I have a book out from the library. It’s a little overdue. Actually, it’s about eight years overdue. I suspect they’ve cancelled my Auckland Public Library membership by now.

The book is called ‘The Shoestring Pirates’ by Adrian Blackburn. It’s the true account (more or less) of four men who set sail to establish a pirate radio station on an old ship anchored in a small triangle of what was deemed to be a patch of ‘international waters’ in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf – as the result of what can only be described as an accident of cartography.

They broadcast pop tunes as well as friendly and hip DJ banter – not to mention commercials and, on occasion, distress calls, for about four years (actually 1111 days, believe it or not) before finally being given a legal licence to broadcast on land.

There are parallel stories to that of Radio Hauraki in other parts of the world at around the same period in history. Radio Caroline in the UK and Radio Veronica in the Netherlands are two close to what is now my home. It’s a story of the battle for independent, private radio in an age of state monopoly control over broadcasting. And it involves men in boats, rock ‘n’ roll records and legal battles.

What makes it of particular significance to me is that I later worked closely with several of the people involved, mostly at other stations (two of the four original “pirates” were management at Radio Pacific, where I worked for five years), but on occasion at Hauraki itself as well.

Of course, what Radio Hauraki represents today is about as far from ‘piracy’ as it’s possible to get in twenty-first century media. But echoes of what it symbolised in the late 1960s and earliest part of the 1970s carried through the station’s development and multiple changes of line-up and ownership until quite recently.

These days, of course, ‘offshore’ means something different to the people of Hauraki. It’s just where the profit goes. And counter-culture has long since been replaced by corporate culture.

But as I go into 2012 – a year in which I write my own book about radio – it’s nice to take a bit of that history with me. And I like to think I’m commemorating their important and historical act of disobedience with a small act of rebellion of my own.

I’ve decided I’m not actually planning on taking the book back for at least another year. And I may even photocopy the whole thing before I do.

If you like cats, or stories about cats – or if you just like stories – here’s a Christmas gift from me to you (and your kids, if you happen to have any).

I made a ‘cartoon for radio’ about 15 years ago. It’s about cats – well, specifically about one cat, Ashley, who finds himself transported out of the world of humans, can openers, laundry baskets and suburbia – and into a magical world of castles, dragons, princesses and wizards. A world run entirely by cats.

If you’d like a taster before you grab the whole thing, you can check out the first 14 episodes on Bandcamp.

Or you can just dive straight in. All 50 episodes of series one are here for you to download as free mp3s. Merry Christmas.

Click to download Ashley’s Worlds. [192MB zip file]

Series two to follow in the new year…

Photo by YlvaS

I’ve been thinking a great deal about radio over the past few weeks. After having done the conference keynote in Auckland, a number of things have lined up to bring me back into that world, after a good five or so years being only peripherally involved at best.

I’ve been asked to write a book about radio in the digital age, for a kickoff. It’s early stages yet, and there’s no contract – but it looks pretty promising. In fact, it’s probably the book I should have been writing since about 2004. I’ll give myself 18 months to turn that one around.

I’ve also been doing a fair bit more academic work in the radio realm than at any time since I originally left New Zealand… and all of a sudden I’m doing a spot of radio consultancy here and there as well.

I did my usual, weekly four-hour jazz, bossa, rare groove, laid-back funk DJ set at the Hare and Hounds this afternoon, while people ate their Sunday roasts. There’s a playlist here, if you’re interested.

Now, because all this radio stuff is going around in my head, I’m thinking of ways of using that activity as the basis for a radio show of some kind. Since I’m playing records anyway…

Radio without additional effort
Here’s the scenario: I have these decks in front of me, and I have brought a pile of records – proper, 12″ vinyl, 33 1/3 rpm albums. Lots of them are rare and all of them are perfect for that Sunday afternoon vibe. In fact, Sunday afternoon’s kind of my specialism. I hosted It’s A Jazz Thing on George FM in the 2-4pm Sunday slot for about 6 years, and then did more or less the same thing on Rhubarb Radio a couple of years ago.

So there’s a four-hour mix each week at the same time. I’m in the back room of a pub which has been converted into a restaurant for the occasion, and people are eating, drinking, listening to my tunes, and talking with their friends and loved ones. Surely, an extra wire, or a little bit of internet technology could plug the output into a web radio stream and provide a low-effort, expertly curated jazz Sunday afternoon vibe for some radio station somewhere.

Could be a community radio station in Lithuania, a small college radio station in Minnesota, a local station here in Birmingham, a web-only station with no obvious point of origin – or whatever.

It just seems like an under-utilisation of media production for the records I play only to be heard in one room, when my laptop’s sitting right there…

Not really radio
A couple of things: first, I don’t talk during my DJ set. People are eating, and I’m more or less just providing the ambience (though it is a very cool ambience) – so there’d be no “Hi, you’re listening to X, that was Y, and coming up, I’m going to be playing some Z”. It’s just a continuous music mix for four hours.

Second, I’m not a DJ in the beat-matching, scratching, turntablist sense of the word. I play one record, and then I play another. I’ve put a lot of thought into what record comes next, and there’s generally no silence between the two – but that’s as good as it gets. One good record after another.

Third, I don’t play much in the way of new music. I would say over 90% of what I play was made between 1967 and 1977. As such, some of the records are a little bit surface-noisy. It all adds to the vibe.

It all takes place in a pub, through a simple mixing desk between two Technics turntables. I’m pretty certain a single feed off the desk could be piped into an upload stream at a decent and reliable rate that could be rebroadcast anywhere.

