Alan John Bangs (born 10 June 1951[1][2] in London) is a British music journalist, disc jockey and presenter on radio and television.
Appropriate to the late broadcasting hours, the show typically included rather quiet pieces by John Fahey or Ry Cooder, but also Kevin Coyne or Neil Young.
There, Bangs presented numerous new records – especially from the independent sector and from the emerging alternative country genre (like Green on Red, Gun Club, Cowboy Junkies, Lucinda Williams), which was rarely found elsewhere in the radio broadcasting landscape.
The former daily musical theme programmes broadcast between 22:00 to 00:00 were discontinued without replacement, only Alan Bangs Connection "survived" on a new slot at Sundays from 23:00 to 01:00 under the new title "Nachtflug" in 1995.
In the 17/18 September 1995 show, he played "Voir un ami pleurer" by Jacques Brel, followed by a short piece of Frédéric Chopin which led to a song by Einstürzende Neubauten.
[8] To counter the conventional format radio, Alan Bangs strive for more creativity in programmes: "I want to listen to people who are interested in certain things and who go through the trouble to find recordings that I might not hear otherwise.
]In Alan Bangs Connection, he put up relationships of various kinds between the songs he played (e.g. only cover versions, only unplugged, certain years of publication, certain names or terms in the title, produced only by a specific person etc.).
In presentation style, however, Bangs differed substantially from Peel, who made no lengthy comments about the music he played and did not make connections between several pieces or concepts for entire broadcasts.