WRITING: Ritchie Yorke On Rock and Roll →

As a 19-year-old in 1963, Ritchie Yorke locked himself in the studio of a Toowoomba radio station and played Little Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips Pt 2" eight times in a row. The on-air protest was an answer to the program manager's threat that he stop playing “nigger music” on his Saturday night rock ‘n’ roll show or face the sack, and had station staff not beaten down the door, Ritchie would have repeated the track indefinitely. At the time, no one realised that he would go on to become on of the world's most respected music journalists, making Editor of Rolling Stone, rubbing shoulders with Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin, becoming friends with John and Yoko, and going on tour with Led Zeppelin. In fact, he still has Jimi's hat after being given it as a gift for appearing as a character witness for the guitarist in a Toronto courtroom, the city he moved to after the unsavory incident on regional Australian radio.