It was a rain-sodden Friday night at the end of another week of lockdown ennui and anxiety; what could be more soothing than pottering about, aperitif on the go, listening to some decent tunes? And hark! A brand new radio station to ring the changes, one promising not merely a schedule brimming with aural treats but one carefully curated to reflect the tastes, the sensibilities and the vitality of an entire generation.
Boom Radio, launched last week on Valentine’s Day, set its stall out in uncompromising fashion, with a poem, an Ode to Boomers that is part mild grievance (“You are the original influencer”, it insists, there when “music was fearless and came from the heart”, when live performances were more than “‘an experience’ to film on your phone”) and part rallying cry to the postwar babies who, it says, changed the world and are still running “at full speed” (“There’s still too much to live/Too much to love”). As I listened, adverts for fresh-fish deliveries and Dormeo mattresses punctuated a beguilingly odd mixture of numbers from post-Manfred Mann Paul Jones, Tom Petty and Jamie Cullum.
Friday night’s host – and, in Groundhog Day fashion, also Saturday morning’s – was Roger “Twiggy” Day, an alumnus of Radio Caroline and Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio, more recently heard on the Costa Blanca’s Bay Radio, which explains why he was celebrating falling Covid infection rates not merely in the UK but also in Spain. He has a pleasantly random presenting style, flexible enough to take in the challenges of getting to grips with new technology, exhortations to cheeriness – “No gloom on Boom!” – and, somewhat startlingly, an expression of sadness at the recent death of US talk radio controversialist Rush Limbaugh.
But early-days output is often a little uneven, and Boom Radio has some heavyweight expertise behind it, not least in the shape of industry veterans Phil Riley, who launched the listener-magnet Heart FM and relaunched LBC, and David Lloyd, who has done his time at several radio stations and the UK Radio Authority, now part of Ofcom. They have identified the UK’s 14 million boomers, noticed the money in their pockets, and realised that in the great identity-driven media land-grab, they are catnip to advertisers.
Alongside Day, they’ve signed up DJs David “Kid” Jensen, David “Diddy” Hamilton and Nicky Horne. Esther Rantzen will chat to her daughter, Rebecca Wilcox; distinguished agony aunt Anna Raeburn will advise on listeners’ problems; Grahame Dene, who inherited Kenny Everett’s breakfast show for Capital in the 1970s, will wake them up every morning.
Boom’s overwhelming message is one of empowerment, its mantra – also the title of Riley’s interview show, which today features Chris Tarrant – that its audience is Still Busy Living. And it is not alone in understanding that, as platforms and technologies converge, audiences themselves are ripe for atomisation. Bubbles – whatever defines them – are how to maximise returns on investment.
Hence, of course, the emergence of Andrew Neil’s GB News, busy signing up a roster of presenters from Sky News and TalkRadio; hence the boom of TalkRadio itself, whose most voluble and contrarian presenters, from Julia Hartley-Brewer to Dan Wootton and the mask-ripping Mark Dolan, have created a very special niche for themselves during the pandemic by taking a position of so-called lockdown “scepticism”.
Age, though, is something else. Who are these boomers? I am listening to Boom Radio illegally, as it were; I was born four years after its “official” cut-off birth year of 1964 and must, I suppose, wait for a radio station dedicated entirely to me. But my partner – himself a radio broadcaster, and music addict – sneaks under the wire. I shout downstairs for him to come and listen to this new channel created for him, but he is too busy curating his own “experience”, playing his collection of singles by the reggae genius, U-Roy, who also died last week. What else is on his turntable at the moment, I ask? Fontaines DC and Fiona Apple, comes the answer.
And therein lies the issue. If you love music, you don’t stop listening to it; you don’t freeze it in time and, as much as you cherish and replay the songs of your youth – indeed, your Big Youth – you make room for the new.
Which is not to say that Boom Radio isn’t on to something. Nostalgia is big business; but so too is the creation of identity silos, in which those who feel – or, indeed, might be encouraged to feel – that their needs are not catered to will be welcomed and made to feel at home.
In a broader context, covertly pitting the generations against one another has become a disquieting feature of our collective psyche’s problems. Greedy old people flouncing us out of Europe and millennials splurging their house deposits on flat whites and avocado toast are equally pernicious caricatures of disparate groups of people that foster mistrust and division.
The biggest problem with the culture wars? There’s so little culture in them. Reliant on a view of humans as unchanging, incurious and desperate to set up gated communities from which to defend their territory against all-comers, they ignore the opportunity for flexibility and renewal, for difference and diversity.
It would be unfair, of course, to project all this on to a pleasant enough radio station which, as I type, is belting out Barbra Streisand. Because, let’s face it, young or old, we all love a bit of Barbra.
