Radio Keynote
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Radio keynote The Radio Conference: A Transnational Forum Auckland, January 11-14, 2011 Opening Keynote: Unpicking the myths and misunderstandings of radio in the digital age Andrew Dubber [email protected] 1 Radio keynote Hi. I’m going to start with a bit of nostalgia. And so Molly ran. And the giant ran. And they both ran. And he ran and she ran, and he ran and she ran – until they came to bridge of the single hair. Molly skipped over it, but the giant stayed. For get over, he could not. “Woe betide you, Molly Whuppie, if you e’er return again…” Hi – I’m Andrew Dubber and to say that I’m delighted to be here would be a gross understatement. This is my home. These are my people. I’m 43 now – and for the first 37 years of my life this place and this subject – Auckland, and Radio – and particularly New Zealand radio – have been my two main ingredients. You’re going to have to excuse a little self-indulgent personal narrative, but it is leading somewhere, and I do have a point. I grew up listening to the radio. It wasn’t time to walk to primary school until Merv Smith had chatted to MacHairy the Scottish spider just after the 8 o’clock news. Each year, my family – Mum, Dad, my two sisters and I - would go on holiday to a bach at Stanmore Bay in Whangaparoa – and I’d always be secretly pleased when it was too wet to go to the beach, because over the Christmas & New Year summer break, 1YA would play old episodes of BBC radio comedies like the Navy Lark, Dad’s Army, Round the Horne, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and The Goons. I learned to play cribbage, while laughing at Eccles and Bluebottle in a small, slopey-floored wooden house by the sea as the rain came down outside. Or at least, that’s how I remember it. And at the end of our vacation, on the way home each year, we listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 hits of Nineteen-Seventy-X on the car radio. I have a particularly strong memory of it having been a close-run thing between Andy Gibb’s Shadow Dancing, and Meco’s disco version of the Star Wars Theme that one year – and this was a source of tremendous anticipation and excitement. Now, Google assures me that this is not even a real memory – and that those two songs weren’t even in the charts in the same year – but the point remains. 2 Radio keynote I think “Turn It Up!” might have been my most used phrase of the summer. Probably still is. Throughout the rest of the year, every Sunday morning, I’d listen as Don Linden played stories like Molly Whuppie, Gerald McBoingBoing, Sparky and the Talking Train, Flick the Fire Engine, Little Toot, Gossamer Wump and of course – still my favourite – Spike Milligan’s Badjelly The Witch, a musical story written and performed by Spike, which - like the song Snoopy’s Christmas - is inexplicably little-known in its UK home. I can remember staying Saturday night at my grandparents’ place. Pa Ardern would always get up early and make himself a cocoa. If I got up early enough, he’d make one for me too, and then I could go and tuck back into bed with my toast - in time for the children’s stories on 1ZB or 1YA. It was engrossing, it fired the imagination - and the way I remember it, it was pretty much at the centre of my childhood. In fact, arguably, radio and music have been what I’ve hung most of my memories off – real or imagined - and now that I come to think about it, it’s pretty much how I connect everything to do with memory, and meaning. I guess that makes it pretty powerful stuff. And then, after a while, I discovered that Nana and Pa had another setting on their radio: shortwave. There, amongst all the static, if you held the aerial just right, were distant voices, strange music and people talking to each other in foreign languages. It’s a cliché, of course, to say that I was transported, but I don’t really know another way to describe that feeling, sitting on the front porch, hearing just how big the rest of the world was. In my early teens, I was a fan of Radio Hauraki and 1251ZM as it was known then in equal measure. I knew the names of the presenters, I rang in for competitions, and even once wrote a letter to Hauraki with my friend Richard Leaman at the age of about 12, offering our own ideas for competitions. They thanked us and sent us a cap each. The music was, of course, central to all this. Radio was my main source of music listening. Mum and Dad had records at home, of course, but I was quick to figure out that Roger Whittaker, Andy Williams and Helen Reddy were not really for me. 3 Radio keynote I even reckon I figured out the playlist rotates and pretty much knew when - say - the B52s ‘Rock Lobster’ – for instance - would turn up again. Of course, I didn’t know they were called rotates, or even that there was such a thing as a playlist – but I could tell that the presenters obviously liked some of the same records I liked, so they were bound to play it sooner rather than later, right? The first album I ever chose for myself in a record shop was paid for by a voucher won in a phone-in competition. Again, 1ZM. Dad drove me to the radio station to pick up my prize. This was 1980. I bought David Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters and Super Creeps’ but I must have spent a good half hour torn between that and Donna Summer’s ‘The Wanderer’, while my Dad waited in the aisles of Jim’s Record Spot in Panmure as I made what I knew to be a critical decision in my life of music fandom. Around that time, there was a late Sunday night programme on 1ZM – way past my bedtime - which, as I recall, was essentially about the apocalypse. All the ways in which we were likely to die imminently, collectively and absolutely as a species. Of course, I listened under the covers with a transistor and a torch, as you do. The programme featured all the popular nuclear paranoia of the time, as well as a lot of terrifying scenarios from religion and mythology. The emergence of the barcode on products was, for instance, evidence of something in the Book of Revelations. The Cold War was at its height, a planet obliterating World War 3 was just a matter of moments away. Minutes to Midnight. And if you counted the number of letters in Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name, you got 666. The series was interspersed with music that fitted the theme – and it was the first time I heard Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers, and started to piece together the fact that songs could have meaning beyond boy meets girl, and then they do the Bus Stop. Those kiwis present younger than me might be surprised to learn that Radio Hauraki released an album called Homegrown that year, which celebrated new, independent local music. They playlisted the tracks, and the more I heard it, the more of a fan I was of those artists and those songs. That has always seemed to me the most obvious thing in the world. Radio stations playing songs to make them popular – not because they’re popular. Not entirely sure what happened to that idea or why local stations in the UK have chosen to ignore their own power 4 Radio keynote in that respect, and almost exclusively play safe, tested chart fodder. But pausing only to wave a flag for local music, wherever you happen to be, we return to our story. What was great, influential and powerful about that Homegrown album, of course, was the idea that in order to be a musician – or to put out a record – you didn’t have to be as foreign and bizarre as David Bowie, nor as glamorous and funky as Donna Summer. Not that New Zealand records hadn’t existed before 1980 – just that I’d never really noticed that they were New Zealand records. Jon Stevens, Mark Williams, Sharon O’Neill and Split Enz were just popstars, and so separate from my reality that their New Zealandness pretty much entirely escaped me. And while of course there was all sorts of interesting stuff going on in my backyard at places like Mainstreet and The Gluepot at the time, punk was so below my radar at Pakuranga Intermediate School or at the rollerskating rink I attended as a corduroy-clad pre-teen - that it might as well not have existed. But music and radio were everything. Music has always been centrally important to me, and radio was the method through which I arrived at my love of, and appreciation for music of all sorts – and particularly new and challenging pieces of music. British colleagues had John Peel. We had Barry Jenkin. Doctor Rock. The poor, antipodean man’s John Peel. Again, younger members of the audience here may be surprised to learn that new and challenging music has ever had a significant place on mainstream commercial radio – but in the early days of FM (and in New Zealand, that was the late 1980s) – music that wasn’t being played on the big AM stations was one of the FM format’s big selling points.