Tag: Jack FM

1694: Spinning Some Tunes

When I was growing up, I wasn’t massively into popular music — my peers found it hilarious that I bought my first ever album, Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, literally a single day before (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory came out — though I did, on occasion, purchase an album containing a song I particularly liked. (Sometimes I inexplicably also purchased albums containing songs I didn’t like, though this sometimes led to surprising discoveries.) I would listen to music while I was doing things like homework or reading, and later, when I could drive, I’d record albums onto tape so I could listen to them in the car.

At the time, I didn’t feel like a lot of the music I was listening to was particularly “iconic” or defining of the era. I certainly didn’t feel like I was living in a particularly noteworthy era of music in the same way that those who grew up listening to, say, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would have been able to. While my tastes were initially defined by what everyone else liked, I gradually started the pattern that I continue to this day of exploring a wide variety of different creative works, and sod what anyone else thinks. Consequently, my CD shelf contained everything from The Spice Girls to Bernard Butler and all manner of things in between. I enjoyed it, indulged in it and, like most people these days, gradually migrated my music library from a collection of CDs to a vast iTunes folder, 95% of which I never listen to.

Just recently, I’ve been starting to feel nostalgic for some of this old music. This can be attributed at least in part to the fact that both Andie and I have taken to listening to a lot of Jack FM, which tends to play a lot of the songs we grew up with, plus some earlier stuff from the ’70s and ’80s, too. While Jack FM has its annoyances — most notably its repetitive adverts and truly dreadful attempts at humour — it’s led me to rediscover a lot of the songs of my youth, songs that, in some cases, I haven’t listened to for literally years now.

I’ve long since parted with a lot of the original CDs — Music Magpie took a whole load off my hands a couple of house moves ago — but thanks to services like Google Play Music, I’m able to call up old favourite albums with the click of a mouse and enjoy them on my phone, in the car, on my computer. It’s pretty great.

And I’ve been discovering that many of these tracks were a lot more “defining” than I thought. Or perhaps it’s just that I have good memories associated with them. Either way, spinning up a copy of something like Prodigy’s Fat of the Land or Mansun’s Attack of the Grey Lantern is like slipping on a comfortable pair of earmuffs and losing myself in times past. If I listen on headphones, it’s exactly like that, in fact.

I’ve never really been one for just sitting and listening to music as my sole activity — I prefer it to be an accompaniment to something like driving or working — but it’s been kind of pleasant to rediscover a lot of these old favourites recently. I anticipate that my drive to work each morning will be accompanied by a lot more singalongs in the near future.

1687: A Jack Too Far

One of our local radio stations is called Jack FM. Jack FM has two “unique selling points” as a radio station: firstly, the fact that they “play what they want” — in practice meaning that they have a playlist just as repetitive as the fetid crap played on more pop-centric radio stations every day, only it consists of actually good songs from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s — and secondly, the fact that, outside of a couple of special shows, there don’t appear to be any DJs — just regular, prerecorded voiceovers from actor Paul Darrow of Blake’s 7 fame.

This is Paul Darrow, if you’re unfamiliar:

(No, he is not the same person as the narrator from The Stanley Parable, if you were wondering. That is Kevan Brighting.)

This latter aspect marks one of Jack FM’s strangest characteristics — the fact that it appears to be trying as hard as possible to be deliberately shit, at least between the songs which, as previously mentioned, tend to err on the side of “actually pretty good”.

The reason I say this is that Darrow, bless him, is forced to read some of the absolute worst “comedy” material that has ever been broadcast via any medium — seemingly every few minutes.

The trouble isn’t necessarily with the jokes themselves — some of them, particularly those which poke fun at notoriously shit town Basingstoke, will elicit a genuine chuckle — but rather the fact that they tend to go too far. Not from a taste perspective, but from a “you should have stopped talking a sentence ago” perspective.

Mostly this happens in a futile attempt to make something mundane appear more funny than it is, or indeed at all. I’ll give you an example.

“Jack FM news with [company name I can’t remember — great advertising, guys!] bus services. Forget about parking and travel costs, travel by bus! The wheels on the bus go round and round!”

Every time I hear this I find myself wondering who signed off on that last sentence. It serves no purpose. It’s not funny because it doesn’t make a joke. It’s little more than a reference to a well-known children’s song that’s been shoehorned in for no apparent reason other than to say… something. Darrow’s voice stands by itself — a distinct, rich, fruity voice that is like caramel melting in your ears — and thus there’s really no need to add anything more than the simple marketing copy prior to that stupid last sentence. But no.

Here’s another.

“Jack FM travel with Happy Hot Tubs. New hot tubs now in stock. Stock! As in gravy!”

This one suffers a similar problem, albeit to an even greater degree. The “gravy” comment really does have nothing to do with the words that came immediately before it, leaving it dangling there like a stubborn… well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Not all of Darrow’s contributions to Jack FM’s distinctive sound are that awful — as noted previously, some of them are genuinely amusing, particularly when he decides to turn on the sarcasm, as he frequently does. (“Our buses have wi-fi. And seats. And poles. And buttons that ding!”) I can’t help but think that he might be taking the piss a bit, having been given some utterly lifeless marketing copy from one of the numerous sponsors of the station and choosing to spice it up a bit with a bit of thinly-masked disdain. His contempt for Basingstoke also seems remarkably genuine — and anyone who has ever visited Basingstoke will happily back him up on that.

But I can’t shake the feeling that Jack FM’s jingles could be something genuinely special if they actually employed someone who knew how to write proper jokes. As it stands, Darrow’s delicious voice makes for a distinctive identity of the station — but his talents are somewhat wasted on material that regularly falls flat on its face.