Since the new mill owners threw this conversation wide open to us oiks working the looms, the most fiercely debated subject has been music. Somewhat inadvertently, I have emerged as a firebrand; a latter day Ned Ludd, wanting to lead a workers’ uprising to smash up the Selector computer and lay waste to all those wretched Scouting For Girls CDs.
I (and others) have already written about music repetition and predictability at such length that we ourselves are becoming like a stuck record. This is the last time, I promise. Here, in my final blogging word on the subject of music scheduling (I know I’m already a bit of a bore, and I certainly don’t want that prefixing with the word ‘crashing’), I will put forward my sincerest belief that ‘She’s So Lovely’, The Hoosiers and that record by the young lady who kissed another young lady and consequently liked it should all be heard prominently on our radio station.
Don’t worry – I haven’t had my mouth stuffed with gold by our paymasters in return for spouting propaganda, I’ll also put forward my point of view that unless these insubstantial, zero-calorie, guitar pop products are augmented with much better and more credible music, we could rebrand ourselves FREE-SPEEDBOAT-FOR-EVERY-LISTENER FM and still be sniffing that rotten and all too familiar stench of decline.
It’s a wonder our music scheduling team haven’t erected a barbed-wire fence and procured Kalashnikovs, with the amount of flak they’ve taken since the great One Golden Square debate began. Mark Bingham had the misfortune to be stuck with me in one of those Albion select committee meetings when I started shrieking like a fishwife about the records we play. I hear James Curran suffered a similar onslaught at the hands of Nelson, Hannah and Gareth.
I can’t overemphasise my respect for, and faith in the music team we have here. They are conscientious professionals who meticulously work to the brief they are given. And that brief, in our recent history has been to put together a tightly focused, pure research driven radio station. Or, to paraphrase another posting on this blog; all science and no art. But what if we let these talented boys don their smocks and paint palettes, and throw a bit of art into the mix? Set them free?
In an earlier post, I said that you couldn’t hope to meet two bigger music lovers than James and Tim. James’ music knowledge goes twenty thousand leagues deep, and Tim was previously responsible for the music in a weekly programme called ‘Razor Cuts’, the most eclectic and interesting bunch of records we’ve ever beamed out onto our airwaves. (And guess what, format fans? It didn’t damage the ratings one jot, consistently holding its own, sometimes excelling, and always adding depth to our output.)
Programming the music in commercial radio has become akin to interior designing a fast food restaurant chain, with the programmers choosing the exact shades of paint that the market research says creates the right mood in its customers. It’s a tragedy. People who become heads of music and music schedulers do so because they love music, but end up micromanaging a database. These music fans have had to divorce themselves from the very passion for music that led them here in the first place.
It’s easy to see the logic in how we got here. Magic and Heart have both occupied London’s top spot by using the kind of precise, clinical music programming that James and Tim have been briefed to adhere to. If it can work for them, why not for us? Let’s look at what those stations are…
Magic is the relaxation station. You turn it on to chill out. Heart is the feelgood station. You turn it on to smile and singalong. They’re both selling moods that music creates, not the music itself. So what are we? Connect with Music. The Music we all Love. Real Music. We sell ourselves as the station for people who care about music, but then programme our music as if we were playing Tetris, guiding a computer to put the right shaped blocks fit in the correct patterns.
Yes, we’re a broad church – we’re not the station for people who only like music by bands from Camden released on a limited edition vinyl single, or the station for people who just want to hear Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ LP played in its uninterrupted glory. We are a radio station for people who want to hear the best old and new music performed by acts who by and large play in beat groups and write their own songs.
I’m no elitist. A big chunk of the people who seek out our radio station are the type of people who went mad for Scouting for Girls at this year’s Isle of Wight Festival and wandered off bemusedly when the legendary Iggy and the Stooges ripped the stage apart. They form a majority, and of course we should be giving them those big hit songs that fit our format, otherwise they’ll find them elsewhere.
The problem we’ve got is that we currently super serve these people, and completely ignore anything less throwaway. We position ourselves as a station for real music, but render ourselves ridiculous to actual music fans by ignoring bands with quality, credibility or importance. The Arcade Fire have been widely been hailed as one of the most exciting bands to emerge in recent years. You wouldn’t know it if you listened to us. Ditto The White Stripes, The Libertines, The Flaming Lips, Last Shadow Puppets and lots more.
Our back catalogue stuff suffers the same fate. We hammer cheesy eighties acts like Aha (which we absolutely should be playing) but ignore, for example, The Stone Roses. We rock out to the big haired pomp of Bon Jovi (again, it should certainly be in the mix) but even at the height of last year’s ticket fever, Led Zeppelin barely got a look in. You’d think The Cure only ever released ‘Love Cats’, Radiohead ‘Creep’ and Nirvana ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Again, each of these tracks should be played, and as the most popular tracks by each artist, probably played the most often, but must it really stop there? Must we reduce some of the greatest acts of all time to one hum-able song?
Of course, if we were positioning ourselves as a pure hit music pop station, none of this would matter a jot, and any thoughts of credibility or depth would be potential suicide. If I was working on my last station, Piccadilly Key 103 in Manchester, maybe I’d be delighted to see The Hoosiers on my running order, breaking up the boybands and talent show nonsense. But how can we make any real claim to stand for ‘Real Music’ or to ‘Connect with Music’ when anyone with even a passing interest in music would just hear the most pedestrian of current bands and predictable oldies?
