The Pilot Project

In 2010, we took a first step to curating a national archive of new independent music. There's a long way to ago...

On Thursday 18th November 2010, at 7pm, I was a happy man, if slightly apprehensive. That’s when the Pilot Project website went live. Before then it was an idea and a holding screen. Now, it’s something else altogether. Over a thirty month spell of planning, cajoling and nagging, The Pilot Project has gone from a rough concept to a really solid website, packed with good stuff.  It’s done so with considerable help from some truly great people, and a very welcome grant from Digital Content Development at the Arts Council. And it’s given me craft satisfaction, the likes of which I haven’t felt for ten years. Then it was a huge classical database, built from scratch for lovely RTE lyric fm. That was great fun and very worthwhile. 

This is too, and it could turn out to be even better.

Magyar Radio. State Radio under the cosh.

Working in Radio in Budapest. Pretty much like The Mailbox... or Donnybrook... or Oxenstiernsgatan.

Magyar Radio Headquarters

I wrote most of this on the way back from a radio consult gig in Hungary. I’ve done this sort of thing quite a lot over the past twenty years or so, working all over the UK and Europe. Maybe fifty different stations; sometimes it feels like a lot more.

There’s something special about the first walk to work, in a new city, heading to a new client. Budapest did not disappoint, with golden autumn sunshine, mist over the Danube, and people everywhere heading out for the workday.  The work is (almost) always a pleasure, invariably interesting, with endlessly different technical challenges, irrespective of the music programmed. And in case you’re wondering what all this has to with this blog, which is supposed to focus on radio and music in the West Midlands… well, actually, there’s quite a lot.

UB40 30th Anniversary thoughts

Call me DJ Urassic: I’m pretty ancient on the evolutionary scale of djs. Actually, I don’t jock anymore, and that’s probably a good thing. But I do go on the radio to do things like the Handsworth documentary. And because I’m ancient, I get called in now and again to talk about one good old day or another.

This month sees UB40 touring to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of their first album. As I was the first jock in the known universe to actually play any UB40 on the radio, I’ve been tapped up several times for reminiscences. This led to a thoroughly enjoyable hour today on BBC WM, gassing with Carl Chinn, taking calls and waxing lyrical about four track recording sessions in bedsits in King’s Heath. Ironically, the station on which I played that early UB40 stuff was... BRMB. You know, the 'Made In Birmingham' guys. They haven’t been in touch. But, hey, I don’t think they play UB40 that much these days. And truth be told, back in the day, the station wasn’t impressed by my interest in obscure local bands… at least until those bands stopped being obscure.  

Interesting fact: UB40 are the fourth most successful British band EVER. Consistency and long-term appeal will do that for you.

Second interesting fact: they deliberately chose to keep their business in their hometown. Not many bands do that.   

Third interesting fact: only a town as multi-ethnic as Birmingham could have ever produced a band like UB40; they know it, and we know it.  That’s why their gigs are so satisfying. It was interesting to note during the programme today that many of the callers feel a very real sense of gratitude as well as a kinship with the band. Seriously.

Fourth interesting fact – and this is where it gets personal: the session I ran on BRMB was a custom rough mix of some of the tracks that were being worked on for the first album, Signing Off. I asked for early mixes; I got them, they worked just fine. The session, in fact, was a stomping, whooping, huge success for the Rock show that I ran at the time.

Whenever I tell this story, I get asked if I still have the original reel to reel tape, as it would be a priceless piece of Birmingham music history – the very first evidence of UB40 on record.

I don’t, of course. In those days, stations recycled tape, wiping the content to re-use the medium. Pro reel to reel tape was expensive stuff. Why, a 10.5” reel, giving you half an hour of play, might run you £15 in 1979, and that was too much money to tie up. This is a difficult concept to explain to anyone under 30 years of age. Factor in inflation, and that £15 gives you enough money to buy a couple of terabytes of hard disk storage… Enough for thousands of hours of material.

Now, it’s easy and cheap to make room for audio storage. Then, it wasn’t.  So countless hours of priceless material has been lost down the years. BRMB is not alone: the BBC did the same; everyone did. So a lot of stuff got lost. Some of it, like the UB40 sessions, irreplaceable, and of huge historical significance.

In a few weeks, I am launching a project  - the Pilot Project – which aims to go some way towards preventing this sort of thing happening again, so that we can stand a better chance of holding on to the vital and powerful music that is being made right now. It’s been two years in the planning, and we are a long, long way from nailing this thing down permanently.

It’s a tough call. But I live in hope. Watch this space for details, very soon.

Handsworth Evolution – a documentary

One tradition. Three generations of Birmingham reggae.

