2023-07-29 21:58:00
Between anecdotes and analyses, the work coordinated by Frank Lanoux (published by Plon) embraces a long memory of radio.
The Dictionary of Radio Lovers has the merit of honoring a singular medium that maintains a passionate relationship with its listeners. If it is there daily, we rarely talk about it. Formerly, his story was published in the French Documentation by Christian Brochand, Jean-François Remonté and Simone Depoux then produced a superb album, the Radio Years (Gallimard, 1989); Jean-Noël Jeanneney, guest in this work, and Agnès Chauveau designed ten years later the Historical Dictionary of Radio and Television in France. Also this sum, which brings together more than a hundred collaborators, including many celebrities who will recognize themselves, is worth noting. Everyone talks about their job: journalists, presenters, sound engineers, directors, without forgetting the switchboard operators at the heart of the system, to whom Matthieu Belliard devoted himself. They come from all frequencies: Radio France, Europe 1 which with Louis Merlin broke in the 60s the old practices of the announcer and broadcasts in boxes, RTL with its Vasarely and its Big Heads, and all the stations born in the sequel free radios which again dynamited the antenna. With the arrival of television, the Internet and digital technologies, the end of the radio has regularly been predicted, yet it is doing like a charm. Its key word is independence (only Bolloré is unaware) and above all permanent inventiveness.
From the entry “Addiction” signed by Anne Goscinny to “Zauteurs” by Philippe Caverivière, there are a hundred love letters to read here. Even if some have retained a little of the house spirit, all have focused on their attraction for the radio. It begins with the voice that Patrick Cohen treats with talent, recalling via Pythagoras that it has the particularity here of being acousmatic (a speaker that we cannot see). And since four generations are present, this dictionary is a bit like “a book, voices” to pastiche France Culture. There are the current ones and those who have made the radio, starting with Julie and Maryse evoking in “Duo” her companionship with Coluche; Gérard Klein in “Bullshit” evokes cooler, freer years; Jean-Paul Rouland opens the mysteries of the games of Pierre Bellemare and Ivan Levaï to brilliant press reviews launches into a eulogy and a plea for the newspapers. On the other, there is FM, DAB, Skyrock, NRJ, the era of DJs, provocative radio, deconstructed and rebuilt around the legacy of Carbone 14 and Radio Nova. A new color on the air supported by laughter and new playlists. Anecdotes are of course on the program, but we learn a lot from them: from the different ways of wearing the headphones to the art of reporting with or without a telephone, through the forced exercise of the news flash or the way of which a Multiplex is created…
It should be noted that they were all chosen by the radio and that often their passion began in childhood, listening to the transistor radio, the holiday car radio, the Ipod, sometimes by a public broadcast where we can see the technique whose console looks like a cockpit. Radio still fascinates, it retains something inaugural, has secret links with anthropology, it’s a bit like the shaman of modernity who tells the world, the weather and has made himself the speaking and singing clock of the life of its dear-zaudiences.
Frank Lanoux (ed.), Dictionary of radio lovers, Plon, 564 p., €26.
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