I used to go out with a publicist who believed in the Andy Warhol maxim: “Don’t read your press, weigh it.” Of course, in these online days, weighing your press can be a little tricky, but the message remains the same. All press is good press, because it gets whatever you’re selling out to people who might be interested.
Which brings us to Radio X. The new XFM has been noisily rebranded as “Radio Geezer”; it has called itself “male-focused”, as though women aren’t allowed to listen. A calculated move, I reckon. First, it gets everyone talking about Radio X on social media, always quick to pick up on sexism. And second, it alerts advertisers to the station’s target market: young men with money to spend.
It also leaves the DJs in a tricky position, Chris Moyles in particular. Despite his immense broadcasting talent, Moyles was beginning to seem like a dinosaur at Radio 1 before he left, and Radio X’s no-women-here shtick sticks a little easier to him than it would do to, say, Graham Norton. Moyles will have to work hard to shake that label off. Which, of course, he will do. On his first breakfast show this week he played Girls Aloud – geddit – and announced, rather sweetly, that despite “many people” thinking that the new station is “just for blokes, by ruddy blokes, playing ruddy bloke-music for more ruddy blokes”, it isn’t. “That’s a load of balls,” said Moyles: such a ruddy bloke reference it actually made me laugh.
Chris Moyles is a great broadcaster who pulls in high-profile guests (Noel Gallagher, Stereophonics’ Kelly Jones), and I find Radio X perfectly listenable. It doesn’t offend my delicate lady ears one tiny bit. And that might be the problem. Vernon Kay wafts in and out, barely registering on the interest scale. People are getting in touch with his show using rude names, he said on Thursday – things such as Paul Smeenis, Peter Bread, Tess Tickle: I’m stopping there – and he and his producer are finding it hard to know which names are OK to say on the radio. Blander still is poor Dan O’Connell, who appears to have been told not to talk at all. Still, Johnny Vaughan, on after O’Connell, makes up for that. Vaughan, like Moyles, is never bland and is a good signing for the station.
And, you know, at least they’re on air. Hattie Pearson, Radio X’s sole weekday female presenter, is on too, but at 1am (Jo Good and Birdy have shows at the weekend). There is no one broadcasting whose skin is any colour other than a grey-ish white. Even if you don’t think that’s a problem, it makes for boring listening after a while. Also, there are only so many times I can hear Mr Brightside by the Killers or The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks before wanting to syringe my ears (and I like both those songs).
Commercial radio, from X to Kiss FM, suffers from its bosses believing that not only do we want to hear the same kind of people talking, but also the actual same tracks over and over and over, until our brains leak out from our ears and dribble over our clothes. Something different would be good. Not because it’s PC, but because the alternative – and remember, Radio X is meant to be alternative – ends up sounding so very, very dull.