I spent a lot of time in the summer of 2010 bathed in classic reggae grooves, chasing down some of the musicians I worked with at local radio, over a generation ago, for a radio documentary. It was a true pleasure, and while it wasn't quite a labour of love – Birmingham Music Heritage paid me, bless, em, but they didn't pay me that much – I certainly put in way more time than was economic.  The picture here is from Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries; the site's well worth a visit. 

While working on the documentary, I got to hang out again with some dear friends from back in the day – so nice to catch up with some of the guys in UB40 that I hadn’t had a chat with for ages - and forge new friendships with guys like the great Andy Hamilton, and the amazing Apache Indian. And I got to do a bit of proper radio as well. It’s all there – the story of how the children of those early post-war immigrants came up with a vital new approach to reggae, mixed, matched and mashed up... and invented whole new styles of music along the way. And right now, there’s even a third generation doing new and vital stuff. Now, with the blessing of Birmingham Music Heritage, whose commission it was, I am making it available via MixCloud. Know what? I love internet publishing. All three parts are after the jump.

Getting that gig on Radio – it’s tougher than ever…

I realised, looking at the front blog page today, that, to my shame, I have not posted for well over a month; for this I apologise. However, I do have good reason for this apparent inactivity: I have been, and still am, ferociously busy on something I am calling the Pilot Project, about which I will blog in enormous detail very soon.

I'm also about to start teaching a seriously detailed Radio Course, concentrating on presenting skills. Normally I cover music scheduling, in a concentrated burst – not perhaps the best way to approach the topic - but this gig has me working on presenting and production, at length, with a team of committed and savvy students; I’m looking forwards to it. And, in a connected bit of serendipity, I was asked today for advice on how to apply to a station. So now seems a good time to pull all this together. More after the jump….  

If you want a paid gig on a radio station in the UK in 2010, you need to know a few key truths:

First: there are a helluva lot less jobs to go for now than there were at the beginning of the year. See my posts here and here for a few more details.

Second: the pay’s really not that great, unless you work your way up to stardom.

Third: the guys – it’s almost always guys, by the way – that you need to reach are, frankly, feeling just a bit beleaguered, what with budget cuts on one side, and job cuts on  the other.

But let’s say that you’re going to bite the bullet and go for it anyway. Here are some tips to help you along.

Listen, hard and long, to your chosen station or stations. Make a note of what you consider the strengths and weaknesses. Then listen, hard and long, to your stuff. How does this sound in comparison? What have you got that might fit with your target station? And what else has the station done that has worked well – or badly?

By the way, I’m assuming you have existing stuff; there’s really no excuse not to have existing stuff, even if you’re starting out – there’s community, student and internet stations galore. Go get involved, now, if you’re not involved already.

Put a demo together, specifically for the station you’re pitching to. Don’t just assemble a demo and think that will do for everybody – it won’t. 

Make the demo short. Lose almost all the music, and use the opportunity to show off with some flash music edits to highlight your production chops… or simply fade out and in. The station wants to know what you sound like, and how you work with music. Even though you are targeting a specific station, be true to yourself.

Put the demo together on a CD, and label it properly – printed label, with your name, address, email and phone number.

Find out the right guy to send it to. Include a CV that majors on your radio experience. Don’t forget to list real-world experience too – it helps to show that you’re a real person.  You got positive press-cuttings, endorsements, and letters of praise? Great! Put them together on the CD too.

Send it, and wait. The station almost certainly won’t come back to you instantly. But they may keep the CD on file, especially if it impresses. 

Keep waiting.

Do NOT pester the PD, his PA, or anyone else at the station.

Keep waiting.

If you don’t hear anything… well, you’re no worse off than you were before. Keep on working at your existing station and/or your day job. 

Keep waiting.

If they ask you in for a chat, go back to that list of strengths and weaknesses you drew up when you researched the station. Be ready to draw on that list… but whatever you do, be careful. They may have a truly crap drive time presenter… but he could just be the PD’s protégé.  The music selection may make you feel ever so slightly icky, but it’s almost certainly going to be a long time before they come to you for your considered views on programming. Rubbishing what they are doing almost never works.

But be ready to make constructive suggestions, based on what you’ve found in your research.  Present yourself so that they see you as having something they may need.  Throw some competition or promotional ideas out – and be ready for them to be pinched.

Have an answer ready if they offer you a job on (ha) ‘intern’ terms. Decide how you would handle a salary of rather less than you’re getting now at your day job.

And, if you get the job… have an exit route planned, just in case you conclude, too late, that you’ve landed a gig working with a bunch of deluded basket cases, lead by a penny-pinching psycho who will never pay you properly, or promote you. It's not uncommon - sadly.

