XFM Is Dead — Long Live Radio X?
Earlier this week a press release dropped from the sky and exploded upon impact with news that we’d apparently been waiting all Summer to hear. XFM, that tired and weather-beaten relic of the pre-YouTube era, is to be killed off and replaced with a brand new concept: Radio X.
At first glance, this makes total sense. The station that helped launch the careers of Ricky Gervais, Russell Brand and er, Justin Lee Collins was once an indie luminary, but the changing cultural tide has left the brand flailing in the dust. In 2015, XFM looks and feels about as fresh as a mothballed pair of bootleg jeans. The company behind the station know this, and they’ve plunged their resources into a ‘bold and innovative concept’ that is a ‘one of a kind’ in this country. Indeed, the tone of their whole campaign suggests that for many of us, June-August has been little more than a period of unsatisfactory foreplay, a fallow season before the great harvest begins. So what is Radio X all about? and how exactly is it going to revolutionise your life?
For a start, Radio X differs from Television X in that women are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the station promises to be the ‘first truly male-focussed, fully national music and entertainment brand for 25–45 year olds.’ Not just male-focussed you understand, truly male-focussed. You have to applaud the kamikaze recklessness of this phrase. It seems precision-engineered to goad the entire Internet with the idea that for too long, those damned Marigold-wearing oppressors have been muffling the roar of our power tools, forcing us to quietly beat our chest in the corner whilst they snatch the world from our fingertips. No: Radio X is our digital man-cave. It is Banter FM, a place where we can make all the fart jokes we like without being hit with a cushion or spritzed with one of those things that girls love to use when they’re ironing.
But, the more you think about it, the more the concept actually starts to make sense. We’re used to seeing successful female-orientated offshoots of large media companies (Broadly, Women’s Hour, The Pool, The Debrief etc), but any attempts to appeal to men almost inevitably result in steaming great piles of problematic horse-shit. We’re either cast as slobbering, misogynistic banter merchants or as the sort of impossibly aspirational James Bond replicants who have a close personal relationship with their tailor and drop £500 on a pair of cufflinks. With men’s magazines dwindling in sales and stations like Men and Motors being absurd relics from the Triassic era, there’s less and less places in which advertisers can flog razors and Lucozade. There’s a window of opportunity here, but in order to benefit from it, Radio X will have to navigate the fact that modern masculinity has been in crisis for about two decades now, lacking in any real shape, boundary or form. So who has Radio X employed to a forge a new masculine identity and salvage us from the void?
*cough*
Chris Moyles.
And Vernon Kay.
And Johnny Vaughan.
Oh, and Ricky Wilson.
Now, I’ll leave it with you to brainstorm adjectives to accompany this selection, but I’ll dare say that ‘bold’, ‘innovative’, ‘one of a kind’, and ‘conceptual’ may not be featuring too highly in your lists. The station are keen to herald Chris Moyles as a kind of war-wounded broadcasting stalwart, returning with rejuvenated vigour after a period of self-imposed exile. But, the reality is, Radio 1 ditched him in the midst of their own bid to revamp their ailing image. Radio X might claim to be pushing the boundaries, but there’s more than a whiff of demographically-fuelled old-media circle-jerkery going on here. Indeed, when we look at their music policy, the stench of the boardroom becomes almost overwhelming. Radio X guarantee to play ‘the best fresh rock and guitar-music’, and go on to list a roster of artists that sound more at home on a Jamie Oliver curated Triple Father’s Day CD than a cutting-edge radio station. So we’ve got the likes of Arctic Monkeys (legends), Kasabian (fookin’ legends), Catfish and The Bottlemen (erm..legends?), Florence and The Machine (weyyyyy the lads), Foo Fighters (authentic), Nirvana (authentic + suicide = edgy), Hozier (ask your brother) James Bay (ask your mum) and, erm, Radiohead. Bold. Edgy. Innovative.
Now, I don’t want to be an indie snob all my life, so I’m going to say that maybe this is a totally fair (read: homogenous) selection of artists for anyone who just wants to sing along to ‘Kick The Bucket’ whilst driving to get their milk and paper. But, it’s at this point you have to question why the station seems barely more fleshed out than the character actors in a WKD advert. It seems that Radio X is the bold and brave new station who’ve played it so excruciatingly safe that their target audience is simply the product of a boardroom fantasy. Radio X imagines a landscape filled with blokes who spray Lynx under both arms before going out, who love to sing along to their favourite Florence tunes, and who look upon James May’s hair with a combination of envy and pride. Time will tell whether this recipe will be a success or whether it’ll die on it’s ase, but, in the words of Jonny Vaughan, ‘Great Britain needs Great Banter’ — and for now, it’s left to Radio X to deliver the goods.
