Blurb:

In 1922 the BBC began to broadcast on the wireless. At first, it used only live performances, but soon it was also broadcasting music from gramophone records and developing a mutually beneficial relationship with the gramophone industry. Early broadcasts of recorded music were staid and boring, until the BBC began to employ presenters who made their own choice of records and spoke about them enthusiastically on air. The first of these was Christopher Stone. By the mid-1920s Stone was presenting his own selection of musical recordings and some years later he would gain the title of The First Disc Jockey – a term imported from the USA in the late 1940s. Despite accusations that he was being bribed by record companies, Stone broadcast for many years and at the height of his fame he performed at the London Palladium, using a gramophone to show, among other things, how to play a disc backwards, making him an early example of the turntablist. Such a radical new approach to the machine was far from universally loved, however, and Stone’s stage career was short-lived. Christopher Stone was not immediately followed by a host of ‘personality presenters,’ so the first pirate radio broadcasters appeared, with the entertainment of their listeners high on their lists of priorities even if those listeners could be counted in dozens rather than hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, new commercial radio stations in mainland Europe broadcast dance music across the continent and the Dance Marathon came to Britain thanks to an Ashington dancehall manager.