And don’t count on this as a long-term career move. This year, there are dozens of able, worthy, experienced professionals, all of who have families and mortgages, who right now are wondering where they can go to, now their stations have been rationalised out of existence. A lot of stations cater to kids or parents with young families – that’s what the advertisers want. So they tend to go for presenters with that kind of appeal. The means... twenty and thirty somethings.

By the way, in case you think I’m trying to talk you out of going for that dream gig… I really am not. I’d just like you to have all the facts. But I really, really, want you in the industry if you happen to be hugely talented and determined.

Good luck….
.

Goodnight Lenin and DC Fontana, live and Local: two great bands

Goodnight Lenin and DC Fontana play blinders in two very different venues

It’s been a busy few weeks. In the past fortnight, for reasons that will become very clear in a couple of months, I’ve seen more than my usual quota of local bands, and I tend to watch quite a lot. I’m a BIG fan of local music. You often get to see new bands with extraordinary promise, and once in a while you see that promise on its way to being fulfilled. And above all, you have the pleasure of watching musicians play for the sake of making music – as opposed to for the express purpose of relieving you of as much money as possible in some soulless concrete box miles from anywhere.

Amazing Radio and Coast 106: Ghosts of stations past

Over the past two years, I’ve traveled around the country a fair bit, working on consult gigs at different stations. Most of this has been database troubleshooting and coaching, both in RCS Selector and PSquared’s AutoTrack Pro - fine scheduling engines both.

I've been struck by the lingering echoes of old radio ways, which persist down the years, even while the old premises are now occupied by new staff doing new things in new ways. But there are some constants. Almost everything has changed in the way we do radio - except for the people.  

Researching Music: Is this REALLY popular in your neck of the woods? Ever asked why?

One of my must-visit radio blog pages is the Infinite Dial, from the US-based Edison Research – who, unsurprisingly, do research for radio. They have a refreshingly open-minded approach to what radio may be now, and what it may become.  A recent post covers regional tastes, and it’s fascinating. Well worth a read, here.

I absolutely love this aspect of the business – ferreting out local tastes, finding out what matters locally. It’s a source of endless interest.  Of course, I also like this post because it reinforces my thoughts on localism. But I’d like to take things a little bit further.  

Our man at Edison remarks, quite rightly, that it’s always interesting to find those places where ‘Mony Mony’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ (hey, not talking Gold much) barely register with listeners, and indeed it is. The processes by which songs become popular and spread out to audiences are interesting and increasingly varied. Who would have thought that computer games like Guitar Hero and trash teen tv (Glee) would have had become major players, bigger than tightly playlisted radio format radio, in shifting product?

What interests me is this. If those horribly familiar songs (to US ears at least) Edison Research is talking about don’t light up audiences everywhere, should we question the continued faith placed in them in their core markets? And, more interesting still, exactly what songs are now lighting up those different audiences?  Classic oldie songs on Gold formats have been around a long time; they’ve had time to develop deep roots. So what made those roots either not take in the first place, or, more likely, lose their grip? And if this is genuine evidence – I’m not quite sure it is - that pop music radio's cosy  assumptions of the past fifty years are turning out to be either wrong, skewed, or outdated, why is such faith still placed in the old ways of operating?

Each market is individual. While we have increasing media homogeneity, this report is pretty convincing evidence that that homogeneity breaks down when you dig deep into each market. I’m not for one minute going to wear any jingoistic assumptions that because this research is driven from the US, that it is blinkered and limited in its vision; I think we’re largely doing a lot worse over here. But if my supposition that local individuality persists against an overwhelming tide of homogeneity, that is horribly inconvenient for our larger scale broadcasters, who increasingly resist any obligations to relate to their local market places.

And here’s the point: by skipping past the local, the network boys are in danger of handing over listenership to new local operators who are rooted in their markets, and willing to both dig into local tastes and reflect their markets. The only question now is: can local small-scale operators in the market and still to come to market, find ways to sustain themselves so they can survive and prosper? The next few years could be very interesting.

Schools Radio

This bunch of cheery chaps (there are chappesses involved too, but they were cropped out - I apologise), are some of the students I’ve been working with recently at a local school – Bishop Vesey, Sutton Coldfield – on a radio production project. The school was happy to define the activity as a radio station, although, alas, of studios and transmitters there were none. In fact for most of the project, there weren’t even such luxuries as microphones. I’m told this isn’t exactly uncommon. But you know what? Radio station status is irrelevant. This project has way more in common with proper, real-life radio station activity than you might think.

