Alain Veinstein’s Final Broadcast

In the early eighties I moved from London (impossible to make the rent in Thatcherite England) to Paris where I found freelance employment as radio-author, commentator, translator and other guises at France Culture (I still listen to that station nearly every night). The people who had just recently revolutionized those French cultural airwaves were the poet Alain Veinstein (by founding the superb nightly program Les Nuits Magnétiques in 1978) and Laure Adler who took over the direction of Les Nuits, while Veinstein created “Surpris par la nuit” and then “Du Jour au Lendemain,” his one-hour daily midnight interview show. It was thanks to them & to my friends Jacques Taroni & Michel Maire that I was able to produce many delightful (for me at least) & wild (radio brute, I used to call the formally experimental programs) broadcasts in a medium that was new to me but that I still absolutely adore today. My thanks to Alain & Laure to have permitted me to frolick in those airy wavy French fields! After 29 (!) years, France-Cultuere decided to put an end to Veinstein’s show (Les Nuits had died already a number of years back).   Here a podcast of Veinstein’s last program, a solo meditation on his work on radio & why it had to come to an end. France-Culture, critized in the show, had not wanted to broadcast it — until the text was recently published as a book from Le Seuil under the title Du jour sans lendemain.

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