You turn on the hot tap…

A personal observation of how painting by numbers and turd polishing choked the fun out of music radio

For the people who run commercial radio stations good radio is radio that rates. Their definition of good music is defined by research. Unfamiliar music is something other people play and in the jargon it's usually demonised as Weird Unfamiliar Music. Music is a product they supply and there's and old saying in music radio, "You turn on the hot tap, you get hot water", meaning that no matter what kind of station you are you want to be playing a familiar song that delivers the promise in your positioning statement when the listener tunes in. It's part of the reason that over the last twenty years Australian commercial music radio has played less contemporary Australian music than it did before then. Rock radio stations can easily meet their Australian music quota by playing the same 70's and 80's songs they've been playing for the last twenty years. Michael Chugg has raised this subject often over the last few years and I recall Don Walker lamenting the fact that there's no room for any of his new music on the radio because radio is still playing his songs from 25 years ago.

Commercial radio ceased being a participant in the music industry and became a parasite in 1990. It began with the announcement at a staff meeting at FOXFM, where I was working at the time, that the newly created Austereo network was going to introduce a new programming philosophy, a scientific formula based on market researched music and new marketing techniques like the one called "Perception Enhancement", or as I came to call it, Painting By Numbers And Turd Polishing. They explained that they now had a sophisticated research resource which Greg Smith had been developing over the last ten years in Adelaide using an American model. It was considered reliable enough to be able to base the entire playlist on and now no song that didn't have a big enough familiarity figure in the research would be played. Put simply, they'd decided to cut the playlist in half and play those songs twice as often and instead of adding up to five new songs a week they would now add one or two a month but not until it showed up in their research or was a #1 song in Britain or America. That was pretty much the end of radio as I'd known it since I started in 1972. 

My radio heroes had been the Stan Rofes, John O'Donnells Chris Winters and Graham Berrys who talked about the music and played stuff I'd never heard before. My specialty was new music, interviews and the ability to pick a hit record. It earned me a spot in the music meetings at 2SM, 3XY EON and FOX and the role of Music Director for short periods at EON and FOX. When Triple M first bought EON they appointed me Music Director and introduced their new computer system which had all of the music from their Sydney station on it. With a lot of help from my assistant at the time, Kate Mason, I replaced it with a Melbourne playlist and checked every hour of the day manually after the computer had spat out the playlist for the next 24 hours. Because I'd played all of the old songs for years I could hear them in my head as long as there was no other music playing. The process would take two to three hours and I could listen to new music for the rest of the day. The station went to #2 in it's target age group in two surveys. I didn't get on with the Sydney people and when instead of congratulating me they said "What have you done to our playlist?" I just said, "Hey, if you think you can do better than that, go ahead." I was still doing drive and a sunday night album show that went to Sydney so it wasn't like I was out of a job at the station (then anyway). They brought in their Sydney Music Director who reintroduced the Sydney playlist and the station went into a dive and never reached the same point until after it changed its name to Triple M a few years later. 

The FOX MD job in 89/90 turned out to be preparing for the new philosophy and learning the mysteries of the new science that would be the cornerstone of the new programming philosophy. It required no knowledge of music whatsoever because it was a system of numbers and computer programs and, I'm not joking, could have been done by a deaf person. Every song was coded for its tempo, its sound, if it had a huge dynamic change, as in a ballad with a raging guitar solo, it's intro and its ending in a category based on its research and the computer was programmed to select the music from the different research categories on these criteria with different priorities for different times of the day. You turn on the hot tap... 

