When Brian Matthew got his first broadcasting job for forces radio in Hamburg in the late 1940s, the chief announcer there – future Tomorrow’s World presenter Raymond Baxter – gave him two pieces of advice: don’t go on air drunk, and don’t swear. “Of course I broke all the rules … not intentionally.”
Seventy years later, Matthew would say “this is your old mate Brian Matthew” to listeners on Radio 2’s Sounds of the Sixties, and that was exactly how they thought of him. By then, he had been the voice of Saturday mornings for two, maybe three generations. There were enough Sounds of the Sixties “avids” to give the show the highest listening figures on weekend Radio 2 for many years. He was a tangible connection to the music of that decade, with first-hand anecdotes on everyone from Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent to the Beatles, the Kinks, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull.
I was fortunate enough to work with Brian – who died last week – on Sounds of the Sixties, which he presented until late last year. My job was to interview him at home and prise memories out of him for a weekly column; he was always a gentleman, always providing coffee and biscuits, even though his furrowed brow sometimes indicated that he’d really prefer not to be dredging up yet another Beatles yarn.
Mostly, he’d rather have been talking about theatre, or recalling the time he interviewed Katharine Hepburn, or Stan Kenton. Broadcasting was something he began as a stop-gap job after he had trained at Rada at the turn of the 50s – he had also been a milkman in Coventry for six months, but fortunately the BBC gave him some radio announcement work and he stayed at the corporation for more than 60 years.
At various points he fell foul of them. In the early 60s he did the voiceover for a Murray Mints TV advert. His warm, husky voice was instantly recognisable but Brian, called in to explain himself, told BBC bosses that it must be someone impersonating him. He was forced to resign as the presenter of the radio show Saturday Club, but realised he could reapply for the job as a freelancer. Contract free, he was soon presenting not just Saturday Club again but also a nightly show on Radio Luxembourg, the ITV pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars, and doing as many voiceovers as he liked.
A trusted ally, he would be the only guest taken on the Beatles’ first American tour in 1964. Matthew became became extremely good friends with Brian Epstein. After buying a split-level modern home near Orpington in the early 60s and realising the area had no decent theatre, he persuaded the council to give him a potential site. Though Epstein came on board as the project’s chief fundraiser, the Beatles manager’s death in 1967 sadly put paid to the idea.
The same year, Matthew was told unceremoniously, by someone in a senior position at the newly-formed Radio 1, that he had no future in broadcasting. But he had been around long enough and made enough friends in the industry that he found work one day a week on a Radio 2 programme called Roundabout. In what would now be called the drive-time slot, Brian was soon presenting Roundabout five times a week, and would never be out of work again.
Outside of acting, his other real love was jazz – Coleman Hawkins was his hero – and he became good friends with John Dankworth and Cleo Laine. Still, it was his strong connection to the beat group and R&B boom of the mid-60s that people remembered him for. When Brian began presenting Sounds of the Sixties in 1990, it put him in the curious position of playing recordings of his own voice from 25 years previously, introducing acts such as the Beatles, the Who and the Kinks in session on Saturday Club. His voice was friendly, but always authoritative. This wasn’t an accident – he would spend at least a day a week going through the SOTS script in great detail, adding facts and even written intonations to the stories behind each record.
The BBC may have appeared to take him for granted, but his listeners didn’t. He was friendly, great company, and his love for the show was clear. His place in British radio history is unique, and he will be greatly missed.
- This piece was amended on 11 April. The original article incorrectly stated that Matthew was 84.
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