Radio Songs #61: The Beginning of The End

When I look back on my time in local radio, it's easy to pinpoint the moment the rot set in, when it all started to go wrong, the top of the slippery slope that led to my eventually redundancy in 2011.


The end began in 1990, just three years into my 23 year radio career. It began with the first takeover.

One radio group taking over another is commonplace. It is an industry that devours itself... almost to the point of self-destruction. There are presently two big groups that own the majority of UK radio stations and it's only a matter of time before there's a complete monopoly.

During my time in radio, our station must have been taken over four or five times, and every time the same thing happened.

First: someone from the new head office would come along and tell us how nothing much would change.

Then: things would start to change.

When they did start to change, they'd promise us amazing things: that life - and our jobs - would be so much better.

Things always got worse.

I came to realise that the defining state of UK radio was entropy. Because local radio stopped being about providing entertainment and being your friend sometime in the late 80s. Instead, it became about making money. Not enough money to sustain a business, pay the staff (and the PRS!), and keep the lights on as it had once been... but enough money to pay shareholders and stakeholders who never set foot in the building and didn't know a turntable from a turnip, and certainly wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between The Jam, Hot Butter and Marmalade.

I have more to say on this, obviously. But for anyone who was wondering how I've managed sixty posts so far in this series and not yet featured possibly the greatest radio song ever written... well, I was saving it for today.

Radio is a sound salvation 

Radio is cleaning up the nation 

They say you better listen to the voice of reason 

But they don't give you any choice 'cause they think that it's treason 

So you had better do as you are told 

You better listen to the radio

I wanna bite the hand that feeds me 

I wanna bite that hand so badly 

I want to make them wish they'd never seen me

Some of my friends sit around every evening 

And they worry about the times ahead 

But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference 

And the promise of an early bed 

You either shut up or get cut up; they don't wanna hear about it 

It's only inches on the reel-to-reel 

And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools 

Tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel