Johnny
began his career on Australian radio before joining Radio
Luxembourg in 1964. He worked there for two
years until moving to the UK in 1966. While on Radio Luxembourg, he was
noticed by Melody
Maker's The Raver column, which in 1964 dubbed him (perhaps
because of his Australian origins) "the
second Alan
Freeman"
He began his BBC career in 1967, appearing on various Light Programme pop shows. When Radio 1 launched, he became the regular presenter of 'Scene & Heard', a weekly magazine programme about new sounds, pop news, views and interviews, which was broadcast on Saturdays or Sundays from 1967 to 1973. After leaving Radio 1, in 1974 he became a presenter at Sheffield’s Radio Hallam and remained there for over 10 years.
Nowadays, Johnny Moran seems to be one of the more obscure names from the early years of Radio 1 but in the early years of Top Gear, Moran’s Scene and Heard was one of the few Radio 1 programmes which John Peel recommended to his listeners, often at the end of the show.
In 1970, when Peel took a month’s summer holiday, Johnny Moran hosted a show in the Top Gear slot called First Gear, which concentrated on “pre-Beatles pop music”. Peel appreciated the show and on his return from holiday, praised Moran for his efforts, which led to a regular oldies show, All Our Yesterplays, which Johnny Moran presented on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons in 1970-71. A piece on the show in Melody Maker in February 1971 described it as "one of the most popular pop shows on radio" which "gets a huge postbag from a large listening audience" On the 4 October 1970 All Our Yesterplays, Moran dedicated a record to Peel after the two DJs had played in a Radio 1 football team on the previous day (and lost 6-1 to a London University team).
First Gear was produced by John Walters, who had gained his first experience on Radio I working on Scene and Heard and was the show's main producer from late 1971 to the end of 1972. Other producers who worked on Johnny Moran's shows included Bernie Andrews and Jeff Griffin, who both worked with Peel. (In the piece on All Our Yesterplays mentioned above, Moran told Melody Maker that Bernie Andrews was "invaluable in compiling the programme as many of the records are from his own personal collection"[4]) Scene And Heard's magazine format was adopted by later Radio 1 shows like Rockspeak (produced by Walters and broadcast in the Sounds Of The Seventies Friday night slot from late 1973 until SOTS ended in 1975), Peel's Rock Week and Walters’ Weekly. Johnny Moran was persuaded to move to Radio Hallam when it began broadcasting in 1974 by the Sheffield station's programme director, Peel's former Radio London and Radio 1 colleague Keith Skues.
