Selecting a morning radio programme is tricky.
My 07:20 alarm needs to wake me up, but not instantly piss me off by filling my ears with drivel. You want to be welcomed gently into existence with something engaging and pleasant. Your first mood of the day is important.
To be honest all I really want is a good selection of music, and not some idiot twatting on. Just call out the name of the band then get the next record on, what’s so difficult?
So I haven’t touched BBC Radio 1 in a long time, not since the days of driving to Livingston every day.
For the last two years I’ve been faithful to BBC 6 Music. It’s a good station, if a bit self-satisfied (“closer… to the music that matters,” spoken in an overproduced blip-wank whisper) . Guy Garvey from Elbow has a two hour slot on Sunday nights, a balm for chapped heids. The super-early morning show is great (just music!). However the morning slot seems to be the fucking pleb zone for some reason.
Thus we get Shaun Keaveny and his infantile hospital-radio no-budget braindeath ‘games’: Cereal Killer and Knight Rider and Cheese Grater. The boy himself seems fairly switched on… I can only assume the cheap bastards are only allowed to play so many tracks per hour and he’s forced to generate all the fucking filler.
Reached my limit. Off.
Next: BBC Radio 2. Mistake. It’s the soundtrack to coma. Impossible to wake up to. Startingly random 80s ballads are pulled out and interspersed with weirdly obsessive traffic reports, every ten minutes. And the undulating rumble of Wogan.
So this week I switched to Virgin Xtreme. Downside: fucking radio adverts. Upside: some actually quite good music (so far). I was pleasantly woken up this morning by the first-hear of Thou Shalt Always Kill. Totally engaging, coming up from the sleepy depths.
As long as they don’t play more than three adverts in a row I reckon I can handle it.
27-Jul-07 at 10:57 pm | Permalink
I am hooked on pandora.com – love it.