After Dinner SpeakersAnnie Nightingale CBE is best known as Britain’s first female DJ on Radio 1 and the station’s longest serving broadcaster.
Having cracked the all male preserve of DJs at Radio 1, Annie began a long career in broadcasting, always choosing her own music, and championing dozens of artists who later became world wide successes.
A second career in television began when Nightingale took over as solo presenter of BBC TV’s legendary series ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’, recently voted ‘top music programme’ in The 100 Best TV Shows of All Time.
Annie brought her irreverent humour to the show at exactly the time of the punk revolution.
Annie has always played and enthused about underground and new music, and through her championing of breakbeat, she is now known as ‘Queen of Breaks’.
Annie Nightingale has written two books of autobiography, Chase the Fade, and more recently Wicked Speed, of which the foreword was written by Trainspotting’s Irvine Welsh.
She is known as an energetic party animal and claims to be most proud of winning Muzik Magazine’s ‘Caner of the Year‘, among other Awards which include being the first female DJ to be inducted in the Radio Academy Hall Of Fame.
She has travelled to some of the world’s hotspots including Russia, China, India and Chile, making radio programmes and documentary films, and regularly DJs in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and Barcelona.
Annie DJs at clubs and festivals all over the world, with concomitant scrapes and adventures. She has been bugged in Russia, drugged in Iraq and mugged in Cuba, the last with nearly fatal consequences!
Throughout her career, Annie Nightingale has hung out with and toured with the who’s who of pop and rock including The Beatles, Primal Scream, The Who and The Rolling Stones, was once ship’s DJ on the QE2, and motor raced at Silverstone and Brand’s Hatch as part of a Radio 1 racing team.
She has broadcast from Ibiza, Miami, Berlin, Bucharest, Prague, been a runway model at a Paris fashion show, and once appeared in a soft porn movie “I kept my clothes on, though!” she commented.
