When I began covering the new Classic Rock format, along with the burgeoning Oldies format’s return to FM in the late ‘80s, I could count on a general manager or program director telling me “we’re not a nostalgia station; just because we play old records, doesn’t mean we live in the past.” And that was more than 30 years ago when stations that played even 20-year-old songs were still willing to be called “Oldies,” rather than “Classic Hits.”
Nine months ago, when “okay, boomer” went from meme to front page news story, I wondered if Canada’s “Boom FMs” were in any way nervous about their station names. Soon after, generational divisions were upstaged by every other event of 2020 (even if they informed our other issues). On Feb. 14, veteran U.K. radio execs Phil Riley and David Lloyd doubled down with the official launch of Boom Radio, after months of pre-publicity and several weeks of on-air testing.
Boom Radio is in DAB in London and other major markets; it’s currently streaming-only elsewhere. Its fortunes will be a test of how upset the audience of BBC Radio 2 really is about the full-service behemoth’s ongoing musical modernization, including the addition of relatively contemporary dance music. Are older listeners grudgingly still along for the ride, or have they come to sort of like this Clean Bandit fella?
It will also be a test of how older audiences want to self-identify, after 30+ years of radio dictum that listeners don’t wish to be reminded about their age. I doubt Riley and Lloyd think of their audience as “living in the past,” but Boom is talking to people who aren’t uncomfortable visiting there. In the pre-launch promos, both station presenters and listeners talking about the first single they bought. (Many were ‘60s MOR. The newest first single was by Donny Osmond and it was interesting to hear that female listener talk about the Osmonds as brash foreigners in the way that Americans talk about the Beatles.)
One Boom Radio music promo lays out the mission statement as “the music you grew up with, the music you discovered later, the music your parents liked [that you came to like], the [more contemporary] music that you came to like [the song hook here was from Adele] and the music you like now.” That’s the remit of any gold-based AC, but I loved hearing a station lay it out that way.
I’m going to update this story later in the week, including more of a look at the U.K.’s upper-demo radio landscape, but Boom Radio has been a big story in the U.K., and I didn’t want to wait on a First Listen.
Here’s the first official hour of Boom with former Capital Radio morning host Graham Dene at 10 a.m., local time on February 14 from the station’s Website:
- Beatles, “All You Need Is Love”
- Abba, “One of Us”
- Beach Boys, “Sail on Sailor”
- Paul Anka, “(All of A Sudden) My Heart Sings”
- Chris Farlowe, “Out of Time”
- Aretha Franklin, “Respect”
- Frank Sinatra, “Come Fly With Me”
- Becky Hill, “Forever Young”
- Mel Carter, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me”
And here’s the segment I heard just before 3 p.m. local time with Roger Day:
- Ben E. King, “Stand By Me”
- Starland Vocal Band, “Afternoon Delight”
- Move, “Flowers in the Rain” (the song that kicked off BBC Radio 1 in 1967; “we’ve gotten a lot of requests to make this the first song. I don’t know why,” Day joked).
- Tavares, “More Than A Woman”
- Spanky & Our Gang, “Sunday Will Never Be the Same”
- Elton John, “Kiss the Bride”
- Beatles, “She’s Leaving Home” (played as part of an Album of the Day tribute to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of a number of songs encountered over the course of the day’s listening and logs that were themselves salvos at a previous generation)
- Michael Bublé, “Lost”
- Bruce Channel, “Hey! Baby”
- Queen, “Another One Bites the Dust”
- Bob Dylan, “Forever Young” (in 1974, and when Rod Stewart released his take on the same title, it was a blessing to one’s kids; Day frontsold it as “an anthem for boomers, growing old disgracefully”)
- Chas McDivitt Skiffle Group, “Freight Train”
- Marianne Faithfull, “Come And Stay With Me”
- Lightning Seeds, “Life of Riley”
- Brook Benton, “Endlessly”
- Hollies, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
- Roxy Music, “Same Old Scene”
- Diana Ross, “Love Hangover”
