Saturday Night on BBC London 94.9 FM

27 November 04

Julia Vorontsova

By my standards, the song that launched tonight’s programme was a relatively recent oldie from 1976. But for our live guest Julia Vorontsova, the first single by Talking Heads was an unknown artefact made six years before she was born.

Twenty-two years ago, the ubiquitous synths and drum machines of modern pop music productions seemed to be tolling the death knoll of the singer-songwriter era. But it turned out that many of us still like the intimacy of listening to a singer with stories to tell, and nothing but a guitar to fill the spaces between the words. These days, my daily mail invariably includes at least one such album, and some months ago the postman delivered a package from the Abaton Book Company of Jersey City , containing the debut by Julia Vorontsova.

The combination of the jokey title, From St Petersburg with Love, and the enigmatic photo of the singer made me pick it out of the pile and wonder what it would sound like. The song titles are listed in English, but are sung in Russian in a fragile voice, mostly low-key and sombre, accompanied solely by acoustic guitar. There isn’t quite enough variety to justify as many as 23 songs, and a dozen would have made a better album. But I like her voice, the hints of dry humour, and especially the rockabilly drive and echo in the one called Rock n Roll.

Having lived in St Petersburg, Warsaw and New York, Julia is based in Paris now, and agreed to take the Eurostar to London to play some songs live for us. She claimed to be nervous, but didn’t show it as she sang three songs and told us what they were about, in flawless English. When I asked for the story behind Rock n Roll, Julia explained that she had been following the instructions in a teach-yourself guitar book, and this was her attempt to get to grips with the formula of repeating each line in accordance with the classic blues verse structure. I look forward to what happens next, if and when she finds some fellow-spirited musicians to help her explore new directions.

The album is available from the website of the Abaton Book Company, and from Julia’s own website, and can be bought one song at a time from iTunes.

Among the prizes available to listeners tonight was The Anthology of American Folk Music, first compiled by Harry Smith on several vinyl albums released by Folkways in the early 1950s, and reissued on 6 CDs by Smithsonian in 1997. Several titles from the collection are referred to in the newly-published autobiography of Bob Dylan, who has recorded or performed more than half of the 80-plus tracks. Tonight I played the first recorded version of Frankie and Johnny, sung by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928. What a year that was for epochal recordings, including arguably the best records by each of Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Jimmie Rodgers. Not only did we offer an album to listeners during the show, but a second copy was available to visitors to Feedback forum at our website. Watch out for similar offers in the future.

The following night, ITV repeated the hour-long South Bank Show feature on John Lennon’s Jukebox. I hadn’t seen the programme before, and was surprised to discover that this was not about a Wurlitzer-type pub jukebox, but a rare portable item that was in effect the forerunner of an iPod. John took it on his travels, surrounding himself in a comfort zone of his favourite top forty. The format of the programme was to plonk the jukebox in front of some of the artists and song-writers whose songs were on it, and have them talk with their pride at being part of a Beatle’s canon. I liked the humour of US Bonds and the honesty of John Sebastian, who began to list the several songs that provided the template for his wonderful song, Do You Believe in Magic? Unfortunately the programme moved on after John had demonstrated how the intro was adapted from that of Heatwave by Martha and the Vandellas. Now what I want to see is an hour devoted to John’s band, The Lovin’ Spoonful, my favourite American group of the 1960s.

Two shows from earlier in the year – the Ping Pong with David Byrne (April) and the live broadcast from WOMAD Reading featuring Tinariwen, Laye Sow, Malouma and Carolina Herrera (July) can now be heard at www.mondomix.com/archives/mix_us/radio_us/index.htm which also has several programmes from 2003 in its archive.

The programme is broadcast from 8 to 10 every Saturday Night on BBC London 94.9, on digital (DAB) radio and on the web at www.bbc.co.uk/london where, as always, this show can be heard for the next seven days until it’s replaced by next week’s. The station also advertises itself as being available on digital (DAB) radio, but to my cost I have discovered that this is not so throughout London . Despite living on high ground equidistant between BBC London’s studios in Marylebone and the BBC’s main transmission mast at Crystal Palace , my newly acquired DAB radio does not find the BBC London signal. Despite helpful suggestions from website correspondents, I still cannot make the connection. Advice will be welcome, preferably posted in the applicable topic in the feedback forum.

My weekly 26-minute world music show The Sound of the World is on the BBC World Service, broadcast four times a week in a 24-hour cycle, Tuesday-to-Thursday. Exact times vary from region to region throughout the world. In the UK , the programme can be heard four times throughout the day on digital radio and has been reinstated on Radio 4, where it will now be broadcast at 2.30 every Tuesday morning. The link at the top of this page leads you to the On Demand archive and recent playlists for the World Service shows.