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Life & Work
Bio:
Gonzo broadcaster...
Rochdale, where he was born in 1959, triggered in Andy a curiosity he has never lost. Musically, his horizons were opened up by an early obsession with Bob Dylan. Tracing Dylan’s influences led Andy towards folk, blues, country, soul and gospel.
He went to Leeds University, partly to study politics in the half-hope of becoming a journalist, but chiefly because the student union at Leeds put on the biggest college concerts in the country.
In his second year he seized power of the job of Entertainments Secretary in a bloodless coup and ran the concerts for two and a half years. His line-ups were a who’s-who of early 80s music – concerts by The Clash, Elvis Costello and Black Uhuru, among others, were regular occurences. Naturally, he failed his degree.
Andy came to London in 1984 to work as Billy Bragg’s driver and roadie. It was while he was chaperoning Billy to BBC2′s “Whistle Test” that he was spotted by a producer as a potential new presenter. He began his broadcasting career in September 1984 with a baptism by fire – a report for Whistle Test from the Monsters of Rock heavy metal festival.
In 1985, Andy was invited by Radio 1 to present his own show with a free choice of music. As his own tastes evolved so did the content of the radio show. Meeting the musicologist and Radio 3 presenter Lucy Duran – now an old friend – and the first appearance of Zimbabwe’s Bhundu Boys in the UK tipped Andy heavily into African music.
Andy presented his Radio 1 show for 15 years until he was sacked in May 2000 to be replaced by another dance music programme. He realised Radio 3 was his spiritual new home when Controller Roger Wright told him that what he liked about Andy’s Radio 1 programme was that he never knew what was coming next. He joined Radio 3 in April 2001 and continued to ignore categories and mix it all up.
In his spare time Andy enjoys motorcyles (particularly racing) and travels to extreme countries. He has thrice holidayed in North Korea and, for Channel 4, made the very first film inside the secretive country.
A journalist at heart, he has often reinvented himself as a foreign correspondent for BBC radio news and occasionally made travel documentaries for Channel 4. He reported for the BBC from the midst of a volcanic eruption in Montserrat, where he had taken his partner for “a quiet Caribbean holiday” (the island blew up the day after they arrived) and, most memorably, from Rwanda during the horrors of 1994.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).