I suggested they find someone else who might be more interested in numbers than music and stayed on doing the night shift. They launched the new philosophy with a short-lived, very high rotation format that saw Doin The Doo by Betty Boo played every 90 minutes, and expanded and contracted the rotations and rotated work experience Program Directors until they settled on something they felt comfortable with. Then 3KZ moved to the FM band under the new name of GOLD 104. It brought much of its audience with it from the AM band and scared FOX and Triple M, which were still independently owned, into playing nothing but oldies for nearly three years, ending only after the FOX's parent company Austereo, bought the Triple M network and both stations reset their target markets in a less competitive, more symbiotic strategy. FOX went after the 18 plus female market. Triple M aimed itself at a male market modelled on the studio audience of the Footy Show and adopted the Austereo research-driven programming philosophy. From 1992 until the end of 1994 the only new Australian songs played on the three big FM music stations were The Weight by Jimmy Barnes and The Badloves and You're So Vain by Chocolate Starfish, both covers, both on Mushroom and I would suspect, played to placate Michael Gudinski who'd suffered a lot from these new programming philosophies. None of those stations did anything for contemporary Australian music during that time and missed the start of grunge, Nirvana and Pearl Jam completely. By the time Triple M started playing Smells Like Teen Spirit and Better Man they were already oldies. The Australian music industry suffered from the reduction in airplay, first with the introduction of the researched based playlist and then three years of nothing but oldies in a way that clearly demonstrates radio's shift from participant to parasite.

I left radio not long after the introduction of this new corporate philosophy. I knew that these people with their high rotation playlists would burn the music they were playing within a very short time and they would eventually have to find some way of embellishing their format. I firmly believed the best embellishment would be comedy and went off to explore that world in the hope of finding a team I could bring back to radio. 

At first, as well as mixing sound for jazz combos several days a week at the Sportsgirl complex on Collins Street I did pre-recorded mid-dawns on six-hour videotapes at GOLD104 to pay the bills for a while before becoming comedy writer for Breakfast duo Liz and Shawn for six months, moving to television after they reached #1. From 1991 to 1994 I ran Espy Comedy and The Waiting Room with Trevor Hoare at the Esplanade Hotel in St. Kilda, where I did my first stand-up gig the night the first Gulf War broke out on the 17th of January 91. By the end of 1993 I'd done three stand-up spots on Tonight Live and was working there in the writer's room with people I would have loved to have taken back to radio. Steve Bedwell, Gary Adams, Deniece Scott and some of the comedians who started the Delivery Room at the Espy before Espy Comedy came along, Tim Smith, Andrew Goodone and the Matts, Parkinson and Quartermaine. 

When Tonight Live ended Triple M and Fox were still locked in their battle with GoldFM and not interested in a comedy show. it was pretty obvious that both stations would have to change format before too long but it still took another year. I recommended Steve Bedwell to Greg Smith at Austereo and Greg set him up in breakfast in Adelaide. Around the same time I was writing for a television show about sex and remembered a girl I'd seen talking about vibrators on an ABC program. She did in such a way that wasn't embarrassing or grubby but still amusing and clever enough to stick in my brain. When I got in touch with her she turned out to be very smart and somebody I could talk to very easily. We had several long conversations about the media and how to handle the people you have to deal with. She had a no-nonsense approach I respected and I also recommended her to Greg Smith. Her name was Amanda Blair. 

In 1994 I withdrew from Espy Comedy and went back to the FOX to do weekend shifts when I sensed that the change from the oldies format wasn't far away. By then I didn't have a team in mind although I knew a few individuals with radio potential and I wanted to keep a foot in the door for the next chapter. Every Saturday afternoon I'd have to start either the 2 o'clock or the 3 o'clock hour with a Meatloaf triple play, which could last for up to twenty minutes. Meatloaf was already little more than industrial noise to me anyway and I had to fake any enthusiasm for any of the oldies I was playing. I did question whether playing 27 minutes of Meatloaf was a good idea when there were people who didn't like Meatloaf and that three songs by anybody else they played on the weekend amounted to an average of twelve minutes and got nothing more than "Hmm." It wasn't the first time I felt like the guy at Mcdonalds who said, "Yeah, but can't we make the food better?" I put the paper hat back on and went back to the counter and did what I was paid for. 

