HOW KEYBOARD STARTED
When Cled Griffin was secretary of the SWANSEA ELECTRONIC ORGAN SOCIETY he started sending a copy of the monthly newsletter to Colin Mason, the Programme Director of SWANSEA SOUND.
The Society had regular star players at their monthly meetings held at a Swansea social club. A star attraction was Brian Sharp who had been voted Britain's No.1 Player by the Keyboard & Music Maker magazine. Cled phoned Colin and suggested an interview with Brian, who had just retuned from a playing tour in Japan. The offer was declined with Colin adding that if it was The Bay City Rollers he would be interested.
It was sometime later that Colin phoned Cled and invited him to the Swansea Sound studios. One of the society's players, Johnny James, who often gave tutorial sessions at the monthly meetings, accompanied Cled to find out what it was all about.
Colin explained his idea of having an hour of live evening music, which including opening up the phone lines for requests. A dummy session was quickly arranged there and then on the studio Hammond organ with a telephone call from within the building. The demo was proved successful and the first live broadcast took place on 7th July 1977 (7-7-77 - a date easily remembered.
The programme in its orginal format, with Johnny James at the Hammond organ, continued for thirteen weeks with Johnny introducing young members of the Society. Included was Ian Griffin, who two years later appeared on BBC1 TV Crackerjack Young Entertainers and was voted back a second time by the live studio audience.
Colin Mason agreed to Cled Griffin's suggestion of him producing different players every week - and so it continued for another three years and until Cled started producing National Keyboard Music Festivals for Pontin's Holidays.
The Keyboard progamme returned in 1981 as part of the Sounda Welsh series, after one of the station's staff had attended the Pontin's Keyboard Music Festivals at Tower Beach Prestatyn and saw the tremendous response shown by over 2,000 enthusiasts.
Keyboard was broadcast in sterio until the introduction of THE WAVE on FM in the 1990's.
Tuesday night at nine was KEYBOARD TIME
