Eddy Says

Eddy Says: An open love letter to Xfm

By | Published on Monday 24 January 2011

Xfm

I’ve always loved Xfm. I used to listen way back when it was a pirate radio station, when Janice Long was a DJ there. An old singer friend swears that the band we were in were played even more on Xfm than Nirvana, back when both our band and Nirvana were new.

Radio is an adorable medium, but it is a notoriously fickle business, especially in the commercial sector. In an industry where specialist shows are rarely supported outside the BBC, I am delighted and amazed to still be producing and presenting one each week. I can’t speak for Ian Camfield and John Kennedy, but I feel sure they’d agree with me. And I feel both an enormous amount of admiration for both of them, and for the station that gives us each four hours at a time to play whatever we want, with no playlists, to support new artists, play demos, encourage new talent, watch artists develop, and drip-feed the mainstream, daytime feel of the station with the artists we nurture at night time.

Now in the eleventh year of my tenure on Xfm, I’ve had so many bosses that I’ve lost count. Each regime change has brought a fresh vision, some good, some great, and some not so hot.

We’ve all been through rollercoaster highs and lows over the past decade. The dizzy heights of Zoe Ball on drivetime with Zane in the evenings, or the awful XU era, where someone thought it’d be a good idea to not have DJs, to have no personality, just a virtual robot segueing tunes with jingles all day.

I’ve witnessed Xfm buzzing, booming, puffy chested with the pride that comes with knowing you’re doing something really sensational, and I’ve been there when the station was at its rock bottom, with poor, preyed-upon bosses grasping at straws of ideas before hurtling, backwards, into the Programme Director’s abyss.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and now feel I want to share it with you, because I genuinely feel that, in the ten years and ten months that I’ve been at Xfm, that the station has never sounded this good. I’m constantly blown away by both the daytime support for new ‘remix’ type artists, like Fenech-Soler, or Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, and now Jagga and Nero, and by the careful manipulation of ‘gold’, ‘silver’ and ‘recurrent’ records in the playout system. I used to hear the same old records come up again and again, really lazy programming, but I’m now hearing flows of music that are just gobsmackingly brilliant. The kind of radio that makes you want to stop your car, or pick up the phone and call someone to say “did you hear that?!”

That’s how a radio station should be.

And it’s getting better… and better… and wider, and more colourful, and more emotional. The old vision of Xfm as being just an indie-rock station has vanished, quite rightly, because Xfm is an ALTERNATIVE station. It’s not just about rock, or indie-rock. It’s about MUSIC. People – and not just the young – everybody’s taste has broadened. Gone are the days when rockers were rockers and ravers were ravers and never the twain shall meet.

I can’t tell you how proud and delighted I am each time I hear a record in the daytime which I know started out as a demo on ‘The Remix’, but more than that, and leaving my own vanity or pride aside, I practically weep tears of joy every time I hear that Adele record, or the James Blake one. These are the types of tunes that would have fallen by the wayside in previous Xfm incarnations, but now, we feel technicolor, and we feel emotional, which is how the greatest music surely must make you feel.

I get the same feeling listening to Xfm now as I did listening to KROQ in Los Angeles in the early 90s when I lived and worked there. I got a sense that all the jocks were good mates, I almost imagined them all living in a mad K-ROCK Monkees House. There was a palpable sense of pride in the music that they played, and that they ‘made’ or ‘broke’ by their initial support. You could tell the DJs not only loved each other, but they loved the music they were playing and we’re chuffed to be a part of its success.

I haven’t felt this good in a job ever, and I want to share this with you because I know how fickle this business is, and that commercial stations live and die by their audience figures, not by how good they are sounding. Of course, this is a personal and subjective view, you can never please everyone, but I just want to shout this from the rooftops and ask you, if you feel like I do, to spread the word… communicate, evangelise, make sure people know how goddamn good this station is sounding at the moment, so that we stand a chance of it staying like this.

If this brilliant new vision is deemed not to work (by the archaic way in which audience figures are derived in radio – don’t get me going on this one, that’s a future mega-rant right there) then there will be a regime change and somebody will turn up and decide we should just segue Kaiser Chiefs with Muse again all day long. That would be gutting for all of us – me, you, and all those fantastic artists who are getting radio support in the daytime right now.

I want Xfm to be appreciated now, the collective ego of the station has never felt so good, the office feels so happy, the staff are all so bloody nice and really, really good at their jobs (of course there aren’t enough of them, but that’s commercial radio in a recession for you) and here’s the bottom line: I have never enjoyed LISTENING to a radio station more than Xfm right now.

OK, I still hit the Radio 1 button on my car radio every time a Muse record comes on, but that’s just me, and I’m always back after a bit and it doesn’t take long before I’m smiling broadly again. The station is ROCKING right now, and interestingly, it is rocking that much more, by playing a bit less ‘rock’ and replacing it with music that just ‘rocks’ without actually being classified as such.

So, if you fell out of love with Xfm in the past, come back, have a listen, see what you think. If, like me, you think it’s fucking rocking right now, then tell a friend, we must encourage, and be positive, and spread the love. I want everyone to feel the same excitement I do when I switch on my radio now. Click. BOOM!

X eddy



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