5KA Adelaide: 1968 airchecks

Below are five audio clips from 5KA in 1968. They give you a good idea of how Australian commercial Top 40 radio sounded at the time.

5KA was an AM station in Adelaide (population then around 800,000), the capital city of South Australia. It eventually went to FM as KAFM, now Triple M Adelaide.

The mp3s were available for a while at the now defunct 5KA Reunion site (2001), along with dozens of other 5KA sound files from the 1950s to the 1990s.¹

An archived version of 5KA Reunion can be seen at Pandora, the Australian web archive. If you go here you will be redirected to the exact page. Fortunately, the audio files are still accessible: it's a treasure trove!

It's a shame that we have no thriving aircheck² sites in Australia. For the US there are many such sites, notably ReelRadio's Top 40 Depository where you can listen to hundreds of historic audio clips from all over the country (paid sub required). For the UK, for example, the Pirate Radio Hall of Fame has numerous airchecks from the pirate stations (including the voices of a surprising number of Australian deejays). 

[Update: The Radio Antenna blog has a growing collection of Australian airchecks from several decades, See also their Facebook page.]

My tattered copy of the Australian Radio Almanac (c.1968), lists only Stuart Jay under 5KA. (The 5DN entry has details of eight announcers: maybe they paid up.) Mike Fewster, heard below on Breakfast at 5KA, is listed under 5KA's country affiliate 5RM in Renmark.

The 5KA Reunion site also had a page packed with jingles, including some from the 1960s created in the US by the PAMS organisation. Listeners to other stations around the world might recognise them, with the callsign of their local station substituted. I have posted one example from 5KA.

5KA 1968 - Mike Fewster [Breakfast].mp3
5KA 1968 - Jim Slade [Drive].mp3
5KA 1968 - Ian Sells [Night].mp3
5KA 1968 - Stuart Jay [Late Night].mp3
5KA 1968 - Lawrie Bruce [Midnight-Dawn].mp3

5KA jingle 1960s.mp3






__________________________________________________
Footnotes:
1. At this YouTube page, Jim Slade recalls that the 1968 set of 5KA airchecks was prepared as a showcase for prospective advertisers. This explains the announcer who introduces each clip, but apart from that they do seem to be genuine recordings of on-air programs.
2. Aircheck: a recording of a radio broadcast (as opposed to a recording made for a broadcast). It can be, for example, a showcase for a professional broadcaster, or an unofficial recording made by a listener. Many CDs of artists of the past are taken from airchecks of live broadcasts. See, for example, the Wikipedia entry.

Aussie aircheck sites

As far as I can see we don’t have an Australian equivalent of Reel Top 40 Radio Repository, the site where you can listen to some 1500 audio clips of US deejay shows from the golden era of Top 40 radio. The British Pirate Radio Hall of Fame also has clips, from the stations that were Top 40 radio in the UK for a while in the 60s (and a surprising number of the disc jockeys were Aussies).

[Update: The Radio Antenna blog has a growing collection of Australian airchecks from several decades, See also their Facebook page.]

These clips are known as airchecks, meaning a recording of a live radio program. I first saw the word on CDs of big bands from the 40s, indicating that a track is from a broadcast rather than a studio session.

The Adelaide station 5KA had a site with a fine collection of airchecks, including many from the 60s and 70s, but it is no longer online. The good news is that the whole 5KA site, including the audio files, is archived at the National Library of Australia’s Pandora Archive. The files are in mp3 format. My favourites are the 1968 clips, which evoke the atmosphere of just about any commercial radio station of the era.

Also at Pandora is the archived Jingles Shrine website, where you can still hear old station jingles from all over Australia (RealAudio format UPDATE 2012: not all audio files work).

I recently mentioned Tony Sanderson’s pages of Australian and British audio files (mp3 and RealAudio) at Bluehaze Media. The real gems here are two complete programs, a 30-minute weekly Top 10 countdown from June 1962 by Ernie Sigley, and a 60-minute Top 20 of 1962 with Barry Ferber from January 1963. Both were broadcast on Melbourne station 3DB and its relay station in the Wimmera, 3LK.

(If those callsigns sound unfamiliar, 3DB became 3TT, then TT-FM, now known as Mix 101.1. 3LK was replaced by still-operating Horsham station 3WM).

The Top 10 is, as you would expect, a nice snapshot of what we were listening to in Vic at that time. At #1 is Toni Fisher’s West of the Wall, one of those Oz-only chart-toppers that Glenn A. Baker put on one of his Hard to Get Hits collections. After my recent post on the topic, I was delighted to find two Bizarro Shadows World Down Under tracks: The Joy Boys’ Southern ‘Rora and Rob E.G.’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Zero.

And, I could hardly believe it, for the second time yesterday I found myself listening to I’ve Been Everywhere, a song that seems to be haunting me at the moment.