Tony Blackburn

Tony Blackburn is a British radio broadcaster who was a colleague of John Peel at Radio One from 1967 to 1984.

Relationship with John Peel
Many of the DJs of the era were extremely flamboyant and actively sought as much media coverage as they could get. Peel clearly had little respect for many of his colleagues for such behaviour, with Tony Blackburn perhaps his great nemesis in this respect. Nevertheless, his rivalry with Blackburn was, despite of being polar opposite in terms of their musical tastes, of a fairly friendly nature and nowhere near as intense as his contempt for certain other Radio One DJs. Blackburn described himself and Peel as the Yin and Yang of Radio One.


 * Blackburn: Were we enemies? Erm, I don't know what we were, really... he thought I was the devil incarnate because I liked Barry Manilow. Anyway, he kept having a pop at me, so I had a go back. I still maintain that if you had asked people in the street, "Do you prefer John Peel or Tony Blackburn?", most of them would have said John Peel because they wanted to look cool. But how many actually listened to his show? People are very good at appearing to be cool. But not that many of us actually are.

In May, 2010, Blackburn discussed, among other things, his relationship with John Peel with Guardian journalist Paul Morley.

Top Of The Pops
Tony Blackburn appeared as a co-host with Peel in sporadic, multi-DJ episodes of Top of the Pops during the 1980s. They never appeared as joint hosts, largely because Blackburn didn't feature in the TOTP rotation during Peel's most active years on the show.

Links

 * Tony Blackburn wikipedia entry


 * I'M KING OF THE SWINGERS


 * Paul Morley celebrates Tony Blackburn's plummy, sunny, urgently relaxed DJing style