After all, any station worth its salt addresses one or more communities: local communities, communities of interest, or identity, or ethnicity, or music tastes, or age groups…. You get the picture. And, just as in real live radio, people come and go, join and leave teams, get to grips or give up, and grapple with technical and programming challenges. In so doing, they weave a web of involvement, hopefully with a high degree of continuity. A school is a particular community, very high on energy, very vocal, often brash, sometimes subtle, and full to bursting with youthful tribal identities that merge and split, coalesce, explode and implode. So there’s lots going on; lots of things to cover, which matter to that particular community.  Radio activities are an excellent 'fit'.

As to the work? Well, we scratched the surface. We made a start, and I’m very happy at the prospect of working with this team again in the next academic year.

This is grist to my mill. I’m especially interested in the notion of encouraging new people – and they don’t get much newer than this lot – to talk about matters of interest, to learn to voice, argue and present, to struggle with new techniques, and to deliver cogent material. As commercial  radio is increasingly rationalised out of having any impact at local level, there is a huge danger that this whole way of thinking will be wiped off much of our radio landscape. I would argue that now is the time to cherish and value these skills, because they will be desperately in demand in five or so years when the Digital Economy bill is… supposed… to clear the way for small-scale and community radio operations on the FM band.

If and when that day eventually comes, I can’t say whether there will be careers to build, or even livings to be made. Radio is turning itself inside out, and for many this is a very painful time. But I do know that radio on all its platforms – streamed, podcast, transmitted, web, digital or analogue – desperately needs good communicators to reach out to its communities of listeners. Those skills are hard-won, and the industry doesn’t seem to value them any more. We desperately need to avoid the mistakes made by television as it cuts costs and sinks to lower and lower levels. Car-crash tv, presented by vacuous inarticulate morons, may be good fun for a few minutes when you get in from the pub. It doesn’t work on radio.  Powerful, direct, loyalty-building communication does; always has, and always will. And it costs pennies… and the will on the part of the powers that be to let it grow and flourish. I’d love it – just love it, Kevin – if some of the above bright, engaging and likeable individuals were working in radio five or ten years from now.

PS: Two days after I took that photo, I was in Newcastle working with the excellent team at Amazing Radio; I'm due back next week. That's a whole different deal, and I'll post in detail in due course.

Budgets, cash flow and creativity

There’s been huge coverage of the jobs lost at commercial radio over the past few weeks. If you want to get up to speed on this, check the Guardian’s pages here. I feel desperately sorry for the several hundred people who will now be leaving the industry they love, some of whom have been hard at work for decades.

Of course, the business rationale is that in a recession, commercial radio needs to find ways to shoulder the extra burden of digital transmission costs, and provide better services to attract listeners to digital. I hear the transmissions costs argument loud and clear, but I’m not going to even discuss issues like ‘quality of output’ now that stations are turning into brands – it’s a pointless exercise.

But there’s a lot of point in thinking about how things can be done convincingly on low budgets. Two weeks ago, I participated in a TV show, hosted by the excellent Apache Indian (check his Wikipedia entry here) from his Corporation Street venue, Apache’s Bar. It was carried on BritAsia, Sky channel 833. He does this monthly. Apache laid on a live band (jazz horns and dhol rhythm section), an audience with things to say, and a key topic – why does radio not do more to support local talent? I was there to talk radio, of course. Interestingly, I was the only guy who turned up from my section of the media; others were invited. Funny, that. And there were only two points I could make.

Firstly: I was not going to defend the indefensible. Radio’s move from local to corporate is soul-crushingly awful for musicians making their way in the world and looking for some exposure.
Secondly: But, hey, radio be damned; great music will find always find a way to its audience, and the better it gets, and the more the audience buys in, the more radio has to acknowledge this. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen radio scramble to catch up with music developments it can no longer begin to control. So.... if you're a musician, get great. Simple.

But those points are tangential to this post. The fact is that Apache delivered a credible, engaging show on a minuscule budget. The same applies all over the country at community radio level. What you need, always, are clearly thought out ideas that your audience will engage with. What you don’t necessarily need is expensive kit.

Still on this topic: I’m just coming to the end of a month-log schools educational project. The equipment we were promised has yet to materialise, through no fault of the school. So we’ve been improvising, using borrowed kit, pressing unexpected tools into service, and working on ancient computers running the excellent and free open source Audacity editing software. Although we’ve had to adapt and revise a fair amount, at no point in the project have these limitations blocked the flow of ideas, and some of these ideas have been belters. I’ll blog separately about this in a week or so, when the project reaches its conclusion.

The best programming approaches, like the best ideas, come for free. They are the results of clear and focussed thought. And often – not always, but often - that clear and focussed thought flourishes best where it won’t be stifled by large corporate structures. If you’re in a tiny operation with zero budget, you may be blessed with a creative freedom you could look back on fondly in future years.