In the US, it exists much more as an umbrella name for any music played by a band with electric guitars and a drum kit to a 4/4 beat. Whether you see Springsteen and the E Street band at the Madison Square Garden, or MGMT at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, you’d be attending a rock concert. Sub-genres branch out from there; college-rock, blue jeans-rock, grunge-rock, alt-rock, cock-rock, folk-rock, trigonometry-rock etc., but as disparate as they are, they all exist happily under the banner of rock.

I think we’re less comfortable with the word in the UK. Even though, at a push we’ll use it in that context, we prefer our genres without the ‘rock’ suffix - just plain indie, goth, metal, punk etc, and we even like to split those up into subsections.

Over here, ‘rock’ carries an odd subtext. It says bad poodle perms. It says stonewashed jeans, it says an horrible old leather jacket with ‘The Scorpions’ crudely painted on the back. Then again, it sits comfortably in the last year’s mass hysteria about the legendary Led Zeppelin reforming, it’s in pushchairs on our high streets emblazoned on ironic AC/DC baby-grows, and in ‘Guitar Hero’ and ‘Rock Band’, maybe it’s finding a new generation.

We don’t quite feel right with the word, we’re not sure what it means. We can say what is rock and what isn’t (Red Hot Chili Peppers - yes. Coldplay - no.) and as soon as we put alongside another word; ‘roll’, it makes things a lot easier (Oasis. Maybe not a rock band, but defintely one of the great rock and roll bands.)

What does ‘rock and roll’ mean today, though? Was it something that once exploded with life in the likes of Little Richard’s ‘Rip It Up’, and died a long slow death, its corpse twitching to the death rattle of Showaddywaddy and Shakin’ Stevens? If we say the phrase ‘rock and roll’ today, does it conjure up the sad image of an old man with a teddy boy haircut, trying to cling onto his youth, or has it been reinvented in the form of the ‘rock and roll lifestyle’ of tabloid stars such as Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss. Our audience may not aspire to be like them, but they’re certainly the hottest show in town when judged by column inches.

A word we’ve used in the past to bundle with ‘rock’ is ‘pop’; as in ‘The UK’s Number One Commercial Rock and Pop Station’. Some of the greatest songs in the rock canon, are in fact pop records, but when we use the phrase ‘rock and pop’, the latter somehow castrates the former. Pop, now more than anytime since the late ’50s, is synonymous with pretty boys and girls singing cover versions to teenagers. When we say that we’re a rock and pop station, maybe we come across as a little timid, saying “Here’s some big, butch RAWWWK music, but don’t be afraid - there’ll be some anodyne pap along in a minute.” It’s a hybrid that possibly works until you start giving it a name; that funny old ‘rock’ word which sits badly on its own, yet makes an uneasy bedfellow with ‘pop’.

One of the most exciting things about the opportunity ahead is that while Virgin is a brilliant brand, beloved by the masses for the association with a ’screw you’ eccentric visionary entrepreneur in casual knitwear, Virgin Radio is a brand with a lot of baggage, not all of it good.

Back when Virgin Radio launched, the UK radio landscape was a very different place. Local commercial services were still very broad and unfocused and the ubiquitous unmodernised BBC radio networks felt like the old guard, the establishment. The thought of a rebel billionnaire, sticking it to the Beeb and evoking the spirit of the pirates felt genuinely exciting. Medium wave was a popular and viable platform for music radio, and it was exciting to hear a song like ‘A Day In The Life’ or ‘Kashmir’ on the radio, because you never heard them. Anywhere. It was a brilliant proposition for a brand.

Over time though, it lost its relevance. A brand needs to be lovingly tended and tweaked to stay in step with broader trends in society. Grunge and Britpop redefined rock music in the UK, part of which was robbing it of its catch-all name. Live music, bands playing electric guitars to 4/4 beats began a resurgence which continues today, with what were once freaky hippie festivals now being mainstream, generation-defining events. In the maelstrom, the word ‘rock’ was left for dead on the roadside. ‘Rock festival’ meant spandex and gothic script at Donnington, not the new, Cool Britannia Glastonbury.

Virgin Radio, maybe not in its on-air output, but in public perception, was left behind while the newly invigorated Radio 1 mopped up. By the time Britpop hit its peak, plans for the offload to Capital must have been underway. Virgin weren’t spending the marketing money to make sure its brand stayed in step with the sea change. And then: The Second Coming of Chris…

It’s difficult now to find a comparable media star to Chris Evans at his peak. If you take the ratings juggernaut of Moyles, add the talent of Jonathan Ross, and multilply by the charisma and tabloid magnetism of Russell Brand, you might end up somewhere close. Virgin Radio reaped such rewards from the association that we gave up on marketing ourselves as anything other than The Court of King Chris, even though the tabloids were doing a fabulous job of that for free. It was, famously, a ratings, critical and commercial heyday, but one question that is seldom asked is why, even though Chris did wonders for Virgin’s ratings proportionately, did only a small fraction of the Radio 1 audience follow him across? What is it about the people who never listen to Virgin Radio that repels them from sampling us? What is their perception?

The Chris Evans glorydays messily segued into the SMG era, and although the radio station eventually recovered from the hangover and progressed in terms of what comes out of the speaker, there has never been any significant amount of money to build and communicate what the modern brand stands for. To the non-listener, we were left with a huge, smouldering Chris Evans shaped hole, and if you leant over it and listened carefully, maybe you’d hear distant strains of Status Quo or Whitesnake.

So. Is that funny word, ‘rock’ actually a millstone around Virgin Radio’s neck? Before I worked here, and before Chris Evans took over the breakfast show, I’d written Virgin off (like the genre of rock) as a dinosaur. I never tuned in, because I expected to hear hoary old riffs and strained vocals. The kind of thing that might be playing in the background of a rough pub in the Peak District, where bikers stop off to play pool, or what Alan Partridge might listen to on the Blaupunkt stereo in his Ford Mondeo. I now realise that probably wasn’t the case, but as a non-listener, the thing which prevented me from ever even stepping over the threshold was the fear of rock, in a very British sense.

Geoff