Three weeks shy of its third birthday, 6Music, the BBC’s digital music station, is in fine fettle, if empirical evidence is to be believed. Scratch many record-buyers on the alternative-music scene and you’ll likely find a 6 devotee beneath their pallid complexion. Alienated by Radio 1, not entirely ready for Radio 2, and unable to take the ad breaks on commercial stations, they turn to 6 for knowledgeable DJs, eclectic programming and airtime untainted by chart pop.
The station attracts in the region of 240,000 of these listeners each week, considerably fewer than tune in to its strategically closest competitor, Capital’s Xfm. The tensions between the two stations seemed to weigh heavy on the thinking of Tim Gardam in his review of the corporation’s digital-radio services last autumn. Obliged, in the interests of balance, to listen to Xfm’s concerns about audience overlap and unfair financial competition, he was persuaded to recommend that the BBC’s governors “redraft a more detailed remit that accurately describes the character of (6Music)”.
The station’s claims about discovering many new bands first had clearly riled the commendably pioneering Xfm, which also questioned the 45% of post-2000 music the BBC station plays (outside its “music from the 1970s to the 1990s” remit). To which fans of 6 would surely say: phooey. Both 6 and Xfm work wonders, and we, and the new bands they play, are the winners.
In the case of 6, what fans really love, far more than just the absence of commercial breaks, is the individualism, sometimes plain dottiness, of its presenters. Yes, there are jokes to be made about the desirability of waking up with Phill Jupitus, but the big man lays out an impressively varied musical spread on his week- day breakfast show (albeit sometimes curdled by Phil Wilding, who, in time-honoured gabby-sidekick fashion, renders everyone inaudible).
Among the other good things are Steve Lamacq, downgraded by Radio 1 and wisely hired for his apparently surplus new-music expertise by 6; Andrew Collins, whose capacious musical brain suggests he eats more fish than most people; Tom Robinson’s polymathic evening show; and 6’s excellent specialist funk, rock and reggae slots.
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Interviews, live sessions and, above all, documentaries, add lustre — in the strand just gone, recent gems have included the Two Tone story and Justine Frischmann on women in rock. Sometimes, they talk too much, or too inanely; sometimes, it’s all a bit pale-white-indie-boy; invariably, though, you’ll hear either a great band you didn’t know, or an old song you loved but had long forgotten, and be inspired by both.
What I think Gardam failed to consider was this: that, if 6 has strayed from its remit, if it is a little unruly, this isn’t some cunning plan, hatched by feather-bedded apparatchiks bent on making off, like Gobbo and Sly, with our licence-fee pennies. Rather, it’s down to something much simpler and altogether more forgivable: that 6Music Towers is full of enthusiasts and iconoclasts, nerds, anoraks, eccentrics and completists one and all, and they can’t help themselves. How do you fit all that into something as narrow as a remit? You don’t, as I suspect Gardam realised, but was unable to say.
Paul Donovan is away