Annie Nightingale, the trailblazing and eternally young-at-heart DJ, has died at 83. When she decided to break into the male enclave of the housewife-friendly music jock she was rebuffed. She was told in the 1970s by BBC bosses her voice was too high and wouldn’t carry, that she didn’t have sufficient authority, and that disc jockeys were “husband substitutes” for listening housewives and a female voice would kill the fantasy. She persevered, called out their gender bias in her magazine column and after three years they relented. She stayed as the first and only lady of radio for 12 years until joined by Janice Long.
She was born 1 April 1940 in Isleworth, England, and had an upfront, pro-active Sun and Jupiter in Aries; with a stubbornly persistent and enthusiastic Uranus, Venus, Mars in Taurus; and an even more relentlessly determined Saturn in Taurus square Pluto perhaps opposition an Aquarius Moon. Lots of fizz and sparkle backed up by resolute staying power.
Her Uranus opposed the BBC’s Scorpio Sun so she would be a rebellious and unsettling presence but their relationship chart had a lucky, successful composite Sun Jupiter conjunction; a musical Venus opposition Neptune; and a chained-together Saturn Pluto. Once on board she would not leave and kept working into her 80s.
Annie was a class act. John Peel and Annie stood out in a sea of crushing musical mediocrity in the 1970s and 1980s.
After John crossed over in 2004, it was left to her to continue to shine the light on her solitary journey with great
success. Like John before his premature passing, she always listened to new acts with considerable interest and
unlike others from her generation, her tastes never atrophied.
As James Brown once said, “Go in important, leave important.” She did exactly that.
What a fabulous legacy Annie left.
What a great woman, sorry to see you go Annie.
First and foremost, she was an Aries, the sign of the pioneer.
Here’s her rectified chart
https://i.postimg.cc/66LKWr53/Annie-Nightingale-Rectifiede.jpg
Thanks Marjorie. Like Hugh, I listened to her shows and those of John Peel as a teenager and young adult. I notice she has Venus on fixed star Algol, making a conjunction to Mars at the aneuretic degree of Taurus. That may have played some part in her ability to negotiate with such determination the fortress of male hegemony in the industry she worked in. At the same time she had the flexibility to embrace changing trends in popular music. Her Piscean Mercury in sextile to Uranus would be adept at that. I recall listening to an interview she gave, where she talked about how important it was for her to keep on listening to new bands, artists and genres. In that respect she outdid her male counterparts who tended to get stuck in an era. An inspiration.
Annie Nightingale and John Peel were pretty much the only BBC DJs I listened to as a teenager. I did not realise that she had been a journalist before and had actually interviewed the Beatles. I was quite surprised at how old she was when she died. She was actually born before some of the male DJs such as Tony Blackburn. A go getting Cardinal Sun in Aries and lots of Fixed sign planets meant she knew what she wanted and once started she was not likely to quit. This perhaps explaining the surprising longevity of her career. She was still working on Radio 1 long after most of her contemporaries had migrated to the legacy music programs of Radio 2 etc. It was the Dance Music revolution of the late 1980s that gave her career it’s second wind when most of her peers were looking anachronistic.