Radio Songs #63: Fight The Power!

Last week I wrote about how the introduction of playlists marked the beginning of the end for local radio - something which struck a chord with many of you.

Local radio became very safe around the beginning of the 90s... but curiously, this was a decade when guitar music would return to fashion. We have to put that largely down to Radio 1, the station that championed everyone from Nirvana to Pulp.

At some point in the mid-90s, the charts went to war with local radio. The bosses wanted to playlist safe pop music... because that was still what tested well... but the charts were full of first grunge, then Britpop. Paranoid Android got to Number One - and thirty seconds of that played down the phone to a 35 year old mum in Huddersfield... well, she probably wasn't going to give it the thumbs up.

This was particularly frustrating for me. I'd just discovered gigging, largely because I worked in the record library and the A&R people were showering us with free tickets to all the latest cool Britpop bands in an effort to get them more airplay.

However, we didn't go down without a fight. There were those of us who strove to get more variety - more of our kind of music - on the air. They were little victories at first - playlisting those songs in the evening when more young people listened. Persuading the powers that be to let us have an indie show that went off playlist altogether... on a Sunday night, when the boss never listened, so we could push it as far as we dared.

And every week we'd have a playlist meeting where we fought to convince the boss that Blur or Oasis or Pulp or Babybird or even Radiohead had crossed over into the mainstream and maybe we could play them daytime too. It was a hard-fought battle, but we tried our best.

One man stood in our way.

My nemesis.

More on him next time.

Here's a song he would have absolutely hated... and to him, I'll say what I thought... over and over again... back in the day...

When I am king, you will be first against the wall

With your opinion which is of no consequence at all

But of course, I never became king. We don't, do we?