Of course, I could record it and then syndicate it out in some kind of reliable recorded music format, and I guess I could be persuaded to do that – but it’s the idea of it happening live that most interests me. The idea that someone is listening right now, and they know that what they’re hearing is happening somewhere in the world as they hear it.

So – that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what I’ve been thinking. Anyone interested in taking a feed and filling a slot on their station? Drop me a note.

While I was in Helsinki, I was interviewed by Radio New Zealand National‘s Saturday Morning host Kim Hill. The pretext was that Finland had just been declared best country in the world to live in, and since I was a New Zealander who just happened to be there, I was on the radio for quarter of an hour extolling its virtues and examining the national character.

Of course, I know very little about Finland or its people having only visited twice, and having actually spent most of that time sitting inside at conferences. But all the same, I managed to glean enough to keep things going for a bit.

If you’re interested, here’s my interview:

…and some responses to it from the radio show’s audience:

Photo by premasagar

Today’s idea is really just a question – and a really bleeding obvious one at that:

Why doesn’t this thing have a DAB chip in it?

And, for that matter, why doesn’t pretty much every other phone available on the market also have a DAB chip? Given the popularity of in-car docks, and the sheer ubiquity of mobile phones, it seems like such a complete and utter no-brainer.

I don’t need A radio – I just want THE radio. And I already have something I could listen to it on. Whoever’s job it is to make Britain “digital”… sort it out, would you?

At home with academic and author David Hendy

I had a meeting in Oxford with David Hendy today. He’s a Reader at the University of Westminster and the author of some very fine books about radio, including the highly acclaimed Life on Air: A History of Radio Four.

His book Radio in the Global Age (2000) was immediately a prescribed text for my class back in Auckland, and it was that book that really gave me permission to take seriously some of my own ideas about digital radio, the internet, and media in general.

It was also the book that encouraged me to stop simply being a radio tutor, and try my hand at actual research. All in all, it’s probably fair to credit David with a large portion of my academic trajectory (or, at the very least, the inspiration thereof), and the fact that I ended up in the UK doing what I do now.

I first met him at an international academic radio conference in Madison, Wisconsin in 2004 – where I was giving a paper on Internet Radio. It’s also, incidentally, where I met Tim Wall, who was on the same panel as me, and is the person to thank for getting me over here. But it was David’s ideas that got me that far.

Amazing thinker, a really beautiful writer – and just a thoroughly nice man. Sometimes you meet your heroes, a decade on, and they make you gnocchi for lunch.

Photo by Ian Hayhurst

This is the first of what I suspect will be a number of radio-related ideas in amongst the 30.

Radio Alerts
Today’s idea is a blend of existing technologies to create a service that I, for one, would find very useful – ‘Google Alerts‘ style messages containing direct links to time-shifted radio content that is about something I happen to be interested in.

Not whole shows, of course – you can already listen to Gilles Peterson in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon if you want to. I’m talking about capturing mentions of topics that you’re interested in.

Here’s how it would work:

1) The audio output of a number of radio stations is fed straight into voice recognition software, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking.

The software would convert the spoken content of the radio stations into indexed and searchable text. This could apply both to speech and music radio.

2) Phrases and sentences of transcribed speech would be timestamped and identified by station and saved to a database.

3) Users would register their email address (or Twitter feed) to receive Google Alert style messages whenever someone on the radio said something about the thing they’re interested in… with direct links to that section of the archived radio stream.

Users could select their sources by region, format or perhaps choose from a list. You may not ever want to listen to what anyone has to say on Heart FM, for instance, so you could exclude that station from your results.

But let’s say I’m interested in dairy farming, bungee jumping and quilting, and I’m a fan of Joni Mitchell, Pere Ubu and Supertramp. I’d sign up to the service, enter those choices, and then once a day I’d get a message saying:

Hi, Andrew! Here are your radio alerts for the past 24 hours:

Joni Mitchell was mentioned on BBC Radio 2 at 14:36

http://myradioalert.com/q4yfow

---

Dairy farming was mentioned on BBC Radio 4 at 11:05

http://myradioalert.com/sdgj3v

---

Bungee jumping was mentioned on Capital Radio at 23:02

http://myradioalert.com/sdjk8s

---

Bungee jumping was mentioned on Kiss FM at 19:03

http://myradioalert.com/sdjk8s

---

Supertramp was mentioned on Galaxy FM at 14:42

http://myradioalert.com/djso23a

---

Nobody mentioned quilting or Pere Ubu today.

---

I’d click on the links, which would take me as close to that time marker as possible on the correct radio stream and then listen to what each of those mentions entailed.

In this case, it might have been a trailer for a live Joni Mitchell concert broadcast coming up this weekend; a 10-minute report about new subsidies for dairy farming; there may have been something in the news about a minor bungee jumping accident in New Zealand; and Galaxy FM could conceivably have played a new Dizzy Rascal tune and talked about the fact that a Supertramp song that had been sampled for it.

You get the idea. You could scan the airwaves for news about your company or a topic you were researching; you could jump to your favourite song, or hear an interview with someone that you otherwise may have missed.

Of course, not every radio station has an archived stream, but for the amount of content that is out there, this could be a very useful way of finding helpful or interesting things you otherwise may have missed, and in a way that works with the 7-day window that the BBC gives you to Listen Again…

Sam Coley and I made a documentary about Zane. Coming soon…