Will GB News’s All-British Music Station Really Rule the Airwaves?

If you are a proud British patriot who is offended by the overly cosmopolitan make-up of what is played on your nation’s airwaves, fear not: GB News has the perfect solution for you. From November 2, the so-called “GB Music Radio” will be launching, with the promise that it will only be playing British or Northern Irish music, with shows being named things like “The Great British Drive Home” and “Great British Breakfast.” The idea behind the station is that it will boost “extraordinary achievements” and “showcase artists from Great Britain and Northern Ireland across the generations.” The channel’s new station will broadcast its drivetime show from the Beatles’ city of Liverpool, and GB News’ chief revenue officer — a slightly strange character to be discussing the launch of a music channel, but never mind — announced that “GB Music Radio gives advertisers something genuinely new: a station built around a single, warm idea that almost everyone in this country can get behind. British music is a shared passion that cuts across generations, and we look forward to helping brands become part of the soundtrack to our listeners’ day.”On paper, it is something joyous and patriotic, allowing GB News’s loyal listeners — who will, it is hoped, spin off naturally from their equally loyal viewers — to respond just as well to their radio channel as they have to their televisual offering. And there will be many who believe that the ever-canny minds behind the upstart UK TV station GB News will have found a niche that those overlooked throughout Britain will respond to with alacrity. And although there is no comparable radio station in the United Kingdom, there are plenty of others worldwide of a similar disposition. In France, there is a general requirement that, at peak hours, much of the music that is played on commercial stations should be French in origin, although this does not preclude other popular songs being played. M Radio has committed to only playing French-language songs from all ages, meaning that you can hear Johnny Hallyday and Edith Piaf figuratively rubbing up against modern-day urban acts, and while there are no American radio stations with a committed all-American policy, in practice such channels as many of the nation’s country broadcasters are unlikely to be broadcasting much music that has not originated outside the national borders. On the more obscure end of the scale, if you’re a particular aficionado of Norwegian folk music — I listen to little else in the small hours of the night if I am unable to sleep — then the country’s NRK folk channel will offer that, and solely that. GB Music Radio, then, is less extraordinary – and also a good deal less xenophobic – than some of its knee-jerk critics might have suggested in the first place. Also, as a Brit, I believe that my native country has offered the world some of the greatest recorded music in history. From David Bowie to Benjamin Britten, and the Beatles to Kate Bush, British music can offer an extraordinary range of styles, approaches, and artists who have blazed a trail in the fields of rock, pop, classical and dance music. Admittedly, there are areas in which American and European music have excelled — jazz, hip-hop and the symphonic — but it is fair to say that most of the potential listeners to GB Music Radio are unlikely to be particularly upset that, say, the works of Stockhausen or John Coltrane are not going to be heard on the channel. The wider question however is what is going to be broadcast on GB Music Radio that will define the channel’s identity. It would be perfectly easy to serve up an unthreatening mixture of the kind of mainstream young British pop artists — Harry Styles and Sam Fender, say — who have a vast international reach in any case, just as there is every possibility that the station could play the kind of popular but largely mainstream music that has long been a mainstay of the BBC’s Radio 6 Music service. If listeners were somehow concerned that they are not hearing enough Beatles, Bowie, Rolling Stones, and Queen from existing channels, there will undoubtedly be many such opportunities to listen to their obscure and underappreciated work. And although there are anomalous figures who might defy obvious categorization as “British” such as Scott Walker, a British-domiciled American who was a huge influence on English and Northern Irish artists from Bowie to Blur and the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon — there are relatively few of these figures who will trouble the station’s programmers. In any case, Walker’s latter-day output was so obscure and difficult that I can imagine that if more than a few seconds of such songs as “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” were to be broadcast, that sound that you could hear would be GB Music Radio’s befuddled and outraged listeners switching the channel off, never to return to it again. Billy Idol plays an electric guitar painted with the British Union Jack flag during a concert, circa 1983. Via Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHowever, if we can safely assume that difficult experimental music is off the menu, I suspect that there may be some tension between what listeners are offered and what they might hope for. Speaking for myself, I would be delighted if there was to be a regular slot for once-popular comic music that largely lurks in the peripheries of national broadcasting, that might feature anyone from George Formby and Stanley Holloway to Flanders and Swann and the Monty Python songs. (Bowie’s wonderfully atypical “The Laughing Gnome” would undoubtedly fit in here, too.) And there will also be those dedicated GB News fans who would long to hear stirring military marches, brass bands and neglected novelty hits of bygone days. I hope that they will be provided for. Yet another difficulty, and one that will become very clear for the station’s programmers, is that “British music,” in many cases, cannot be separated from other countries’ influences. The Rolling Stones would never have existed without American blues music, just as Bowie’s charisma and showmanship owed as much to Elvis — coincidentally with whom he shared a birthday — as it did to Walker and Anthony Newley. There are those artists such as Björk — admittedly not a natural fit for GB News listeners — who were never British per se but who lived in the country for a considerable while and collaborated with many British musicians. Then there are others, like Bowie, who spent as long, if not longer, living outside the country and collaborating with American and international musicians than they ever did producing albums in Britain. All of this might sound admittedly like nitpicking. But I wonder if anyone involved in the creation and execution of GB Music Radio has sat down and given such issues serious thought, or simply dismissed them as irrelevant to their grand scheme. If this channel is done well, it could fill a real gap that exists in British music broadcasting, and do so with the irreverent verve that has been a hallmark of the love-it-or-hate-it television channel. But if it’s done badly, and fails to find a place in the market that differentiates itself from all the other harmless but inessential broadcasters that pump out the same songs to their undemanding listeners, this might be a time-limited initiative. Still, if they’re looking for DJs, I’ll happily throw my hat into the ring. I can only apologize in advance for what will be — let us say – an eclectic selection of music played.

Will GB News’s All-British Music Station Really Rule the Airwaves?

Will GB News’s All-British Music Station Really Rule the Airwaves?

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