“A new boss has taken over,” he added, referring to Victoria Easton Riley, Radio Scotland’s Head of Audio, “and she wants to make changes to the style of the music played on the station. 

“It has been reported the aim is for a more easy-listening format designed for a broad mainstream appeal. Over the next two hours I’m going to play a collection of great records and I think it’s safe to say none fall into either of those two categories.”

At which point he cued up the title track of David Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station. All 10 minutes and 14 seconds of it.  

For the following two hours, Sloan played “records you wouldn’t normally hear on the radio,” and read out messages from disgruntled listeners unhappy to see him go. “Vandalism,” one said of the decision to axe his show.

All in all, it was a defiant final hurrah, bringing down the curtain – for the moment at least – on a long and storied broadcasting career, stretching back to the end of the 1970s; first at Radio Clyde where he was the champion of new and alternative music and then at Radio Scotland for the last decade.

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Speaking to The Herald a few hours before his final broadcast, Sloan said: “I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated,” over the decision to end his show.

“I don’t want to sound like some whinging disgruntled ex-employee, because that’s not what it is at all,” he added, though he did admit he’d sent a Fortnum & Mason hamper the BBC had sent him for his “long service” to a Foodbank in Scotstoun.

Sloan’s is one of three shows that have been cancelled by Radio Scotland. Iain Anderson and Natasha Raskin Sharp have also disappeared from the schedules as Radio Scotland switches direction for their late-night music shows. 

The station can point to the fact that Vic Galloway, Ricky Ross’s Another Country show and BBC Introducing in Scotland will continue, while former late-night DJ Roddy Hart is starting a new weekend show. 

But the reaction to the schedule shake-up has been vocal. A petition was launched to save Iain Anderson’s show, whilst many Scottish musicians and names from the country’s creative industries signed an open letter protesting the BBC’s decision.  

Sloan’s cancellation has also prompted many Scottish musicians who were given their first airplay by the DJ to speak out.

“Billy has been a great champion of Scottish music, he was our John Peel,” James Grant of Friends Again and Love and Money told The Herald on Saturday.  “He played the first Friends Again demo on his show as we all jumped around our bass player’s kitchen thinking we had arrived.”

Ken McCluskey, front man of The Bluebells, fears that Sloan’s disappearance would mean that there would be less new music on the airwaves. 

“We’re going to hear Young at Heart for the rest of our lives,” he argued, citing the band’s number one hit, “but we’ll never hear any of our new stuff.

“It’s not just for the heritage acts like ourselves. It’s harder for young bands to get any play at all. We have BBC Introducing, but that’s a lottery.”

Sloan’s final show was wilfully defiant as the DJ played the Velvet Underground, Orange Juice, Edith Piaf and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Off the Ball presenter Tam Cowan sent in a message saying he would miss listening to Sloan on the way home on a Saturday night and asking – unsuccessfully – for some Peters and Lee.

Sloan’s final song was Sinead O’Connor’s The Last Day of our Acquaintance, which, he pointed out, contained the line, “I’ll talk, but you won’t listen to me”; a line he directed at Victoria Easton Riley.

Speaking to The Herald, he lamented the decision to switch to a more restricted playlist on late-night Radio Scotland. 

“There are already a 100 radio stations up and down the country adopting that format,” he pointed out.

“Nobody in 2025 needs to listen to the radio anymore,” Sloan added. “Everybody has got 10,000 of their favourite songs on their tablet or their phone. So what you’re trying to do is give them something that they don’t get from just listening to songs they’ve downloaded from Spotify.

“They just seem to be trying to bland it out, and dumb it down and smooth the edges.”

As for his own future, he hasn’t any plans yet. “I don’t know what I’m doing on Monday. Everybody says you must do a podcast. I think podcasts are a bit like arses. Everybody’s got one. I want to play records.”

But he is leaving Radio Scotland, he says, with his head held high.

“I’m proudest of the fact I think I can put my hand on my heart and say I’ve never sat behind the microphone and played a song that I didn’t think was a great record.”

“I’m also proud of the fact that I introduced people to bands like Simple Minds, U2 and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and the Trashcan Sinatras and Hue and Cry, all of whom got their first radio plays when I played them on Radio Clyde and continued to play them at the BBC.

That’s what I still do. I’ve had messages saying, ‘I’ve never heard of the American band Lo Moon, then I heard you playing them two years ago and I went and bought the album and now they’re my new favourite band.’

“I just played my favourite records and hoped someone liked them and I was astonished to find out that there was a whole audience out there who did exactly that.”