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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm very excited to be joined by Annie Nightingale, who is the first female DJ in Britain,

the longest serving employee of Radio One. She is MBE, CBE, BBC. She's the queen of it all. And her new book

is called Hey, Hi, Hello, which has, I think, the friendliest title of any book we've yet had on

this podcast. Annie, tell me what you were trying to do with this memoir in particular, because it sort of goes through the story of your life bit,

but you've written about your life before.

What's this one doing that's different, that's expanding it?

Right. Well, yeah, I've written an autobiography before.

This is not an autobiography.

This is about 50 years of pop culture.

And the thread is, it starts in 1970 when I began with Radio One.

So that's where it starts. And then right up to now, up to Billy Elish in 2020.

So there's a lot of material interviews and with people I've met along the way.

And a lot of them have never been printed before or ever appeared outside of bits of it

appeared on, you know, I might have appeared on radio or TV. So there's a lot of material to put in,

to tell the story over that,

so, you know, the first interview, Mark Boland. And then, you know, it kind of travels through

the music as the music's progressed over the years. But there's some other, my adventures as well.

So things like I was in LA when the riots happened in 1992

...