Decktician Logs Vol 3: March-August 1973

[ken]

I have now completed scanning, dating and annotating volume 3 of Decktician's logs, covering mid-March to the first week of August 1973, and have sent the digital files back to him, and to Rocker (Decktician tape-digitisation central controller), and Steve and Steve of the WIki, for track listing production for all.

For the benefit of those new here, the logs are a very short series of surviving school exercise books in which Peel listener Decktician noted down every record played in each show he listened to. Vol 1 was Top Gear 1969-1970, Vol 2 contained both almost the complete run of Peel's Radio Luxembourg show, Stenhousemuir 2 Cowdenbeath 2, Jan-June1972, and his BBC Friday Night is Boogie Night show for the same period. Still to come are vols 4 and 5, which cover similar 4-6 month periods in 1974 and 1975, I seem to recall. I am comparing them with the BBC scripts I still have, such as they are, from these years, from when I wrote IN SESSION TONIGHT, and once again, can confirm Decktician is a highly reliable source, often more reliable than the BBC documentation, in terms of sequence of tracks played, if not always in precise track titles (but who would blame him for that?).

There is perhaps little in this volume that is of as rare or lost historic interest as those Luxembourg shows, with the possible exception of the first broadcast of Tubular Bells at the end of May. Decktician's notes suggest the BBC documentation here is correct - which I used for my item on p80 of THE PEEL SESSIONS: Peel did not tear up his script and play no records but Mike Oldfield's, and, comparing the total needletime in this shows to others it looks like he did just play side 1, not the whole album as the myth has it. My calculations suggest he could not have got in all 49' of the album AND these other records Decktician clearly heard. The total duration of all music played here, including side one of tubular bells, comes to just over 100', leaving about 18' for all of Peel's links between 23 tracks, which for the mid 70s sounds about right to me.

Anyway, those of you knowledgeable and interested in the period can offer to help the wiki team in creating the track listings for all,

and a Happy Christmas to you all!

ken