Alan Bangs

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Alan John Bangs (born June 10, 1951 in London ) is a British music journalist and presenter on radio and television. He has lived and worked in Germany since the 1970s.

Live and act

Bangs holds a Diploma in Communication Studies from the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL), now the University of Westminster .

His career began at BFBS Germany , where from 1975 to 1989 he first presented music on Sundays and from 1981 onwards on Saturday nights in the show Nightflight that did not fit into any common category. In the first few years, appropriate for the late hour, these were rather quiet pieces by John Fahey or Ry Cooder , but also Kevin Coyne or Neil Young . Towards the end of the 1970s he was one of the first to include artists such as Television and Patti Smith in their programs. For a short time he moderated a second program for the BFBS, which he called The Modern Dance , based on the first LP by Pere Ubu , in which this new music was given a forum.

He achieved greater fame as the presenter of the TV program Rockpalast on WDR and the Rockpalast Nacht on ARD . In 1984 and 1985 he moderated the Musik Convoy on WDR regional television on Mondays . He was also active in WDR radio, first with WDR 2 , from 1986 with WDR 1 . There Bangs presented numerous new records - especially from the independent sector and from the emerging alternative country genre, which were otherwise rarely played on the radio ( Green on Red , Gun Club , Cowboy Junkies , Lucinda Williams ). If he liked a record particularly well, he did not shy away from distributing up to six pieces from it over the two-hour program. From the 1980s onwards, Bangs hosted the Alan Bangs Connection on WDR radio, initially on Saturdays and later on Tuesdays . From the end of 1985 he took over the contribution of the WDR to the joint night program of the ARD in the ARD rock night . Due to the musical content, this program was later no longer broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk , which was met with much criticism at the time. When at the end of 1989 the night rock for ARD Popnacht was reformed, Bangs declared that he did not agree with the new guidelines for this program; he got out of the ARD “Nachtschiene” and returned to the WDR 1 program under the program name Alan Bangs Connection . In April 1995, WDR 1, again accompanied by vehement criticism, was replaced by “Jugendwelle” 1 Live . The specialty music programs broadcast daily from 10 p.m. to midnight ceased to exist, only the Alan Bangs Connection “survived” on a new slot, on Sundays from 11 p.m. to 1 p.m., and with the new title “Night Flight”. His idea of ​​music radio was noticeably incompatible with the environment of the new wave: 1 Live was a "formatted" station aimed at a young target group, Alan Bangs did not want to rule out any musical style from the outset. That he in the broadcast of 17./18. In September 1995 he played a longer stretch with music by Frédéric Chopin , which led to the WDR releasing him from his duties at short notice and almost without comment. After that Alan Bangs received no more moderation assignments at WDR.

Further engagements followed, among others, with the broadcasters NDR , Sat.1 , VH-1 Germany and, in particular, with the ARD's live concerts without filter . Since 2000, he has moderated the two-hour night session on Bayern 2 every month that has a fifth Friday (four times in 2012) . In June 2003 he hosted the Rockpalast live from Rock am Ring .

From April 4, 2010, Alan Bangs hosted the program Nightflight on Sundays at 11 p.m. on the radio program DRadio Wissen, which is broadcast via Internet and digital radio (DVB-S and DAB) . In June 2013, DRadio Wissen announced that it would discontinue the program in order to develop its music program “in another direction”. In the corresponding comment blog from DRadio Wissen, this decision was repeatedly criticized by the listeners without a change being achieved. The last Nightflight broadcast in this series aired on December 15, 2013.

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Bang's personal record collection includes over 10,000 records. In the mid-1980s, around 3,000 records were stolen from his home when he was broken into. During a broadcast on BFBS Radio 1 in Cologne, Bangs had previously mentioned that he was going on vacation.

concept

Alan Bangs pleads for more creativity in programming as a counterpart to format radio :

“I want to hear people who are interested in certain things, who go out of their way to find things that I might not otherwise hear. The pieces play because they think that other people just have to hear them. "

In the connection , he established relationships of various kinds between the songs he played in the programs (e.g. only cover versions , only unplugged , specific year of publication, specific name or term in the title, only produced by a specific person, and much more). So once he only played cover versions of Fever for an hour . In his carefree, courageous and musical open-mindedness he was often compared to John Peel . His BFBS broadcast was long contiguous with John Peel's Music on BFBS . In the style of moderation, however, Bangs differed significantly from Peel, who made no lengthy comments about the music he played and did not establish connections between several pieces or concepts for entire programs.

See also

Fonts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Editing of this article on the "Friends of Alan" site.
  2. ↑ Comments on the birthday ( memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) at DRadio Wissen on the broadcast on June 10, 2012.
  3. ↑ Personal details : Alan Bangs . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1995, pp. 284 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Night session .
  5. ↑ Nightflight with Alan Bangs. Retrieved April 11, 2010 .
  6. ↑ Pop has no age in FAZ from June 20, 2013, page 31.
  7. ↑ Playlist and comments on the last Nightflight broadcast on December 15, 2013 .
personal data
SURNAME Bangs, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bangs, Alan John (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British music journalist and radio host
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH London