Happy 75th birthday, Jørgen de Mylius

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GoogaMooga
custodian of oldies
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Joined: 28 Sep 2010, 05:23
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Happy 75th birthday, Jørgen de Mylius

Postby GoogaMooga » 05 Mar 2021, 15:17

Happy birthday to Radio DJ and TV presenter Jørgen de Mylius, 75 years old today! Known as "Denmark's oldest teen-ager", Jørgen de Mylius was the man who introduced rock and pop on Danish radio back in January 1963, and it was thanks to his weekly chart show, "Top 20", that I became a full-blown music geek in 1974. He was only 16 and still in high school when he became the youngest staffer at DR, having convinced the program directors that it was okay to play other music than just schlager, jazz, and classical. So we got foreign pop, and the more raucous rock and roll, mainly from the UK and the US. On TV he became the Eurovision Song Contest commentator, and he was the host of the Danish show eleven times. Mylius will never forget the time Otto Brandenburg scored zero points at Eurovision in 1960, for the sumptuous "To Lys På Et Bord", one of the finest Danish pop ballads. The jury that year was terribly biased, consisting of people who really hated pop and rock, people straight out of the music conservatory. It was in the 1950s that a very young Jørgen heard Radio Luxemburg over at a friend's house. There he listened to Elvis Presley for the first time, when they played his new hit, "Wear a Ring Around My Neck". An hour later he was back in his mother's kitchen, feverishly tuning his mother's transistor radio to find that station, with its notoriously weak signal. Danish radio annoyed him more and more. The DJ's were jazzbos, who didn't know a pop A-side from a B-side, and mispronounced the pop names. He wrote a letter of complaint to DR, and by some sort of miracle, was asked to come for an interview. It was his good fortune - and mine, too!

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