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Dave
Rogers', real name Ernie White, first experience
with radio was doing
a couple of things for the Radio One Club as a guest interviewer. He
thought that this was rather good fun working on the radio rather than
just being a disc-jockey in a club, so he wrote to RNI who had advertised
in Disc and Music Echo. Nothing happened and Dave believes the
letter ended up with the then programme controller Roger Day, who Dave
believes was just employing the guys he already knew. A few months later,
after Roger had left, Dave rang RNI in Switzerland and said that I would
come out and do an audition for them. He
flew out to Zurich and went to a little discotheque there and recorded a
demo tape, which in the end turned out to be a total waste of time because
Larry Tremaine had taken over. This meant making another demo tape at |
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Roger Squires Studios in London and that went to Larry, but he still
didn't hear anything. After hearing the tape, Spangles Muldoon and Mark
Wesley must have thought he had potential as they rang him up and asked
whether he could come out and do some programmes for them. He was supposed
to meet somebody at Southend airport but there was nobody there so he flew
over to Schipol and went to the Grand Hotel in Scheveningen. He went out
to the ship with Andy Archer but about a week after he'd joined, RNI closed,
on September 24, 1970. Both Dave & Mark were cautioned by the
Authorities on their
return to the UK. Dave went back to the West Country, but was subsequently
interviewed by two guys from
Scotland Yard. The first
question he was asked was: "Did you work on RNI?" His solicitor
said: "You don't have to answer that question", which he didn't.
The two policemen went back to London and that, luckily for Dave, was the end of it.
However,
Dave did return to RNI in February 1971 as one of the six DJs who
re-launched the station. Dave remained with the station until early
February 1972, but rejoined late that year on August 15th. On 24th October 1972, the English broadcast failed to begin.
Non-stop music was played, between occasional Dutch language programmes.
It emerged that acting without the authority of Swiss owners, Meister and
Bollier, Dutch programme director Jon de Mol had sacked the entire English
DJ, complement, including Dave. His reasoning was that since the English
service earned no money, there was no point in keeping it going.
Dave
returned to Devon and was working in
a bath cube factory in his home town of South Molton, which is my home town
in Devon when had a call at work asking whether I fancied joining Radio
Atlantis. A couple of weeks later he was back at sea, out on the
"Jeanine".
Dave subsequently did some of
freelance work on Radio City & then joined Radio Orwell in 1975,
having reverted to Keith Rogers and was there for six years. In 1981 he
joined Essex Radio. He says: "I was there for 14 years getting into a
terrible rut but if you've got security and a home it's quite difficult to
leave and do something else. Having said that, during my time at Essex
Radio, I did launch Breeze, which was quite a successful station, and from
a professional point of view, I suppose, was the high point of my career.
They then had a change of management at Essex Radio and Dave moved on,
working for Fame, which was Radio Mercury AM, for about a year.
Dave was part of our 1999, 2000
& 2001 RSLs.
Dave now works for Southend
Coucil. |
