On the Air in a Flash
So far as I recall, I’m not a superhero. My superpowers are definitely a bit wonky, more Clark Bent than Clark Kent. When people Marvel at me it’s because of incompetence, not an ability to jump from building to building without looking down. Only my handwriting is spidery. Nevertheless, fifteen years ago this month, I did suddenly identify with Flash Gordon.
You’ll recall him in that wonderfully schlocky eponymous movie. It had Queen’s possibly least popular song as its theme, and Brian Blessed’s immortal ‘Gordon’s alive?’, a meme before memes were a thing. The funniest line in the film comes towards the end, when Dale Arden intones ‘Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the earth’. The entire cinema fell about laughing at that. Although, when you think about it, any self-respecting superhero should be able to accomplish that feat in a trice. Fourteen hours seems a bit dilatory.
Nevertheless, I – just a man, with a man’s courage – knew how Flash felt, in June 2009. I didn’t have fourteen hours to save the earth, but a much more ridiculous deadline: nine days to launch a national terrestrial radio station.
I’d been running my music business Amazing for a few years, which meant a website a bit like Soundcloud. We work with emerging artists, trying to help their careers, and I had been pondering how we could increase visibility and offer more to musicians. I remembered my own emotions when, a gangly teenager, I stood in my mother’s kitchen and heard me, playing the drums on the radio. The BBC, as it happens. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life, empowering, encouraging, validating. How nice it would be, I thought, to give that experience to the next generation of musical talent, by launching our own radio station.
And - wouldn’t you know it - there was a way to do it. Shortly before, the UK had launched digital radio. It’s like HD in the States, with the important difference that people actually did have DAB radios in the UK, and they do actually listen to them. Accordingly, our largest broadcast technology company had spent a fortune building transmitters, intending to launch new stations doing different things, not just re-broadcasting the BBC or commercial AM/FM stations. Slight snag; each station that launched went bust. When another one fell silent, they started broadcasting 24x7 birdsong to keep the transmitters warm. And the audience figures went up. It was all a bit embarrassing.
So when I came along with my barmy idea of a radio station that played nothing but brand new music you had never heard before, the owners of this expensive but borderline redundant new technology showed me a contract, instead of the door. One condition; launch in nine days. This was so they could trumpet a new and innovative station in an upcoming shareholder meeting.
Now I’m not sure how familiar you are with broadcasting timescales, but nine days is not really quite enough. By about nine months. But we really wanted to go on the air.
So I called my oldest friend.
When we left Oxford, Ian Baker and I had both joined the BBC. I was a management trainee, waltzing around pretending I knew what I was doing, like all Oxbridge arts graduates. Ian, who had studied physics, got a proper job and became an engineer. After working his way up and becoming CTO of the entire place (he built BBC Online), he was freelancing.
‘Hello Ian’, I said, ‘do you have any free time at the moment? Could you help me launch a national radio station?’
‘Ooh, that sounds fun’, Ian replied. ‘How long do we have?’
‘Nine days’.
The line went quiet. Then he called me a bloody idiot. And then he agreed to do it.
We decided we could make it work with a three hour loop of some of the best tunes in our website, interspersed with ‘station imaging’ – announcements about our aim to create access to opportunity, explaining that listeners could influence the radio playlist by going to the website. Whilst Ian worked out how to get it on the airwaves, I wrote some scripts, and we popped out to the streets of Newcastle with a portable recorder. ‘Would you mind reading this, please?’ we asked passersby, a jumble of accents and voices, old and young, engaged and confused.
‘This is Amazing Radio - new music and new voices, with us in control’.
‘You’re listening to Amazing Radio - the music you’re about to love’.
‘Amazing Radio - you heard it here first’.
When someone added ‘what’s aall that aboot like?’ in a Geordie accent, we kept it in. Then Ian, King of the Impossible, sent the three hour loop by ftp to the ‘multiplex’.
This was not a cinema with smelly popcorn, but the place where the broadcast distribution started, thence to transmitters all over the UK. He persuaded an engineer – I like to think he was wearing a white coat – to download the loop and stick it in an MP3 player. To do this - ah-ah! – required a Flash card. (It was A Mighty Flash, really). And so, at midnight on the appointed day, fifteen years ago, the engineer pressed ‘play’, and the birdsong ended. We were on the air: a national radio station, broadcasting from a thing the size of your thumbnail.
