Alison Rayner to Guest (yes, pun intended) on 'Round Midnight

[Serial_Apologist]

NOT Angela, please note!

Jazz Record Requests is being Boulezzed off Saturday this week - ww...ell, it is his centenary.

Monday 31 Mar

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002989w

Thassall, folks!

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I immediately read that as "Angela" and was ready pounce. Of this Alison I know nothing. A total distraction, but I always like the name Alison, not just Mose but all Alisons and Alysons etc. It's a good name.

[Ian Thumwood]

I have never heard of about 75% of the musicians on this programme. I think it is designed for Generation Z or certianly people under the age of 30. In the past i had a real thirst for contemporary jazz but i am not the least interested these days. This prgramme has very little appeal for me....only listened a handful of times.

Wonder how many others are bothered. I liked Impressions but Radio 3 has either been getting their values muddled up or the jazz scene in 2025 is not worth exploring . On the rare occasions when i buy jazz albums , it never seems to be stuff that sounds like the samples.

[Ian Thumwood]

Always get confused between Angela Rayner and Catherine Tate. Same with Emily Thornberry and Eddie Izzard....never seen in the same room together.

[Serial_Apologist]

I immediately read that as "Angela" and was ready pounce. Of this Alison I know nothing. A total distraction, but I always like the name Alison, not just Mose but all Alisons and Alysons etc. It's a good name.

A bit of autobiog here, even though I shouldn't really be allowed to get away with it. Oh well, what the hell!

One of my distant relatives, Alison Settle, was apparently something of a fashion setter for high end women's clobber in the 1920s and 30s - with her flaming red hair she was billed as a "stunner" in the Tatler or one of the other posh magazines of the time. I was still small when Alison eventually retired to a small cottage at Steyning, Sussex. The last time I saw her was on a motoring detour around Sussex lanes while on family holiday. My father asked her about a sizeable collection of unusual porcelain openly displayed in an antique corner cupboard in her "parlour" - her word. She told us that it comprised part of the Tsar's valuables, which had been smuggled out of Russia for sale in the west to raise much needed roubles, and had mysteriously ended up somehow in the hands of my grandfather, who was an antique dealer. He had handed them onto Alison, for nothing, claiming he didn't think they would ever get a sale, at the same time emphasising that she should nevertheless demand a high price should she ever find a buyer because with the Tsar's insignia embossment indicating authenticity they should fetch tens of thousands of £££££s - a huge sum in the 1950s. Dad then said, "Why didn't you sell them?" "Well", Alison answered, "it has never really occurred to me, so they've just sat there... it would probably be too late now"!

[Serial_Apologist]

I have never heard of about 75% of the musicians on this programme. I think it is designed for Generation Z or certianly people under the age of 30. In the past i had a real thirst for contemporary jazz but i am not the least interested these days. This prgramme has very little appeal for me....only listened a handful of times.

Wonder how many others are bothered. I liked Impressions but Radio 3 has either been getting their values muddled up or the jazz scene in 2025 is not worth exploring . On the rare occasions when i buy jazz albums , it never seems to be stuff that sounds like the samples.

Alison Rayner was and to this day, among the ageing feminist generation of the 60s and 70s, one of the leading protagonists for female involvement in UK jazz and rock music more generally, co-leading The Guest Stars with guitarist Deirdre Cartwright in the early 1980s. It was the time of Rock Against Racism and radical punk, bands such as The Slits and X Ray Specs. There was also a large unit called the Lydia D'Ustebyn Swing Band. All kind of shambolic but in a good way! Deirdre's claim to fame still unfortunately lies in her contribution to Channel 4's Rockschool, a weekly series. Both, I think, were in the Holloway Allstars, an all-female samba band we invited to a fundraiser for Reclaim the Night which packed a deconsecrated church in Bristol's Old Market area. More recently they operated a regular gig at the Vortex under the heading Blow the Fuse. But let Deirdre and Alison tell their story properly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYXcBknPCp0

How I miss those times!

[Ian Thumwood]

I remember the Guest Stars from Humphrey Lyttelton days but only Cartwright's name is familiar. Not the kind of stuff i have really listened to as Fusion was never my thing. When i was discovering jazz in the early 1980s this stuff was on its way out.

[Serial_Apologist]

I remember the Guest Stars from Humphrey Lyttelton days but only Cartwright's name is familiar. Not the kind of stuff i have really listened to as Fusion was never my thing. When i was discovering jazz in the early 1980s this stuff was on its way out.

As was I.

[Alyn_Shipton]

Catch up you lot. We played Alison Rayner’s new single on JRR on 9 March…

[Tenor Freak]

Deirdre's claim to fame still unfortunately lies in her contribution to Channel 4's Rockschool, a weekly series.


How I miss those times!

Tish and fipsy. 'Twas a BBC production. Now where did I find that link, ah wait a mo:

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/56a8fa38433d40d6a48ebe4d37742cc5

Don't knock Rockschool, I'll always remember seeing her and the other members of the trio skanking to a reggae beat. I bumped into Deirdre C on the stairs at the old Astoria in Charing Cross Road the night Wayne Shorter's quartet played there.