SteveG wrote: ... It's a true autobiography in that Cousins writes of his boring childhood and also of the radio station jobs (he was a radio station programmer from 1982-2002) that he had after the late seventies break up of the Strawbs. ...

There is a very nice sidebar to this. It's most interesting that he did not "discuss" the music played and such, but at the very least it shows the development of radio in England, of which he certainly was a part, however minor that might be.

Some good details though ... FM radio in England appears to have been about 5 to 6 years behind America. I'm double checking this even more ... as this is very important and telling of how a group was capable of being heard and got a chance. In the early days of FM in America, until it started going hardcore/corporate commercial around 1977 or so (give or take a month or two), the amount of freedom in most of these stations was pretty much up to the disk jockey ... and by 1980, this was over in most of the same stations over here.

I'm a firm believer that without the FM radio, specially in America, that a lot of this music would likely not have made it at all. I imagine that the stuff that was more "pop music" oriented might be checked, but the rest would likely not. Radio folks, without trying to be mean, are generally not very well versed in "music listening", that we could determine, since they never played that many different things, and in all those years in Southern California, I only met one guy that actually listened to the music, and PLAYED IT.