The next morning there was no solar eclipse, but there was cause for alarm. People were cross. I found a ‘bulletin board’ of broadcasting industry nerds, who were outraged that we had launched with no press fanfare and they knew nothing about it. They were extremely sniffy.
‘I’ve been listening all day and I haven’t heard a single song I know’ said one, entirely missing the point. ‘I know’, wrote another, ‘and it is very amateurish. The station imaging even sounds like it was recorded in the street!!!’
So they scoffed and they scorned, until a somewhat smarter correspondent, who had actually been paying attention, wrote ‘if you listen to what they say they are trying to do – to smash open the doors of opportunity - it all makes sense. And recording in the street is deliberate. It’s part of the point’. Suddenly, like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppet Show, they all went from ‘I hate it!’ to ‘I love it!’, pretending they had sussed our game.
And then, God bless him, Terry Pratchett got involved. You’ll recall him as the curmudgeonly author of the Discworld novels. He wrote to The Times; ‘Such a horrible racket. The Birdsong was much better’. And then an idiot Tory MP complained about it in Parliament. Free publicity. Brilliant.
Then, like the pure in heart finding the Golden Grail (do you think this Flash Gordon metaphor might have outlived its usefulness yet?), the people came. The great thing about DAB is that stations are ranked by name. We were two clicks to the left of the BBC. Listeners idly tuning their radios fell across Amazing Radio by accident. And of course, we have a deliberately stupid name, inviting people to check it out. So despite having no PR budget – actually, come to think of it, no anything budget - we suddenly started getting emails from people saying ‘I have no idea what this is, but I love it’. One particularly thoughtful listener wrote ‘I know I won’t like everything you play, but I can always change it’ (by going online and voting).
And then the newspapers weighed in. Laudably forward-thinking, said The Daily Telegraph. Superb ... a ray of light, according to The Huffington Post. A force for good in broadcasting, opined The Guardian. A revolution, the end of the closed shop, according to The Sunday Times. Nobly Democratic, worth supporting, said Time Out. An idea so simple you can't believe it hasn't been done already.... a lovely parallel universe, wrote The Observer. Over the pond, even NAB (the US National Association of Broadcasters) got wind of it, saying it was ‘a brilliant application of social media strategies to the broadcast world’.
We gulped, and kept going, gradually extending the length of the loop, hiring DJs, then building out some infrastructure to allow us to schedule shows properly. The first DJ programmes were recorded in a sound booth literally made of cardboard boxes on the attic floor of our grotty offices in Grey Street, Newcastle. Then I hired the former Head of Music at BBC Radio 1 to run the station. Then Ian built lots of clever software; we were the first people anywhere in the world to offer pause and rewind of live radio, and the first to let you time-shift content, so you could listen to our British breakfast show at breakfast time in LA. With your granola and facelift. Amazing Radio survived, and then, little by little, it grew. It was like legal pirate radio.
As we gained traction, we started to discover artists before anyone else in the world. Alt J were the first, who were called Films when they uploaded their first track, later to be their debut single Tessellate. We put it on the air the same day. Another, Dua Lipa, is headlining Glastonbury this year. In the fifteen years since that first thumbnail launch, we’ve given first-ever radio play to thousands of artists, broadcast every hour of every day, and aired 127,397 new tunes. Though as you read this, that number will have increased.
Today we no longer have a transmitter – you don’t need it in a world of smart phones and Apps – but we do have two Amazing Radio stations, one focused on the USA, and we’re proud to have helped so many musicians find an audience, attracting six million registered users in the process. We’re adding pictures, too, with Amazing TV now live for testing purposes. It’s like ‘Netflix for Music’, aiming to recreate the glory days of MTV, music videos introduced by VJs, but distributed with today’s technology. You can have a sneak preview at thisisamazing.tv. We’ll launch it properly when we can find a ludicrous deadline.
Today, fifteen years later, that harum scarum start-up seems a world away, but the mission remains the same; to help musicians find an audience. We could not have done it without our patient investors, who include AOL co-founder Steve Case and Sting; the wonderful staff and DJs, who share my belief and have kept the thing going; the enthusiasm of listeners, who daily tell us how they love that moment when they hear a fabulous new song for the first time; and those incredible musicians who wake up one morning with a song in their head, and capture it for the world to hear.
But as I look back on fifteen years of sheer determination, I think most of Ian, my oldest and closest friend, who found a way to convert that nine day deadline into technical reality. He was the smartest and humblest of men, and his death last year left a huge gap. Ian was genuinely Amazing. Ian was a real superhero.