Oldies Station

Faced with trying to come up with a list of favourite bands to add to my profile brought to the forefront something I�d been vaguely considering for a while.

I no longer appear to be up with the new music. I�m not quite up for listening to the oldies but goldies stations yet, but I can see how that could happen pretty easily.

I�ve bought plenty of CD�s over the last six months, but with almost no exceptions, they�ve all been the new albums of bands or artists that I own the previous works of. Foo Fighters, Aimee Mann, Queens of the Stone Age, The White Stripes, Coldplay. And I love their new stuff as much as the old stuff but I�ve really bought them on the basis of hearing one song and their previous track record. Sometimes just on the track record.

That�s because I haven�t been listening a music-based radio station since last year.

I can�t stand commercial radio, the ads, the DJ�s and most of the music - I cannot stand manufactured reworked over dance stuff where some trio of apparently cloned English 19 year-olds covers a Blondie song with no reinterpretation whatsoever except a faster drum machine in the background.

Where I live we are however blessed with a couple of great non-commercial radio stations which play a wide variety of new music, with no ads, no prize-patrolling four wheel drives and no manufactured pop. They have been the source of my music since I was in high school.

I just haven�t been listening recently.

It started a few years ago when the radio walkman I listed to while walking the work decided it wasn�t going to receive FM radio when I got near the city - and as I live close enough that I can walk, it pretty much turns to fuzz when I reach the end of my street. So I took to listening to the AM station current affairs program to get my morning news and analysis. And that became a habit that I didn�t want to break.

But still when I got to work I�d listen to the FM youth station as my desk, and a couple of years ago one of my favourite radio announcers took over the 9-12 shift of current affairs and music and it was a perfect combination. But even then I found myself turning over to the AM station for the 12-1 news and current affairs shows and gradually I stopped turning back in the afternoon.

The radio is my main source of news. I�m not home early enough in the evenings even if I wanted to watch the commercial news on TV, and most of the time that�s just a glorified police report anyway, and I never make myself take the time to read the paper, aside from glancing at the odd article either in the hard copy or on the web. So the radio is it, which is fine, but late last year when my morning DJ left that shift and headed over to one of the more grown up stations on the network, I stopped turning over to FM at all.

So now I get my music from flipping past MTV - I always seem to get the hop-hop show or J.Lo - and walking into the CD store and picking new things by artists I already know. Even my friends and I don�t really have many of the same music tastes, so I don�t get much from them - Betty only listens to the cast recordings of Musicals and Nathan prefers stuff written before 1800.

And while I don�t think my list of bands is too out of date yet, I can easily see the day when it will be. And then when I turn over from news radio the only place I�ll find my kind of music is the oldies station. Of course, I have faith that I�ll never have the patience with the ads or the announcers to actually listen for long, but that�s not really the point. As of tomorrow I really need to get back to the FM dial, at least for a few hours a day. Today I�m listening to the football on the AM dial and Badly Drawn Boy�s �About a Boy Soundtrack�, but tomorrow I�ll turn over. Really.

Of course with all that there are still no bands listed in my profile because I couldn�t narrow it down to just five.