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HEY cool cats, get down ‘n’ get hip to this blast of a book! It’s like coolsville. Retired radio DJ and current ‘rad’ artist, surfer and beach buggy enthusiast Billy Munro presents one of the most definitive histories of radio and its impact on the modern world of music – from the Top 40 hit song charts to the groovy radio DJ personality to the performers and songs that changed the world.
Billy Munro lived and breathed radio and music ever since his father brought home an old HMV Victor phonograph and a corn sack full of 78 rpm records. From that day Billy realised he was ‘born with the beat’.
His incredibly entertaining writing style speaks volumes about his popular style over the radio waves. If you are a music freak and remember Bill Haley and the Comets, the TV show Countdown, single records and the paper hit charts, then this book is everything you need to know.
There’s all sorts of interesting and quirky information about the top radio DJs and radio stations in their music heydays from the 1960s; top performers and songs from around the world; top music clubs in Aussie cities; and how the music culture changed our language, our fashions and our social lives. Plus we get a behind-the-scene look at a radio station in action and the incredible workload of a top DJ.
Billy Munro is one colourful character and this book really does hit you in the face – it’s power-packed!
With a name like Bill-A-Go-Go, you would be entirely correct in assuming that this book, based on how top 40 radio has shaped our Australian society for three decades, would be a little different from the norm.
You would also expect that a man who has been a DJ, male stripper and comedian would have a lot of interesting things to say about our society over the years – and you would be right again.
This great piece of memorabilia would be fun to pass onto your kids and grandchildren so that they can experience some of the funny, tragic, awful and corny songs and jingles that captured our hearts and imagination over the years.
Bill also reminds us about how excited we were, when in the late 1950s, we were introduced to that most beloved of all inventions, the transistor radio. Australians embraced this new invention with zest and vigor, and the tranny forced our top radio stations to move with the times to come up with some catchy phrases to keep us listening to their ‘cool’ sounds.
There were, of course, top stars and songs that really made our hearts beat faster. Do you remember:
Elvis Presley’s – Love Me Tender
Pat Boone’s – Love Letters in the Sand
Bobby Darrin’s – Dream Lover
David Bowie’s – Sorrow
and so on and so on...................
If you’ve got a real taste for nostalgia, you will love this book which has certainly taken me for a trip down memory lane. From transistors to record labels, Billy Munro has reminded me just how good some of the music was back then.
Disc jockey, male stripper, comedian and artist Billy Munro provides a lively thirty-year history of pop chart music from the early hit parades to the birth of the Top 40, the Top 50 and the Top 100 and everything in between. Read more about “Tower of Power”