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There's nothing more divisive among different people's tastes and preferences than the kind of music they like to listen to. One man's Country music is another man's bitter bile, that's for sure.
It's the kids that are the most fascist and intolerant in their choice. Play something they don't know about already - and off they go to the far horizon like a rat out of an aqueduct, or they just give the loudspeaker a pitying look and turn away. They're much better placed in hearing their particular kind of music of course, what with I-Pods, MP3 Players, music-on yer-mobile and all the hi-tech delivery methods of today´s technology. Far better catered for than those like me of shall-we-say an earlier generation, who perhaps only had the various BBC radio programmes, tapes and gramophone records to feed our regular need for canned music. An avid radio fan from quite tender years, I once remember timing on my H Samuel chronograph a Family Favourites programme: thirty minutes of yak and only twenty minutes of records in an hour's show. Did we really need Jean Metcalfe to tell us every single week what the weather was like in BFPO 29 ? Why not squeeze in another Paul Anka instead ?
Just mentioning “gramophone records” there reminds me that my grandson watched me sifting through my LP collection a few years ago. Later I overheard him telling his little pal, “My grandad's got a lot of big black CDs!” It's not a generation gap, it's a chasm,
Grown-ups still have markedly fixed ideas of course about what they like in music. Michael Bolton fans often can't stand Celine Dion, for instance. Some 50 year old girl who thinks that Elvis was the bee's hips probably can't stand Mr. Relaxation Perry Como. Although in my experience an avid opera fan is much more likely to enjoy a beautifully produced rock ballad just as much as they enjoy highlights from The Magic Flute. And no matter how long you´ve been involved in music, you still get surprises. I was amazed at the number of twenty- and thirty-somethings who were in raptures at a recent Berlin concert by the decidedly balding James Taylor, and an EMI Records exec I know who used to work at the Beeb said recently that if it hadn't been for the likes of the Three Tenors, Renee Fleming and Il Divo, there'd be no effective classical record market at all – the minscule amount of sales wouldn't justify the majors' investment in recording sessions and production costs. He omitted to mention the pioneering campaign from China by the German guy who halved the price of classical CDs and grabbed a notable part of the sales with his Nexus brand.
The launch of Classic FM in Britain and Germany several years ago has been a mixed blessing for the record industry, said Mr. EMI Records plugger. Of the total CD buying public, those who build up their personal collections of “classical music” CDs, i.e. anything from Hayley Westenra's pop opera ballads through the Readers Digest 100 Best Orchestral Memories, to John Elliott Gardner's authoritative and scholarly interpretations of the Bach Cantatas on original instruments ( how do they KNOW ?) have mostly now got on their bookcase all the records they need.
So they tend to find that the increasingly adventurous music policy of Classic FM provides them with their essential dose of“the tingle factor” - that wonderful sense of discovering a new work or composer that they'd never have thought of going out to a record shop to buy. Simply because it's there on the radio for them – all through the day and night-time – free.
But just returning to the “major market” - that vast spread of popular music that extends from Frankie Laine to Rosemary Harding, with Snorer Jones, ELO, Abba, the Beach Boys, Sinatra and Robbie Williams with all their variations in-between. It's this kind of music that still has the most general and definable pleasure-giving potential. And credit where credit's due, the record companies of all sizes have been pushing forward the bounds of the general music-lover's taste with professional dedication for almost a century, revealing to us on record vast swathes of talent that would otherwise have languished in nightclubs or on university bandstands. They're not all robbing rogues who recycle back-catalogue material at ever-rising prices, you know.
And it's this broad range (crikey I nearly said the dreaded word “Spectrum”) of music that popular music radio uses for its staple. Tuneful yet challenging, familiar yet “new”, memorable yet previously unheard, tasteful as well as subversive. In fact, emphasising the concept that listening to music is an indispensable part of civilised life. That's what us radio folks try to provide as the staple diet of musicradio. BBC Radio 2 is the giant of the breed, with an vast nationwide following; Capital and Virgin provide stimulating fare for the red-braces and capuccino class cruising the West End in their drophead Mercs., as well as the young newly-wed slaving over the nappy tub and the Kwikfit guys crashing about and swearing at the grease bucket. The former king of musicradio BBC Radio 1, where so many of the present-day commercial jocks signed up for their pensions after throwing-up for years on a boat, now seems to be recovering from its tribulations of policy conflicts and has settled firmly on providing the renegade range of rock - serving a deserved purpose in the market.
So you're left with the rest of musicradio – the pipsqueaks like Maldyn FM in mid-Wales, one of the 200-odd small commercial stations in the UK that base their operations on the kind of music I described. And even our own midget Cool FM. In the still of the night I wakefully wonder if the balance here is right. Should there be more country and less night-time classics? More 60's Britpop and fewer moody rock ballads? More Abba and less Eminem? Less reggae and more folk?
Having decided firmly, in the absence of the availability of real talent like Wogan or Walker, against indulging the vanities of half-baked local DJs who invariably talk utter bollocks, having passed on the concept of “The Rock Hour” or “The Jazz Hour” to avoid alienating the rest of the audience while that particular specialism is airing, and opting instead for an entirely mixed palette, the task of making the right sound in this style of radio is doubly difficult but also maybe more rewarding. There is, after all, hard proof that where stations abandon DJs in favour of an almost entirely automated music playout system, those stations lead their market ahead of the chattering music radios.
So maybe we should leave stacks of A5 flyers about the place, asking people to express their preference for the music they want on their local English language radio. That would be really democratic, wouldn't it? Or would it?
One man's meat is another man's poison, particularly where music's concerned. So maybe we should just plough on regardless. After all, as the guy said in the film “Good Morning Vietnam” - “Jeez, colonel, it's only RADIO !” |
