Legendary radio DJ Johnnie Walker has died on the age of 79, simply two months after asserting his retirement from broadcasting because of sick well being. The information was confirmed by his BBC Radio colleague Bob Harris, who had taken over the Sounds Of The 70s present after Walker’s retirement.
“We have heard from Tiggy Walker [Walker’s wife] that Johnnie Walker has handed away,” mentioned Harris. “I’ve recognized Johnnie because the Sixties, once I first began listening to him on pirate radio, and we all know what an unbelievable, heat, great broadcaster he was.
“We additionally know the way passionate he was about his music, and he went out on a limb many occasions to defend the music that he beloved, and he was obsessed with radio. And because the 60s moved into the 70s, he and I grew to become more and more shut buddies, a friendship that endured proper as much as the current day.”
Walker made his identify on Radio Caroline, the pirate station based mostly on a former Danish passenger ferry moored within the North Sea, simply outdoors the UK radio authority’s three-mile jurisdiction.
Walker’s 9pm-to-midnight present included such risqué options as ‘Frinton Flashers’, whereby he communicated with listeners of their automobiles on shore by asking them to flash their headlights in response to his questions, and the ‘10’o’clock Flip On’, through which a very lascivious slice of soul or bluesy rock was performed.
“It was a bit like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” Walker says in his autobiography. “[Radio] London was The Beatles – slick and neat, the radio station you would take residence to your mom for tea. Caroline was positively the Stones – scruffy, anarchic, non-conformist and rebellious… It was there to offer freedom and expression to the artistic inventive explosion that was the Sixties.”
Walker joined BBC Radio 1 in 1969 however left for the US in 1975, the place he labored at KSAN in San Francisco, KPFA in Berkeley, California and WHFS in Bethesda, Maryland, earlier than returning to the UK within the early Nineteen Eighties. He returned to Radio 1 in 1987, and commenced internet hosting a present on London station GLR the next 12 months.
Fired after asserting that individuals could be “dancing within the streets” following the resignation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he went on to work for BBC 5 and was concerned within the early broadcasts of fledgling London different music station Xfm. Additional stints at Radio 1 and Radio 2 adopted, and he hosted Sounds of the 70s and The Rock Present till his retirement. He had been battling the lung illness pulmonary fibrosis.
Walker’s final broadcast was in October, when he signed off from The Rock Present by saying, “‘[It’s] going to be very unusual to not be on the wi-fi anymore. Additionally, by the identical token, life might be barely much less of a pressure actually, looking for the breath with a purpose to do the programmes.
“Thanks for being with me all these years and take excellent care of your self and people you like and will we stroll into the longer term with our heads held excessive and happiness in our hearts. God bless you.”
“He remained his charming, humorous self to the top, what a powerful wonderful man,” says Tiggy Walker. “It has been a rollercoaster trip from begin to end. And if I could say – what a day to go. He’ll be celebrating New 12 months’s Eve with a stash of nice musicians in heaven. One 12 months on from his final dwell present. God bless that extraordinary husband of mine who’s now in a spot of peace.”