Early in 1995 I was called in to the FOX for a few week days to teach Peter "Grubby" Stubbs how to work the studio panel for the new show he and Dee dee would be doing after the new format change. Austereo had just bought Triple M and both stations were repositioning themselves. The stations weren't in the same building yet but the Triple M executives from Sydney were working out of the Fox building. One day I ran into Mick Molloy and Tony Martin in a corridor at the FOX. They'd just done an audition with, and been knocked back by Triple M's chief programming exec who didn't laugh at one of the jokes and stood up at the end and said, 

"Yeah, I can see what you're trying to do there boys but it'll never work." 

When they told me I went straight to the office of the Network chief of programming, the immediate superior of the exec who knocked them back and told him he shouldn't let these guys get away. He looked at me blankly and said, 

"Well who are they?"  

I told him I had no doubt they could be the biggest thing he ever had on the radio. I'd known Mick and Tony since 1990 when they did their first stand-up gigs at the Espy and told him about their Triple M show Bulltwang,The Late Show (he didn't watch it when it was on) and how they'd just spent the last year touring the country doing town halls and picture theatre shows for their fans from the Late Show. He agreed to let me produce a demo for the FOX and within six months Martin/Molloy had become the biggest FM radio show in the country and stayed there for the rest of its four year run. It remained the biggest show in Australian FM history until Hamish and Andy, who listened to Martin/Molloy in their high school/uni days, came along in the next decade.

At the end of the 90's after Martin/Molloy I went back to Triple M to play the same old, same old. They told me they wanted me to do a show called Gracie's Cafe, in which I'd have comedy guests and interviews every day. When my first morning on the air arrived my boss, who I'd already dubbed "The Sweaty Guy" told me the budget, producer and assistant they promised wouldn't be forthcoming. I told him I didn't care if it made me the biggest prick he ever met but he wasn't going to get a comedy show with my name on it without them. I told him I'd play their music and act like I was interested and if he wanted to pay my friends to do guest spots I could organise that. That became the compromise. 

My next door neighbour at the time was playing in a band that was recording its first proper album. Triple J had picked up their single, which was too raucous and rowdy for the commercial stations and when I heard the album I knew it would be huge but I also said Triple M would only play one song in the daytime. When the Living End's album came out it knocked Cold Chisel's reunion album, heavily promoted by Triple M, out of the #1 spot and Triple M started giving the single spot plays at night. By then the single was also getting played on FOXFM's Hot 30 every night. 

Four months later on the day I started at Triple M the station launched a new promotion that was supposed to prove how much it loved Australian rock by spotlighting new talent it thought would get somewhere. It may have been a promotion the record companies paid to be part of and it was part of the "Perception Enhancement" strategy designed to make the listeners think what the station wanted them to think. Those who practise these techniques have much more sophisticated euphemisms than Propaganda and Bullshit but that's all it is. The hot new band The M's claimed as their new discovery was that same band that had already had a #1 album and the song they chose to highlight was the one I said would be the only one they'd play, All Torn Down. Six months later I was still playing it almost every day because it researched well and was still the only song the station would play in the day time. Nine years later when I went back to Triple M they were playing the title track from White Noise every day in drive. 

Today's risk-averse scientific formulas for predictability, blandness and hot water from the hot tap have pretty much eliminated commercial radio as a place to find new, different and innovative music beyond what the kiddies and the record companies other vested interests are voting for on the Hot 30. The NOVAs play a style of contemporary music for their target demographic but most stations wait until a song is a hit before they get on it and see no need to play it until it is a hit. Commercial radio has little to offer the music fan in a world where the internet offers more variety, downloadable favourites and on-demand outlets like Youtube. I don't listen to it. I scan my way across the dial every now and then the way some people drive past their old houses to see what's changed. A new slap of paint this time, a fancier car in the driveway another time, no real change, these people aren't that much different from the last. I still know my way around that old house, I just don't think much of what they've done with it.