Thursday 18 April 2019

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




4 comments:

  1. "Things would start to change" and "Things always got worse" - you nailed it.

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  2. " ... the difference between The Jam, Hot Butter and Marmalade"

    great line - and on I wish I'd have thunk up.

    Elvis Costello got censured by the Americans when hid did Radio Radio unannounced on Saturday Night Live.
    30 years later, The Beastie Boys (knowingly) pulled the same trick by performing their version with Elvis on stage with them

    When Elvis did Radio Radio on Top Of The Pops, he changed the line "the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools" to "the radio is in the hands of lots of silly men" and pointed directly at TOTP host Tony Blackburn - I think he definitely had a point

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  3. The greatest radio song, Rol? It's good, but it's not Hank Hill.

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  4. They wouldn't know a turntable from a turnip - excellent line. To be fair every industry has changed in this way over the last 20 - 30 years. As you know I was in the public sector until the other year, and around every 5 years there was a "restructuring" which always added a whole new level of management/administration. When the walls very literally came tumbling down, I knew it was time for me to hang up my laptop (nothing else left to hang up as it had all gone). Young people get criticised for all sorts nowadays but in the 8 years my daughter has been in the workplace in various capacities, she has never had a job she has enjoyed as much as some of the ones I've had over the years and I suspect, sadly, she never will.

    ReplyDelete

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