Category: [Media]

It’s 50 years today since the entity now called Triple J began life, and the entity now called Double J has dusted off “the first day of Triple J”, sic, and is replaying it throughout the day… just been rather amused to hear the DJ admit they were having trouble rounding up enough Australian artists for their first day, which I suppose is less of a problem now (and grumbling too about how many months it took some records to appear in Australia after their international release). Kind of impressed they actually recorded the first day and kept it all this time… but listening back to it now it feels very strange (not just because it’s in glorious AM mono). Graham Berry just announced that later in the evening they’d have some live Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd plus Cheech & Chong and Ravi Shankar. And look at the playlist! Opening with “You Just Like Me Cos I’m Good in Bed” was a fairly controversial act, I know, but… Rolling Stones 2nd? Paul McCartney 3rd? Leo Sayer 4th? Led Zeppelin a couple of tracks later? Beatles, Deep Purple, Bad Company, Elton John, Maria Muldaur, Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, CSN, Santana, “La Grange” by ZZ Top, “Radar Love” by Golden Earring, Steely Dan, JOHN FUCKING DENVER, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” by BTO, “China Grove” by the Doobie Brothers, Tim Buckley… Portsmouth Sinfonia is probably the most radical choice so far, that Cheech & Chong “Mr Dope America” skit wouldn’t have passed on commercial radio… But really, how much of this would you think of as “youth radio” or “alternative” now?

And yet I suppose it must have been in 1975, which I daresay shows how much has changed over 50 years… I mean, those four specific songs just embody more of the Triple M classic rock ethos than they do anything, but I don’t suppose they felt that way at the time (not least because Triple M didn’t actually exist yet, but you know what I mean). And a few years later 2JJ would give Cold Chisel’s “Khe Sanh” a boost when other stations wouldn’t touch it. Now it seems like a veritable Triple M anthem. Have things just changed so much that it’s now almost inconceivable (for me anyway) that this was, you know, alternative then? The kids must’ve been different in 1975 and so must the music, and when I listen to this sort of thing now I’m doing so with years of knowledge of the music that came after it… Radio Birdman hadn’t yet started the Oxford Funhouse scene. A little bit over two years later we got the first Saints album. Must’ve been unimaginable on January 19th 1975. I don’t know, I don’t really have any coherent thoughts about this (you may have noticed). It’s just been intriguing to realise just how must of a foreign country the past can be.

Of course, the day is darkened a little by the passing of Arnold Frolows a few days ago…

In the mid-1970s, Frolows was delivering flowers around Sydney when the opportunity to interview for a role at the ABC’s brand-new youth radio station came up.
Marius Webb and Ron Moss had been tasked with building the station and they hired Frolows before its launch after a tip from Webb’s then secretary.
“Arnold joined Double J before it went to air, indeed, he was one of the first of its very first employees,” long-term colleague Stuart Matchett said at Frolows’s retirement party in 2014.
“He acquired much of the vinyl that made up the original music library. He programmed the music for many of the shows on Double J.” […]
Frolows began at the ABC in November 1974 as a research assistant in the Contemporary Radio Unit, before becoming a presenter and producer on the new 2JJ from July 1975.
His initial stint at the ABC was short, as he decamped overseas in 1977 where he took up other music-industry roles.
By 1981, Frolows was back in Australia and back on the station now known as triple j. He worked as a presenter and producer on various programs, including the Sunday night program, Ambience, which became a cult hit as it introduced audiences to downbeat, often hypnotic music rarely heard on other stations.
His role as music director became official in 1993, but this didn’t stop him from being on the tools. He served as the producer for Helen Razer and Mikey Robins’ triple j breakfast program in the 1990s and would appear on triple j programs presenting new music through the early 2000s. […]
Frolows left triple j in May of 2003. Before his departure, he’d been subject to a raft of commentary regarding his suitability for the role given his age. But he left the role of his own choosing, and never believed his age precluded him performing his job effectively.

I’d quit listening to the Js myself before that, and even more years have passed to the point where “youth radio” is comfortably ensconced in its middle age, but to give Arnold credit, his tenure as music director was better than Kingsmill’s seems to have been (at least if the annual Hottest 100 results are indicative). RIP to him. I bet a bunch of that music I was listening to while writing this came from him, too.

Clive Robertson has left the studio.

From his Talking Heads interview from a long time ago:

PETER THOMPSON: What are you interested in? Did you say want to say something through all of this?
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Um, I’d have to say the order of things especially at Channel 9, the order of news items. And if I said, “Look, this is really important”, I’d look at the camera and say, “This is a really important story” and set it up, and if it was an important story, then the audience think, “Oh this guy’s a good filter.” If you said, “Look, this is a silly item, I don’t know why we’re running it” and you run it and it is a silly item, you’ve got them. And it’s not a con. What that program did is different from most news programs is gave things what they really were worth.
PETER THOMPSON: But you were also by playing this role, undercutting the artifice what it is a lot of television.
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Oh, yeah, and did that go down well with the journalists? Have a guess Peter. “He’s ruling our station” and all that rubbish. I mean, we get a new item in at, say, 10.30 at night and I’d say, “By the way, you’ll see this at 6 o’clock tomorrow night” and they’ll say it’s the latest, “you know better”. “You can’t say things like that.” Well, you know, come on, so journalists are a bit thick as you know, Peter, you’ve worked with a few, they really are thick. I mean, they really should be sterilised.

I used to watch Clive back in the 80s when he was on commercial TV, because I was a slightly strange child drawn to programs that I wasn’t really old enough for. He may have been something of an influence on me. This is awfully sad.