From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Annie Nightingale, Pathbreaking British D.J., Is Dead at 83   
   By Richard Sandomir, Jan. 19, 2024, New York Times   
   Annie Nightingale, who became the first female disc jockey on BBC Radio 1 in   
   1970 and remained a popular personality there until her final show, late last   
   year, died on Jan. 11 at her home in London. She was 83.   
      
   Her family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.   
      
   “This is the woman who changed the face and sound of British TV and radio   
   broadcasting forever,” Annie Mac, a longtime BBC Radio D.J., wrote on   
   Instagram after Ms. Nightingale’s death.   
      
   Ms. Nightingale became well known in music circles in the 1960s as a columnist   
   in British newspapers. And she was a familiar face to stars like the Beatles,   
   whom she interviewed at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1964.   
      
   “As Derek Taylor liked her, she was welcome at Apple,” the Beatles   
   historian Mark Lewisohn said in an email, referring to the Beatles’ press   
   officer and the company they founded in 1968.   
      
   In 1967, she applied to be a D.J. on BBC Radio 1, the pop music outlet that   
   had just been started in reaction to the rise of popular offshore pirate   
   stations.   
      
   But she found herself up against the station’s sexist hiring policy. She was   
   told that its all-male D.J. lineup represented “husband substitutes” to   
   the housewives who were listening, and that a woman’s voice would lack the   
   authority of a man’s.   
      
   “It came as a huge shock,” Ms. Nightingale told The Independent in 2015.   
   “I was almost amused. What do you mean, ‘No women’? Why not?”   
      
   But in Oct 1969, the BBC offered her an on-air trial. Before her first   
   appearance, she told The Manchester Evening News, “I am sure that a lot of   
   girls would make marvelous D.J.s if given the chance.”   
      
   She was hired the next year for a weekday record review program, “What’s   
   New,” and two years later she became a host of an evening progressive-rock   
   show, “Sounds of the 70s.” Later in the decade, she became the host of a   
   Sunday afternoon    
   request show and a music interview program. She hosted a variety of other   
   shows through last year.   
      
   “From Day One, I chose the records I wanted to play and stuck to it ever   
   since,” she said in her autobiography, “Hey Hi Hello: Five Decades of Pop   
   Culture From Britain’s First Female DJ.” (2020). “I preferred the   
   evenings, where I wouldn’t    
   have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. That would have been like   
   lying to me.”   
      
   Anne Avril Nightingale was born on April 1, 1940, in the Osterley district of   
   London. Her father, Basil, worked in the family’s wallpaper business. Her   
   mother, Celia, was a foot doctor. As a girl, Anne listened to children’s   
   programs on her father’   
   s radio and came to love that it could tune in to distant cities.   
      
   “I still feel when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know where it’s   
   going and it could be reaching outer space somewhere, and I am still in love   
   with that, completely,” she said in an interview in 2018.   
      
   After graduating from the Lady Eleanor Holles School, she studied journalism   
   at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London.   
   She began her journalism career soon after, first as a reporter for The   
   Brighton and Hove Gazette and    
   then at The Argus, in Brighton, where she wrote a music column called Spin   
   With Me. She later wrote a music column for a national tabloid, The Daily   
   Sketch.   
      
   In 1964, she collaborated with the pop group the Hollies on a book, “How to   
   Run a Beat Group.”   
      
   She found a measure of TV fame on BBC’s “Juke Box Jury,” where she was   
   part of a guest panel that reviewed new record releases, and as the host of   
   “That’s For Me,” a record request program on ITV, and the Rediffusion   
   network’s quiz show, “   
   Sing a Song of Sixpence,” both in 1965.   
      
   But she was best known for her time at BBC Radio 1, which began with some   
   rocky moments because of her inexperience — like the time there was eight   
   seconds of dead airtime when she accidentally pressed an “off” switch   
   while a record was playing.   
      
   “What I found difficult in those early days was being bad technically,”   
   she told The Western Daily Press of Bristol in 1979. “Every time I made a   
   mistake I thought they’d all say, ‘Oh yes, woman driver!’”   
      
   She remained the only female D.J. on BBC Radio 1 — the “token woman,”   
   she said — for 12 years. In 2010, when she was more than halfway through her   
   41st year there, Guinness World Records cited her for having had the longest   
   career ever for a    
   female D.J. (That record has since been surpassed twice, by the Peruvian   
   broadcaster Maruja Venegas Salinas and Mary McCoy, a D.J. in Texas.)   
      
   “It was not until the 90s and the ‘girlification’ of Radio 1 with the   
   likes of Sara Cox, Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball that Nightingale’s exceptionality   
   became her longevity and impact rather than her gender alone,” Lucy   
   Robinson, a professor at the    
   University of Sussex, and Dr. Jeannine Baker, who at the time was with   
   Macquarie University, wrote on the BBC website.   
      
   Ms. Nightingale’s success went beyond radio. In 1978, she was named a host   
   of BBC’s live music television show “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” where   
   she focused on new wave music.   
      
   After John Lennon was killed on Dec. 8, 1980, Ms. Nightingale and members of   
   the “Whistle Test” staff were trying to round up people to talk about him.   
   During the program, a producer appeared in the studio and told Ms.   
   Nightingale, “Paul’s on the    
   phone and he wants to speak to you.”   
      
   “I had no idea who he meant,” she recalled on the podcast “I Am the   
   Eggpod” in 2018. It was Paul McCartney.   
      
   “He wanted to say thank you on behalf of Linda and himself and Yoko and   
   George and Ringo,” she said. “And that’s what really got me.” She   
   added: “I got back in front of the camera and it’s live and I thought   
   right, right, you’re the    
   messenger. And he said, ‘You know how it was.’”   
      
   Ms. Nightingale’s survivors include a son, Alex, and a daughter, Lucy, whose   
   name was inspired partly by the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With   
   Diamonds.” Her marriages to Gordon Thomas, a writer, and Binky Baker, an   
   actor, ended in divorce.   
      
   Throughout her career, Ms. Nightingale championed new music — from   
   progressive rock to acid house to grime.   
      
      
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