The Spirit of Radio.

 A notification arrives that the BBC Introducing holding page for my band is shortly to archived, unless we sign back in and refresh our content. To this, I am disinclined to acquiesce. The reason we have one in the first place is as part of a small experiment from some time ago, where some of the exciting new hosts at our local radio station were heralding the joys of uploading our/your material to the homepage, shortly after which the talent scouts would sift through the submissions and summon you to a showcase session and possibly even tip the wink to (say) Tom Robinson to get you some national play. Previously, of course, we’d had to simply rely on the prior wave of DJ’s – now largely replaced by the hip young gunslingers on the late night airwaves - actually going out to local shows, checking out touring musicians and responding to hot tips from trusted sources rather than them sitting crouched over a warm laptop waiting for something to gift itself to the hard drive.

Naturally, being an East Angliacana band with a combined age of about three hundred (if I am being generous, and I am being generous) we did not hear anything back. I never expected to, I did not rush to my notifications gnashing my teeth at each empty page, and I certainly did not resent anyone else getting any airtime, whether they seemed like the sort of people who paid their TV license fee or not. I did, however, keep the BBC Introducing page on my social media feeds, and was interested enough to respond to one of those “How are we doing?” updates they occasionally ping out.

In a spirit of 360 degree feedback, I mentioned that we had submitted a number of tracks, a couple of photos and a biography as requested, but we hadn’t had any response – not so much as a ‘thanks but no thanks’. In passing however, I noted that interestingly, according to the ‘Introducing’ playlists on the iPlayer, there seemed to be a number of artists doing recurrent sessions including one who’d been a regular at Ipswich Music Day for at least the last six years*. Not, I pointed out, that this was a criticism, but if you are going to rebrand your live performance cupboard and launch a show with the bold claim that this could be one’s passport to unimaginable fame and wealth – or at least a night time play on Three Counties Radio – then not simply booking your mates on a regular basis might be the way forward.

In fairness, I got a genuinely nice reply, asking what the name of the band was, when we had sent our demo, and what they should listen to once they had dug it out of the recycle bin**. There was also a warning included that they could not listen to everything, and that of course they were going to book people they were already familiar with (which I thought was a PR misstep, frankly) and they thanked me for my interest. I mean, it is not the worst response the BBC has ever issued to a concerned listener, I think we can all agree.

So anyway, apologies to everyone who was relying on the BBC to offer them updates on our new material***, we will keep the semaphore operator primed and the string between the tin cans taut. Keep watching the skies.

 

 

*I checked.

**I am paraphrasing.

***We are recording it now.