A man (and his voice) from my past
As part of her UK tour last month, Janis Ian was interviewed by various local radio shows there. One of them was The DLT Show.
DLT stands for Dave Lee Travis, a name which brought back mega memories for me, and which will forever be associated with the May 13 race riots in Malaysia.
The whole country had been under curfew in the aftermath of the riots. To keep us occupied, TV Malaysia started broadcasting a variety of programmes that had never been shown on air before. One such show was Beat Club, a pop music show made in Germany and featuring an English deejay by the name of Dave Lee Travis and a female co-presenter called Valerie (I still remember their names after all these years).
My sister, brother and I were over the moon with the show as we were pop music fans. And when Cliff Richard came on, my sister screamed. He’d been a favourite of hers for many years and it was the first time she was seeing him “live” anywhere. Since the whole country was on curfew at the time, there was no traffic on the road and the house, plus the neighbourhood, was very quiet. My sister’s scream, the loudest sound to be heard, earned her a scolding from my uncle who reprimanded her for “bringing attention to the house” .
A few years back, I found Dave Lee Travis on the BBC World Service and listened to him for a while, after which I lost track of him again. Until recently, when he featured Janis Ian on his show. And yes, I heard it, thanks to the Internet - lots of radio stations, including BBC Three Counties which hosts his show, these days stream their shows online for anyone to listen to anywhere in the world, so long as you have an Internet connection.
