www.musicweek.com
28.06.13 Music Week 29
guy called Chris Carnegie who is still in local radio gave me some amazing careers advice,” he recalls. “He said, ‘Look, I could give you a weekend show, but then you wouldn’t go to university, you would become a DJ at 17. You’ve got the potential to actually to do really well in radio and be a unique and different kind of personality and to do that you’d be a lot better if you went and actually had a life to talk about rather than suddenly have a kind of arrested development that all you’ve ever done is radio since you were 17.’” “I hated him because what he basically said was
‘Get out’ but it was an amazing piece of advice,” says the breakfast host. “I thank Chris to this day. I did go to university and it took me quite a few years after university to get into radio, but by that time I had done a succession of jobs like telesales and I would listen to Chris Evans in the morning here at Virgin ironing my shirts dreaming that one day I could just do a breakfast show, let alone get into a situation years later where I would do the breakfast show here. It did make me a far better presenter than just getting into it at 17.” O’Connell was already 25 by the time he became
a presenter, a role he managed to secure after following the advice of his then new wife of getting a sales job at a radio station to put himself in front of station bosses. His first gig was at Bournemouth’s 2CR, then Juice FM in Liverpool before in 2001 he took over breakfast at London-based XFM with a station bursting with incredible radio talent, including Adam and Joe, Richard Bacon, Zane Lowe and even Ricky Gervais. “They were on XFM when I was there,” says
O’Connell. “It was an amazing couple of years to be in radio. You really felt this is the best radio station in the country and it was this tiny XFM station, but it was so exciting. We really punched above our weight.” He won his first Sony Golds while at the station
as he achieved his goal of hosting a breakfast show in London. “Just getting that was a huge thing for me, a
massive thing and then this guy Chris Evans got fired and everything changed,” he says. “I owe Chris so much. Not only has he inspired me over the years, but also he somehow got me a pay rise. When Chris got kicked out [of Absolute Radio predecessor Virgin Radio] it unlocked a load of other things. It wasn’t for a couple of years before I came over to Virgin and Absolute Radio. I turned it down a couple of times because it didn’t feel right.” O’Connell eventually accepted a job at Virgin in
2005, taking over the breakfast show once occupied by Evans the following January.
LEFT Flying high: O’Connell’s breakfast show attracted 178,000 extra listeners in Q1
did they do that?’ It’s certainly given the station new focus and getting people like Frank Skinner on board. Some of the stuff they’ve let me do over the last couple of years, from my point of view, they gave me more freedom and put more resources into doing what I do and enable me to do the radio I do, which I’m really thankful for.” Audience numbers are hitting levels not seen at
the station in years, including those specifically for O’Connell who attracted an extra 178,000 listeners in Q1 compared to the same three months in 2012, according to Rajar. This took his reach up to 1.40 million, while in London it rose from 532,000 to 636,000 people. He has also further added to his tally of Sony
Golds, the latest at this year’s ceremony when he was named Music Radio Personality of the Year, while his breakfast programme triumphed in the Best Use of Branded Content category. “I didn’t know [about achieving a record number of Golds] until I came off stage on the night,” he says. “It was crazy because it’s normally BBC DJs and shows that do really well at the Sonys and I’ve done well at the Sonys, been very lucky. It was eight up until the last Sony Awards, but to get another two to take it to 10 and then find out it was 10 in 10 years and the only person to do that was a mixture of very proud and still feeling like a bit of a fraud and I think that’s the best way to feel.” But just in case there was any risk of him getting
“The timing was right. I had done five years at XFM and I was thinking, ‘I need a new challenge.’ I thought, ‘Crikey, it’s the one Evans did.’ I didn’t know I could get a national breakfast show. People in Leeds would hear me.” Evans had famously exited the station after failing to turn up to his programme for five consecutive shows, but in O’Connell’s case it was sometimes the executives leading him astray. “It was quite wild when I first got here,” he says.
“It was a very rock ‘n’ roll station. I remember going out with the boss once for lunch that went on for like nine hours and started the show the next day. As you can imagine I wasn’t feeling that well and rang the boss and said, ‘I can’t do four hours today’ and he said, ‘I’m surprised you’re even there. You can go home.’ The boss says that! ‘I can’t tell you off because it’s my fault.’” Since he joined the staff at One Golden Square,
O’Connell notes the regime has changed hands “like three or four times” with the most significant being in 2007 when TIML bought the station from SMG and its name changed from Virgin to Absolute Radio. “I know a lot of people were like, ‘Crikey, why
carried away, one of his daughters was on hand to put things into perspective for him. “I remember the next day chatting to my kids and my kids are a great way to keep your feet on the ground because they are rarely impressed with anything I do, nor should they be, but I put up one of the Sony awards on the mantelpiece,” he says. He then picked up his daughter from Brownies and she told him she had just been awarded an entertainers badge that involved not just singing and dancing, but doing magic, your own national dance and, apparently, hoovering and cleaning up afterwards. “There aren’t many people I interview who can do all of those things. I’ve interviewed Bono and at no point did he do any magic or hoover up the studio afterwards so he wouldn’t get his Brownie entertainers badge,” explains O’Connell. “Anyway, she had this badge and I noticed she
came home and she’d moved my Sony award off the mantelpiece and onto the floor and put her Brownie badge up there like it was a bowling ball knocking off the other ones. That’s exactly how it should be. ‘Dad, you’ve done really well at work, but this is a Brownie badge.”’
O’CONNELL ON THE EMERGENCE OF PODCASTS: 'I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE THE END FOR THE TRADITIONAL RADIO DJ' Christian O’Connell admits the rise of new technology like the iPod did at one time make him seriously question whether the age of the radio DJ was coming to an end. The Absolute Radio presenter had these thoughts while at XFM when he was additionally hosting a BBC 5 Live programme called Fighting Talk, which also became a successful podcast. As he recalls: “I was interviewed by Radio 4 and they
said, ‘Do you think [the podcast] is going to mean the end of the DJ?’ and, you know what, I really did think maybe it was. Why would you want to, if you had a choice to listen
to your own music in the morning, to listen to songs some guy is going to play to you, but radio is bigger than ever before. There are more people listening in the morning and drivetime. Radio listenership has gone up despite not just iPods but all kinds of alternative ways of getting music now. Because there is so much information, so many platforms, they still in the morning want to hear Evans or me or the Today programme as that kind of filter through the noise, even though we’re just adding to the noise.” As evidenced by the way listeners interact with his breakfast show, O’Connell is also convinced that radio can
more than compete with the likes of social media. “Radio is such an interactive medium,” he says.
“People talk about Twitter and Facebook, which are at the forefront of everyone’s minds these days, but to me radio has been the original social media because it was an interactive medium where it put communities together whether it was small farming communities, local radio or national radio. It is social media.” O’Connell says he if he were now 18 trying to get into
radio he would be podcasting: “You can just do a show anywhere, on an iPhone and upload it and that’s brilliant.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60