„Good morning London, I’m Robert Elms!“

[ Edited 19 February 2024 ]

I’ve been listening to Robert Elms‘ daily show on BBC Radio London ever since I had returned to Germany from one semester abroad at Aberystwyth Uni in 2004, stumbling upon it by pure chance on the BBC iPlayer, or however it was called back then. Robert has shaped not only my musical tastes and knowledge in more ways than you’d care to read about here, but also, I guess, even my English pronounciation and vocabulary.

So here’s a collection of the iconic instrumental tracks Robert used to start his show with, when it was still on from Monday to Friday. I originally collected the songs for this playlist from 2018 to 2021, when he used a wide variety of tracks as background music to his spoken intros, covering a whole lot of different musical moods:

Only Nearby Far by Umbrella People, once one of Elms‘ most iconic opening tracks (yes, it has that fabled, and oft-mentioned Flügelhorn!) is not on Spotify, so here goes:

However, ever since the drastic changes made to the BBC Radio London schedule in 2021, Robert’s show has only been on from Friday to Sunday. Since then, the vast majority of opening tracks from the playlist above have been retired, leaving only a fixed pattern repeated every week:

Fridays: Bob James, Westchester Lady

… famously sampled by Adam F, of course, in his 1997 drum and bass classic Circles:

Saturdays: Pat Metheny Group, Last Train Home

Sundays: George Benson, Take Five

But let’s leave the last word to Roger Tichborne from Barnet, whom I couldn’t agree with more:

„Robert Elms‘ weekday show was a fascinating, entertaining mine of information. Not only that, it was a fantastic resource for finding new artists and shows. Maybe half of the bands I’ve got into in the last 20 years were first played on the Robert Elms show. When I wrote the blog in 2019, I assumed that Robert would carry on until he either retired or the grim reaper intervened. It didn’t occur to me that BBC management would be so stupid as to muck around with a winning formula.“

The state of BBC Radio London sums up the state of the world as they lose a third of listeners in 2022 – Roger Tichborne / The Barnet Eye, 1 March 2023

r e f e r e n z [ playlist ]

Eine Playlist mit Musik, die mich aus unterschiedlichen Gründen und auf verschiedenste Weisen sehr berührt. Referenzen bezüglich der Erzeugung großer Emotionen, oder auch einfach nur perfekter Melodien.

One song per language

Hey, I made a Spotify playlist. It has one song per language.

So far there’s Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Lingala, Low German, Mongolian, Portuguese, Pulaar, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Spanish, Swabian (I know, it’s not a language per se), Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Tuvan (?), Ukrainian, Vonlenska/Hopelandic, Welsh, and West Flemish.

To be continued.

Maybe there’s too much of the blatantly obvious (Björk’s first band, Huun-Huur-Tu, Jacques Dutronc, Tarkan, Tenores di Bitti…). But it’s all stuff I like a lot.

[Edit 19.2.2024]

When I made this post, the amazingly brilliant album „Kazemachi Roman“ (1971) by Happy End wasn’t already available on Spotify, so at that point Japanese was still missing from the list. In the meantime I’ve added something else, but here are Happy End, because they are great: