Boss Radio

It's with some relief that I can announce that on this week's 'Any Questions?' the Labour party seems to have seriously cut back on it's annoying habit of referring to the government as "This Tory-led coalition", it was getting really annoying.

For their part the Tories are being a lot more careful with their "The mess the previous government left us" line following increasing barracking from the audience on both 'Any Questions?' and 'Question Time'. They were, I suspect, a little worried that the general public was slowly making the connection.

It goes like this. The banks go bust and plunge us into a giant economic crisis, the New Labour government bails them out to the tune of millions of quid using our money because allowing the banks to go bust would be unthinkable (I'm thinking about it and it's starting to seem like a pretty good idea to me) thus making our financial condition even worse. The Conservatives get in with the help of the Liberals and start banging on about the mess Labour left them. The bankers continue to pay themselves huge bonuses and the Tories refuse to do anything about it. Then it's revealed that over half of the Conservative party's funding comes from the banks...

The Labour party gave our money to the banks so the banks could give eleven and a half million quid to the Conservatives.

And they have the cheek to bray about the Labour Party being funded by the unions...

Meanwhile, back at 'Any Questions?', would it be possible for politicians to stop 'Thinking'? They seem to be continuously thinking that something is right, that this is the way to go, that the public will support this. There's nothing wrong with thinking, but they're adding the subtext "I think, therefore I'm right".

No you're not. Now stop it or I may have to kill you*.

*I keep slipping this in to my blogs because it apparently attracts the attention of the forces of goodness, anti-terrorism, and all that is right, and I like the idea that my blogs are being read by important people.

In the USA the NAB have begun their campaign against the proposal that they, like radio stations over the rest of the world, should pay the artists who make the records a commision for playing them. On their website there's an article with the same title as this blog (No, I'm not paying them commision for it). It reads:-

Olympians aren’t the only ones who bring home the gold…

Local radio stations provide billions of dollars in promotional value to artists and record labels. In appreciation, the record labels bestow upon radio stations "gold" and "platinum" albums to show their gratitude.

So why do labels now want to "tax" radio for playing music – a practice that has put money in their pockets for more than 80 years?

I would venture to say that the reason is because the rich b@$#@£ds who run the record companies are thanking the rich b@$#@£ds for... let's not call it 'payola', let's call it 'services rendered', and it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the artists get paid their dues.

Since it will never see the light of day, here's the letter I've sent to the NAB today:-

I can't help thinking you're being more than a little frugal with the facts about performance tax, known to me and my brother as 'royalties'. The fact is that when a US artist gets played on the radio almost anywhere in the world, even Cuba, they get paid performance royalties, but when a foreign artist gets played on US radio they get nothing. The US is one of just five countries in the entire world that don't pay performer's royalties, and the other four are 3rd world nations.

To say you offer free publicity is nothing short of dishonest. When scores of US radio stations were chasing the Beatles around the globe they weren't doing it because they wanted The Beatles to be big stars, they were doing it because The Beatles were making big money for them, and in the majority of markets that's still the situation, from everything I've heard of US radio over the internet over 90% of the material they broadcast is from already successful recordings.

As far as I'm concerned if radio stations in the richest nation in the world can't afford to pay me and my brother our miserable pittance then there is something majorly wrong with the way those radio stations are being run, and I would suggest that the guys at the top take a wage cut immediately for manifestly failing in their jobs.

Maybe I should put my mouth where my money is and get Boss Radio onto the air...

Just to show 'them' that it can be done of course.

I was listening to a documentary on the radio whilst I washed the dishes. It was on the subject of Surviving the Pressures of Modern Day Living.

This is something which I personally feel that most of us manage to do quite well without any need of a documentary on the subject. If anyone wants to make a documentary on how to survive the pressures of modern day living they could do no better than to simply follow me around with a camera. I am the very model of survival in the modern world.

Not so the guy they were interviewing. He was a TV writer and he had traded in his London pad for a family home in the Chiltern Hills. Sounds idylic, and indeed it was, the writer was hard pressed to think of anything bad about it, but when pushed he said the mobile 'phone signal was very bad out there. He had to leave his 'phone leaning against the back door and if it rang he had to speak to people while walking around the garden.

Have we really reached the stage where people don't realise that there is an alternative to mobile telephones? It's called the home 'phone and it's plugged directly into a network of telephone cables so it doesn't need a signal to work. It's also a whole lot cheaper and more reliable.

I used to wonder why people like that earned more money than me, but now I know. They need it to pay their mobile 'phone bills.

No, of course I'm not serious. In 1967 Ted Short, the postmaster general of Britain, said we would blast any pirate TV stations attempting to broadcast to our shores out of the sky. The Thatcher and Blair governments didn't feel that way, this pirate station was being run by their mate, the Dirty Digger. Rupert Murdoch to the rest of you.

Murdoch was taking a massive risk, the official satellite station, BSB, was due to start transmissions any day and it had far superior technology, in fact it was completely incomatible with Sky, so the punters would have to decide between one or the other, to receive both would require two dishes, and that was illegal in Britain. They went on the air with no test broadcasts and very few satellite dishes installed, but they were first to air.

Then they struck lucky. BSB was delayed, giving Sky establishment time, and they used the time well spending a fortune on first-run movies; they studied the BSB schedules and developed alternative programmes for everything the competition was going to offer. By the time BSB hit the ether Sky had already established the principle of paying-to-watch-commercials with a much larger installed audience than their rivals. True, BSB suffered from far less weather interference, but the weather played ball and the difference was not immediately obvious, and true, BSB's picture and sound were visibly and audibly superior... If you had the equipment to see and/or hear it, but most Brit TV viewers just had bog-standard TVs and the difference wasn't really much of an issue, just as V2000 video failed against the better established VHS, BSB failed against the Sky behemoth. Although it was, for political reasons, described as a merger, the combining of the two companies into BSkyB was a complete takeover. The BSB satellite was shut down and its dishes became redundant.

Then Murdoch set his sights on the British TV establishment. He bid apparently silly money for the exclusive rights to broadcast football and it paid off, he is now in the happy position whereby subscribers are payng him the money to continue bidding silly money for more football; then he started buying the rights to established US TV series like 24, Lost, and, of course, The Simpsons. He also tried to blind side terrestrial TV by always being first with innovations. The downside of this was that once again he was imposing inferior technology on his audience, especially when they were based upon US standard TV rather than UK standard.

Today Sky is firmly established with its transmissions from distant satellites which break up in bad weather, much like Radio Luxembourg established itself with its swishy broadcasts from The Grand Dutchy over half a century ago. Funnily enough, the satellites that Sky broadcasts from and the programmes of Radio Luxembourg both originate from the same company, RTL, Radio & Televison Luxembourg.

Maybe if the offshore stations of the 60s had realised that all they needed to do was to get the backing of a country we'd still have Radio London, Radio City, and Swingin' Radio England. We do still have Radio Caroline though.

It's broadcasting from Sky.

Hah! Some of you will have made an obvious, but slightly incorrect assumption about this post, the rest of you will be wondering 'Who in the hall is Bill Drake?'

For those who think they've got it sussed, Bill Drake did not name my blog, well, not directly anyway...

This blog is named after the band I've been playing in for about 40 years. We've outlived The Grateful Dead and The Mothers of Invention, and are currently running neck and neck with The Tower of Power, although they get a lot more work than us and get better paid for it too

I called the band Boss Radio because at the time I owned the name.

I owned it because back when the government were trying to drive offshore radio stations off the air with the Marine Offences Act there was this plot to go out to the former Radio City fort and start broadcasting from the minute that the act came into force until they either came out and dragged us off or they starved us out. I became involved partly because I'd been on the fort already and partly because some guy dropped a load of tapes on my doorstep and asked if I could make up some jingles out of them for the station.

Further investigation revealed that he had no idea what format the station was broadcasting or what it was called, so I suggested two stations, one pop and one easy listening since those were the two genres covered by the current offshore stations. Sometime later the guy got back to me and said that 'they' liked the idea and they'd leave it up to me to name the stations. The tapes consisted of several recordings of the offshore stations, and one of WCFL, and I couldn't see how I could make any of the jingles on them into new jingles until I came across a sting on a Swinging Radio England tape that just went 'Boss Radiooooo'. I set to work cutting up jingles and dropping the sting in where the old station names went, and shortly after that the guy turned up and said one of the backers had pulled out and the whole thing was off. For all I know the whole thing might have only existed in his mind.

The trouble is, I'd registered the name 'Boss Radio', I now owned a name and had nothing to use it on...

The Boss Radio referred to in the sting was a radio format devised by Bill Drake and Ron Jacobs. Unbeknownst to them another young DJ called Ron O'Qinn was devising a format for a British offshore station to be called Swinging Radio England, and the two formats were to be released to a waiting world at about the same time, one in the US and one in the UK. Due to delays in getting the ship on air Boss Radio hit the US airwaves first, and although I have absolutely no knowledge of this, I suspect that this time advantage enabled O'Quinn to appropriate the name the name for his format over here. There were now two entirely different Boss Radios filling the ether.

The US version went on to become the biggest thing in Top 40 radio ever, the UK incarnation, due mainly to some really bad handling at boardroom level, but also to the looming Marine Offences Act, never really caught on. But it provided me with the sting which went into the jingles that I protected by registering the name which is why I named my group that and carried it over to my blog...

So farewell then Bill Drake. Others better aquainted with your achievements will write your obituaries, but this blog would like to thank you for giving it a name.