Issue #003 (March 2003) Tim Ritchie Interview - Sound Control to Major Tim Email this article to a friend By Vaughan Healey Tim Ritchie likes to think about radio. And radio is something that bears thinking about – or rather, what bears thinking about is why it is so hard to find radio worth thinking about, not to mention radio worth listening to. You have to hoist your antenna pretty high to find any moments hidden between the mindless banalities of corporate media. The only programs to really rise above the oversupply of plastic ambience are a handful of shows on community radio, and of course, old Aunty. Tim Ritchie is an ABC veteran, Radio National producer and at 10pm on Friday nights presents Sound Quality. If you don’t know Radio National, think of it as the hardcore of ABC radio output – it’s the (mostly) uncompromising programming where the last remaining vestiges of Rethian ethic remain. (And when I say Reithian, I am talking about Lord Reith, the BBC controller whose trifecta was that broadcasting should ‘inform, educate and entertain’. In that order). It’s the station of choice for people who need real news or serious opinion, away from tabloid propaganda and lifestyle soundtracks. Sound Quality is something of a round peg in a square hole. But where else on the ABC would a show filled with weird electronic music feel comfortable? Radio National already features a motley crew of music programmers from Nasty Tek soundbwoy Brent Clough to transatlantic ageing hippy Lucky Oceans; it’s the only place for this sort of show. Sound Quality was born of opportunistic confidence. In 2000, Radio National had been replaying The Story of Music, an epic 52 part BBC-produced series examining the history of pop music from 1900 to today. As that wound it way towards the end of the 20th Century, Ritchie reacted as any optimistic senior ABC staffer would: he offered to produce and present a new release music show to take its place, for free. Since then, it has shifted towards one end of the spectrum - weird, leftfield music that sometimes gets put under a category of “electronica”. The portly DJ with the familiar voice admits that while ‘it was initially planned as a new-release show, and it is, in a sense, it has evolved into what I think is under-represented electronic sounds.’ As an added bonus, Ritchie replays sections of Solid Steel, the cult cut-up Cold Cut radio program which was, until recently, broadcast on the BBC. It’s your only chance to check that without the 404s, dropouts and buffering that go with web-casts. Sound Quality is the only place you are going to hear anything remotely approaching underrepresented electronica, and in many ways these sounds represent a logical progression from his time playing hiphop and early house music in the 1980s. Ritchie is obviously pleased with the sound of the show. ‘It’s here because the ABC doesn’t have anything like it elsewhere. I said, “Here is an obvious hole!” The ABC is not just about getting numbers but about fulfilling a cultural role about Australia. JJJ and Classic FM do what they do, but Radio National deals in specialist programming and it seems logical that Radio National should have a program dealing with this sort of specialist music.’ Self-vindication is a theme that you can’t ignore when you talk with Ritchie. He is a consummate survivor, and (unlike most of the sycophantic throwbacks in the worlds of the music and radio), his credentials are firmly in place. Old-timer Sydneysiders will remember Tim Ritchie as a JJ presenter, and might even remember him from the early days at Goodbar (née The Icebox). Rewind fifteen years and take a subterranean stroll into that steamy underground club on any given Friday, and you would be bumping shoulders with eastern-suburbs scenesters, finding Ritchie in the DJ booth next to Shaun Finley and Peewee Ferris dropping late 80s New York hiphop like Public Enemy, Cash Money and Cold Chillin’. Not much has changed in fifteen years. Except of course today, radio “personalities” walk out of private colleges and into bland and banal jobs with about as much commitment to music as their marketing department allows them (i.e. none). It doesn’t have to be this way. For a few years, JJ (and later, JJJ) was a wonderful station to listen to for new music. It was a station that was very important to its Sydney audience, which may be very hard for our younger, interstate, or international readers to appreciate, especially when compared to the JJJ of today. It was a station brimming with a certain type of revolt and dissent; or at the very least, our eight cents a day used to go towards a station with presenters who knew and cared about music and radio that could rock, and dance, and pose, and think. According to Ritchie, ‘Then, it used to be that there was this one station that you could go to, and there were people who loved music and finding new music and giving it to the audience. It was the portal where the good stuff was found.’ It was also the only Sydney station with an agenda set to agitate, and a station pushing leftfield comedy. Famously, Roy and HG developed their bit many years ago on the Js, but in particular, Ritchie name-checks JJ breakfast presenter Russell Guy, ‘This was the best radio I had ever heard – they had this guy called Captain Goodvibes who was just this surfing pig who just blew joints all day as this little comedy routine, and Major Judith Kidney Stone was the producer who used to write a skit that talked about the social and political events of the day but set against a backdrop of Rommel's desert campaign! It was just magic, Russel Guy had a way of communicating which was just off the planet but just spoke to me absolutely. It was what used to get me up in the morning. As well, he made What’s Rangoon to you is Grafton to me - a road journey in someone’s head. It was a classic JJ radio play. If ever you get a chance to get a copy of that, it’s fantastic.’ In a story that has since become folklore, pressure was mounting from critics who claimed that JJJ was media for the metropolitan elite, inner-city arty wankers who were out of touch with real Australian youth. The station was dragged kicking and screaming towards nationalisation in 1990 and the Chapman–Frolows steamroller ironed out any kinks in the roster by effectively purging any staff who didn’t toe the line. Ritchie and a few others survived the sackings but were increasingly marginalised in a station whose identity became nothing but a lightly modified imitation of the useless, interchangeable, corporate networks. So today, we have a neutered JJJ. Tough luck if you are interested in Captain Goodvibes: finding a copy of an obscure twenty-year-old radical radio play can be easier said than done. Ritchie is rightfully unrepentant: ‘If I ran JJJ, that would get back on the radio. There are classic things from the past which have entire worth and relevance today, and there is a new audience for it.’ Throughout the interview, I get the feeling that Ritchie would rather be fighting for the forces of good trying to reform JJJ than making anonymous management and editorial decisions in the rarefied atmosphere of Radio National. Who wouldn’t? Ritchie is brutally positive in his belief that the national youth broadcaster can be hauled out of the depths of insipid wallpaper. His vision is noble, but I can’t help being cynical. Unfortunately for all of us, the tide is against the sort of patrician broadcasting Ritchie is talking about – where decisions are made by individuals and programming is idiosyncratic. The digital era has ushered in an age where we have infinitely more media, but no choice – media content is sifted through focus groups and demographics (not to be confused with democratic). There is little room left over for individuals to develop ideas outside of prescribed boundaries. Of course, we’re not all mindless automatons with a home and garden in need of a refurbish. The wonders of widescreen/digital/interactive/multichannelled/payperview/5.1 portable media amounts to nothing when you can’t find anything to watch/listen/read. There are some content creators who stake their fortunes on distinctive subject matter, for example TV stations like HBO in the US or Channel 4 in the UK. And Tim Ritchie can be included here – he has always programmed divergent (if not deviant) radio, and his attitude has paid off. He has single-mindedly championed new music, and new sounds: in his own words, ‘I spend much more time looking for new stuff than most young people I know.’ This was evident from his early radio voyages into cut n paste. ‘I used to do this thing when I was doing midnight to dawn shifts on JJJ; I would get in the BBC World Service, and mix it with tape loops, and weird music and everything. Someone heard about it in the media and wrote a lovely article but then management came and said “No, no, no, you have to put announcements in it, the audience has to know what they are listening to and what station they are on.” Ridiculous, who cared what I did at three in the morning? It was going to be crap, so I stopped.’ Aside from this typically community-radio-type hi-jinx, Ritchie was also working on a program called The 12 Inch Music Show. ‘It was things like Breakers Revenge and that sort of stuff, it was considered a wild concept to play these records. I used to get asked, “How would you get enough of these records to fill in a whole show?” That was just at the start of the explosion of that music…When I came back from working for JJJ in New York my passion for this sort of stuff was heightened. That’s where I fell in love with hiphop especially. One time when I was there, I had this press card which could get me into anything, so I went to this club which was evidently a predominately black club. So I walked in there and everyone was quite polite to me because they thought I felt cool and confident enough to be there. In fact, I was just being a complete idiot and I shouldn’t have been anywhere near there at all. But I was just enjoying this thing, seeing people have a great time with some fantastic sounds.’ During the interview, Ritchie takes a call from his bank manager about a car loan - obviously the ABC doesn’t afford him a garage of Bentleys. As an expectant father (and due to his bad back), he is in the process of exchanging his modest hatchback for an even more modest family-mover. There is something prophetic about the shift. Sound Quality is the state of nation according to Tim Ritchie in 2003, and the slamming hiphop and house music has been left far behind. Its playlists wouldn’t look out of place in The Wire magazine (apart from the huge selection of Australian music). The recently released compilation Sound Quality, Volume 2: Top Shelf - Approved for Export is a perfect vignette of the program. It sprawls over two CDs and could be vaguely demarcated into the beats/ambience category. The CD was hamstrung by a badly executed release schedule and promotion, and it features some uniquely ugly neo-Yellow-Submarine design; nevertheless it’s worth tracking down if you can find it. The tracks range in sound and quality (there is a review elsewhere in Cyclic). Essentially, it’s a comprehensive and worthy document about what is currently going on behind some of the closed doors of Australia’s ‘underground’, unsigned, unknown electronic producers. Sometimes the program (and the compilation) lapses into the wrong side of whatever passes for avant-garde these days, worst of all, that isn’t a guarantee of it not being dull. But Sound Quality is radio made by a true aficionado with a clear vision of the sound and direction of the program. Think of it as another element of Ritchie’s determined bloody-mindedness which also surfaces in his ability to survive and prosper in the backbiting world of ABC journalism. Enthusiasm, naivety and audacity are close companions and Ritchie is full of one of them. His judgement is nothing but idiosyncratic and it usually pays off. After all, during his time at JJJ, as he will proudly tell you, he pulled in the highest ratings ever, and he out-rated Sydney competition. Those ratings haven’t been beaten on JJJ since. Tim Ritchie Top 5 Top Shelf Tipples 1. Neat, not chilled, Stoli vodka with a Pils chaser. 2. Red Wine with the Radio National Staff Wine Club 3. ‘A good brandy’. Whatever that means. Hennessy Paradis? 4. Pernod. 5. Uila. Tim Ritchie World Cup Selection: New Zealand