Things you never hear on the radio any more
1. People Announcing Who The Song Is By
This started as a sarky comments box dig at 6music, who may well be playing rub new band The Bravery day and night but frankly I wouldn’t know, because it’s so rare for anything new on their playlist to get actually named as such by the DJ. And when they do bother to tell you they mumble it. XFM are bad on this too, and I grumpily assumed that this is an ‘indie thing’ but when I thought about it some more I realised that Radio 1 were if anything even worse. It’s as if the transmittion of basic information is some kind of naff hangover from the old school Smashie and Nicey days and now Simply Not Done unless people email in and ask. Some credence is lent to that theory by the fact that the most informative pop station is cheesy old Capital.
Hand in hand with this is the rise of commercial digital stations which simply dispense with DJs entirely. Smash Hits radio can probably assume that anyone listening knows its entire playlist, but Kiss FM can’t. Maybe not telling you what’s been playing is some kind of cunning scheme to thwart the downloaders. I grabbed recent hot dance smash Uniting Nations off the inter only to find that I’d heard it fifty times in the last week.
(The exception to this is Andrew Collins, who is a DJ of the Peelite old school and very diligent about letting you know what’s playing. Good for him – but since everything Collins, A. plays comes from when Collins, A. worked for the NME, i.e. when I read it, I know it all anyway.)