I’m not proposing that we put a tonne of dynamite under the music policy and then rebuild it into the kind of station that would have, say, me, Kweez and Bobby stroking our chins in muso approval and the wider audience fleeing for the hills. I’m in agreement that all the current stuff we play, we should still play, and it should still be the heaviest weighted stuff on the list. The same goes for the old songs, too. Pack it with big-testing songs that we know are going to score home runs for us. But at least devote some of the time to being just a little bit more interesting, showing a little bit more depth, more intelligence, so that we can lay at least some claim to having music credentials.
If we’re playing 11 records an hour during the day, would it really damage us to make two of them a bit special – maybe one old, one new? I don’t think so, and I think a little special goes a long way, too…
Like the biggest single chunk of the radio listening audience, I’m a fan of BBC Radio 2. I listen to it because I like the environment they’ve created for me as a listener – tone, presenters, values and music. The odd thing is, if you were to input my tastes into a clever piece of radio station matching software, it would come back with BBC 6Music, or maybe Xfm, but Radio 2 is my default station. The typical knee-jerk counter argument to this is that I’m listening for the DJs, not the music. Not true. The much maligned Johnny Vaughan is probably the sharpest, cleverest, funniest personality on commercial radio, but I never, ever tune in to his show, because I’m scared of the teeny chart pop music.
When I listen to BBC Radio 2, because I feel that they care about music, I’ll sit through terrible records like ‘More than Words’ by Extreme, or ‘Sussudio’ by Phil Collins, not just to hear the speech content, but because I know I’ll be rewarded for my patience by a really surprising or brilliant music choice.
I heard Chris Evans open his show with The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ the other week. I was so excited to hear that song on the radio, and felt a surge of love and loyalty for Radio 2. I’ve never heard that song before on that station, and probably never will again, but it’s left me with the feeling that Radio 2 is my kind of station because it plays The Velvet Underground at 5 in the afternoon.
Here at One Golden Square, under the current directive they’ve been given, if I even suggested to James and Tim that we played that record at midnight, in amongst our tried and tested formula, they’d start writhing on the floor and frothing at the mouth, convinced that I’d just uttered some foul blasphemy. But would the sky really darken and fireballs start falling to earth if we played a different, less obvious record every now and then? Would our audience really start vomiting blood and thrashing around, desperately grasping for the radio dial? I don’t think so.
A while ago, as part of a wider conversation and experiment on our show, we did a one-off programme where we threw the playlist out of the window for the night. We hand-held the listener throughout the whole thing, and believe it or not, I made an impassioned speech in defence of the existing playlist. We then tried it the old fashioned way – a big bag of songs we wanted to share with the audience.
We didn’t stray into John Peel territory; this was a mixture of stuff that you might find in Channel 4’s Greatest Albums of All Time, some lesser played stuff from artists and eras we already feature, and some quirky newer stuff. Throughout the programme, we urged the listeners to feed back on what they were hearing, bad and good.
The response was phenomenal. Given that we’re told that people are far more likely to complain than praise, we were bracing ourselves for the worst, a barrage of moaning, and hoping for a fifty/fifty split. What we ended up with was a flood of email and texts, more than 90% positive. I’m well aware that this isn’t a scientific piece of research (Adam and Adrian probably have their heads in their hands in despair at my methodology), but it is from genuine listeners, and provides at least some insight into what happens when you don’t do things exactly by the book.
There was no appetite here at the station for this kind of thing when it was broadcast, but the other day I forwarded the listeners’ contributions in their entirety as part of the conversation we’ve all been having about the future. I can forward them all, positive and negative, by email if you’d like to see them, along with that evening’s playlist. But for now, here are some of the good things our audience had to say when we dared to do something a little different:
“Loving the spontenaity of no playlist. A great chance to hear some unusual stuff, some true unknown gems.”
“I think the lack of the playlist is great! I like Virgin radio but when I am listening to it the whole day… from Ben jones to the Geoff show to the breakfast show, it is the same song being played again and again which can get tiring. So hearing these new or different music is really refreshing!:)”
“I listen every afternoon while I’m at work and finding tonight’s show very interesting. I’m going to stay tuned, just to see what you might play next”
“I have been listening to this show for the last 6 months and every night is awsome but this night has been purely orgasmic. All the excentric music has now been added to my itunes play list. This has made my week. I think it was even better than the day I found this show.”
“I just wanted to say what a pleasure it is not to have a play list, I am sick to death of hearing the same songs 15 times a day everyday, everyweek, it drives me crazy.
I have never mailed the show before but feel compeled to do so as I have loved the veriety of music played today and really do not want it to stop… ”
“If only every show could be like tonight’s. Commercial radio sucks. If I hear The Feeling one more time I’m going to scream.”
“If they put more of this on the playlist i would listen to xfm less. If they let you do this for one night a month or something i would be more impressed with virgin”
“This is radio how it should b, play lists r boring and you’ve breathed fresh air into what is now stagnent radio. Virgin radio has fallen into the same trap as the other station”
“The way it should be! Your playing the music I actually love!”
Geoff
