You may well be wondering what The Wyrd Ways Rock Show is all about, am I right?
Well, it’s quite simple.
The Wyrd Ways Rock Show was where it all started as a weekly(-ish!) Hard Rock and Metal podcast that I’d been doing between 2008 and 2018. It began as an attempt to channel the spirit of The Friday Rock Show, a late, very much lamented radio show here in the UK. It was presented by the late, great Tommy Vance and produced by Tony Wilson, who now runs Total Rock Radio.com.
It was The Friday Rock Show that brought me into listening to Metal back when I was a 15 year old boy back in the late 80’s. As Ginger (The Wildhearts) once told me during an interview, “It was your education“. He’s right. It was. It was through Tommy Vance and those nights tucked under the covers listening to the radio that introduced me to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, Bang Tango, Kiss, Alice Cooper and many others.
Not long after, legendary DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman added a Saturday Night Rock Show to Radio 1’s line-up, delving deep into the BBC archives and filling the request show niche that the listeners obviously wanted.
Unfortunately the management at Radio 1 didn’t agree. After Tommy and Fluff left the BBC, the Friday Rock Show limped on as the bands lost confidence in it. It went through another couple of presenters before it finally became comatose. It never actually fully died, though, becoming conscious several times. The current Rock Show is presented by Daniel P Carter (although it’s nowhere near as broad as Tommy’s show was).
Anyway, after 10 years of ups and downs, I decided to “rest” the show and the website (which I was attempting to turn into a webzine and content portal), because they had become a chore. I’d stopped enjoying myself, so I hung up the mic and headphones.
After a second rebrand as WWRS: The Forge, I was getting the taste for it back, at least partially inspired by the chaps at Primordial Radio. A couple of years of it not feeling quite right and after a break (and a few other things going on that I won’t go into here), it was time to come home… and thus The Wyrd Ways Rock Show was reborn. It’s stuttered a few times, but now with a once-a-month schedule, I might be finally getting back into it properly.
Only time will tell, but it seems to be going OK so far.
It’s my hope that through the podcast (which can be found at http://www.wyrdwaysrs.com), I can do the same thing for some of my listeners that Tommy and Fluff did for me. I spoke to Tony Wilson at Bloodstock and Hard Rock Hell. Once I stopped being a fanboy, he told me that Tommy (or “TV” as he referred to him) would have been amazed at the number of people he inspired to follow in his footsteps.