Radio Radio, so good Elvis Costello named it twice- but then repeating the word ‘radio’ in as catchy a refrain as you could conjure was always a surefire method of getting your record played on said medium, even if as on EC & The Attractions’ 1978 smash you were slagging it to the hilt and therby risking the ire of Smiling Tony Bollockburn and the epitome of pre punk end of the pier puffed up showbiz bigotry, DLT, The Hairy Cornfuck…

What would we do without said communication? For those of us of a certain vintage radio was always so much more important, insidious and ear worming than television (despite the impact of Top Of The Pops. You have to remember that for every Bowie homo erotically grappling Mick Ronson during Starman there were 30 Disco Ducks and 700 Pussycat do Mississippi’s…see current repeats with Noel Edmonds rocking his Bee Gee meets walnut whip meets shady ’70s pimp look).

The words ‘John’ and ‘Peel’ inevitably arrive at this juncture….but as a lot of us can evince with our bag loads of cassettes with ‘Peel’ scrawled across em stashed in shoe boxes in the shed, yer man Peel was such an incredibly potent oracle for all things musically worthy it takes a whole station to replace him (the ever brilliant, redoubtable 6music).

No, Peel can never be replaced but there’s an exciting array of radio out there, mostly on the BBC (I pay my license fee gladly and so should you) and with the aforementioned 6music very much the benchmark.

John’s boy Tom Ravenscroft, Marc Riley, Stuart MaConie’s Freak Zone, Jarvis Cocker (currently depped by John Cooper Clarke- how good is that?!), Craig Charles peerless funk and soul show, all unmissable radio. And elsewhere a la beeb let’s also hear it for the daddy of all wireless daddios Brian Matthew and the only way to wake up on a Saturday Morning, the still essential Sounds Of The Sixties, not to mention the plethora of engaging, enlightening and inspiring conversational works all over Radio 4/4extra (Sunday mornings over the sizzling bacon are always a joy) , Radio 3′s endlessly fascinating cross cultural night-time smorgasbord Late Junction and all the R3 shows playing real jazz as opposed to Californian pony tail music designed for selling air conditioning and yoghurt.

So God Bless the BBC and proper radio…and an honoury this-is-the-stuff mention to the always startling Resonance FM, home of too many flabbergastingly good shows to mention….but this being the social networking age and the era of internet based pop promotion we all get the chance to ty our hand at radio and so by God we shall and bloody well enjoy it too. Check out our fortnightly Bugbear’s Rock And Roll Highschool shows on Shoreditch Radio and catch up with old instalments on their browser or here via mixcloud. It’s a fab show although we say so ourselves and comes at you amidst an array of very good company via the same hub.

We can’t recommend Gram Friday’s soulfully exotic ‘Desert Island Discs’ on rum and reefer happening Radio Shangri La heavily enough and other fine shows there such as Conchitas’ Cabaret, Sleezy Mixtape and Dance , Dance, Dance To The Radio are well worth clicking into.

Other internet portals are out there too such as Ditto‘s intelligent and uber professional approach to the genre with tasty items like ‘Fireside Favourites’ and Greg Wilson’s Random Influences..check it out..not to mention the intriguing spread of DJ action across Mixcloud etc. There’s no excuse for not hearing good music new and old, oft times interspersed with vivacious chat, natch… Yeah it’s not really ‘radio’ but it sounds like radio, it smells like radio, by God it must be some krazy kooky kinda radio scene right? See you in cyberspace.