – remaining the only female host until Janice Long’s arrival 12 years later – she was also its longest-serving broadcaster, male or female, still on air until late last year with Annie Nightingale presents…
Nightingale paved the way for the likes of Jo Whiley (left)
She was a friend of The Beatles and David Bowie, but more importantly supported waves of popular music genres including prog rock, German electronica, punk, acid house and grime. Now highlighted following her death at 83, her influence on the world of British music culture cannot be overstated.
Even into her 80s, she was a champion of new music. Look at her Desert Island Discs choices and you see a mix including John Lennon and Bowie, yes, but also Billie Eilish and Beyonce, interspersed with Ethel Merman and Sid Vicious.
While most of us turn to the music of our formative years and early adulthood when we think of the songs that have defined our lives, Nightingale was constantly soaking up the new, always with an ear for those artists who might become stars. “You want to hear something you’ve never heard before,” she told Laverne, quoting the late John Peel. “Something that surprises you.”
Nightingale was born in Osterley, now part of outer west London but then part of Middlesex, on 1 April 1940. She started her career as a journalist in Brighton and first broadcast on the BBC in 1963 as a panellist on the TV show Juke Box Jury.
Nightingale was friends with Paul McCartney and The Beatles
It was in Brighton where she first interviewed The Beatles, and she went on to become a frequent guest at the band’s Apple Studios in London during the 1960s – a front-row seat to one of the most creative periods in British popular music.
She knew about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s relationship before it was made public, but did not report what she knew would be a headline-making story as she did not want to break her bond of trust with the band.
And Paul McCartney even proposed to her on one occasion, according to the BBC. “Well, sort of yes,” she said when asked about it in an interview. “But I don’t think he was serious!”
‘I hate the R word’
Nightingale said she had not really experienced sexism until she was “rebuffed” by Radio 1.
But in 1969, a new controller arrived who wanted a female DJ, and asked The Beatles’ publicist for a recommendation. Her first show was a disaster technically, she said, but it was the start of an incredible career.
As a DJ she travelled the world, telling The Independent in 2009 that she had been “mugged in Cuba, drugged in Baghdad and bugged in Russia”.
She was also the first woman to present music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, from 1978, which featured live performance from artists as diverse as Bob Marley, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Roxy Music and Randy Newman.
She would say in interviews how she had no plans to slow down. “I hate the ‘R’ word: retire,” she told This Is Money just six months ago. “I don’t want to watch daytime TV.”
Nightingale received an MBE in 2002 and a CBE for services to radio in 2020, which she described as the “coolest big-up ever”.
Her memoir Hey Hi Hello was released in 2020 and offered a look back at her five decades at the forefront of popular music culture in Britain, coming after previous autobiographical books Chase The Fade: Music Memoirs And Memorabilia in 1981, and Wicked Speed in 1999.
A ‘trailblazer’ and ‘legend’
In 2021, a scholarship for female and non-binary music DJs was launched by Radio 1 and named after Nightingale, aiming to “celebrate and elevate talented women and non-binary people in the electronic music scene”.
She kept going, a role model who rallied against not just sexism but ageism, too, a much-loved favourite and authoritative voice on music into her 80s, on a station whose target audience is 15-29 year olds.
“She kept going, her very existence as an older woman playing underground music on Radio 1 was subversive,” said Annie Mac in her tribute.
For Mac and the other female presenters who followed in Nightingale’s footsteps – the likes of Zoe Ball, Jo Whiley, Sara Cox, Fearne Cotton and Clara Amfo – she was a “trailblazer”, a “legend”, “the coolest woman who ever graced the airwaves”; a woman who broke down doors during a time when the industry was pervaded by sexism, and held them open to break the misogyny down, little by little, over more than 50 years.
“Thank you, Annie,” said Laverne, sharing a photo of her conversation with Nightingale. “For opening the door and for showing us all what to do when we got through it.”
Taylor Swift has announced she is getting married to her NFL star boyfriend Travis Kelce.
The pop star and Kansas City Chiefs tight end shared the news in a joint post on Instagram, with the caption: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
The announcement was liked more than 1.7 million times just over 30 minutes after it was posted.
Pic: Instagram / @taylorswift
Swift and Kelce started their relationship in July 2023, after the three-time Super Bowl winner said on his podcast New Heights that he tried and failed to meet the singer at her Eras Tour concert in Kansas City.
Rumours grew that the couple were dating after Swift was spotted at a number of Chiefs games. On her seventh time in the stands, she brought her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, along.
Kelce told the Wall Street Journal in November 2023: “There were definitely people she knew that knew who I was, in her corner [who said]: ‘Yo! Did you know he was coming [to the Eras Tour]?’
“I had somebody playing Cupid… She told me exactly what was going on and how I got lucky enough to get her to reach out.”
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From January: Taylor cheers on Travis after Chiefs win
Earlier this month, Swift appeared on Kelce’s podcast, New Heights, and announced her 12th album, titled The Life Of A Showgirl.
Speaking to her now-fiance and his brother Jason Kelce, Swift said it was inspired by the Eras Tour – and also talked about Travis’s attempt at meeting her two years ago.
While she said his plan to give her his number on a friendship bracelet was a “wild, romantic gesture,” she joked he “didn’t do any proper logistical planning” and thought he would be allowed backstage.
“Because he knows the elevator lady, he thought he could talk to her about just getting down to my dressing room,” she added. “That’s how it works in 1973.”
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The new album, which will be released on 3 October, marks her first release since she took back control over her entire back catalogue from private equity firm Shamrock Capital.
Sky News culture and entertainment reporter Gemma Peplow said after her globe-trotting tour and a swathe of re-releases over recent years, the new album cemented Swift’s reputation “as the hardest-working star in pop”.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Despite rumours he would retire after losing this year’s Super Bowl, Kelce will play for the Kansas City Chiefs again this season.
He told GQ magazine his on-field performances “slipped a little bit” as he started acting, and added: “I’m just saying that my work ethic is such that I have so much pride in how I do things that I never want the product to tail off, and I feel like these past two years haven’t been to my standard.”
Entertainment
Boy, 16, convicted in Germany over supporting failed terror plot at Taylor Swift concert
A 16-year-old has been convicted in Germany for supporting a foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift concerts in Austria last year.
The teenager, named Mohammad A, who cannot be fully identified under Germany’s privacy laws, was convicted of preparing a serious act of violence and supporting a terrorist act of violence abroad.
He was handed a suspended 18-month sentence on Tuesday. According to the court, he made a “comprehensive confession” at his trial, which was held behind closed doors because of his age.
German judges found that the defendant, a Syrian national then aged 14, supported the ideology of the Islamic State group at the time.
The court heard he was also in contact via social media with a young man in Austria who planned to attack a Swift concert in Vienna, had sent him a video with bomb-building instructions, and organised contact with an IS member.
All three of Swift’s concerts at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium were cancelled in August last year after a terror plot was uncovered by authorities.
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Swiftie on cancelled Vienna show
Concert organisers had expected up to 65,000 fans inside the stadium at each concert and as many as 30,000 onlookers outside.
Authorities said the main suspect, now 20, planned to target those outside of the stadium and hoped to “kill as many people as possible”.
Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, head of the directorate of state security and intelligence, added at the time that the suspect was “clearly radicalised in the direction of the Islamic State and thinks it is right to kill infidels”.
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Swift later called the decision to cancel her shows in Austria “devastating,” and said: “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows.
“But I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives.”
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