Station masters: Radio jockeys talk about what it was like, all that’s changed

In the early years of FM radio in India, young men and women risked their own music collections, ferrying CDs about in all weather, to broadcast out of makeshift studios.

PREMIUM

Brian Tellis’s first studio, he remembers, laughing, was a room in a friend’s flat in south Mumbai. This was in the early 1990s. He and the friend, musician and event organiser Farhad Wadia, worked with a technician to set up a microphone, a spool recorder and a master mixer. Tellis used all his own CDs.

“As a lover of the spoken word, music and storytelling, it was so exciting to be able to research bands and curate playlists that I could then share with the city,” says the radio jockey (RJ). “It was a joy to be able to go on air, share music that I loved, and tell stories about the musicians, and about what went into making the songs.”

On August 15, 1993, his voice was carried across the city as he riffed about Mumbai and his favourite Western musicians, in between playing blues and rock-and-roll, on Akashvani’s new FM station, 107.1.

Tellis was 33 and working as an RJ with Times FM, one of the many private organisations that booked airtime slots on the FM frequency then.

Each show was recorded a day or two in advance, and the spools then carefully sent over to the local Akashvani office. “It was daunting but exhilarating to be on air from day one of FM; it changed the way the youth interacted with the medium,” says Tellis, now 63.

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FM radio was deregulated in 2000, and immediately there was a boom.

In 2001, India got its first private FM radio station: 91 Radio City (then co-owned by the TV network Star India and Music Broadcast Ltd, which remains the owner today). By September 2007, there were about 120 private FM stations across the country, with some based as far beyond the prime metros as Kolhapur, Ajmer and Dhule.

As the studio system strengthened and media houses began to establish a presence in the space — HT Media, which owns the Hindustan Times, for instance, also owns two radio stations: 94.3 Radio One and Fever 104 — broadcasts went from local to multi-city.

The two shows that Tellis currently hosts on Radio One — The Blues Show and The Night Shift — beam their nostalgic hits across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai.

By the early Aughts, this was already a buzzing, bustling space. There were celebrity appearances and chat shows; quizzes and live contests; programmes driven by write-ins, phone-ins and page-ins.

Male and female RJs hosted shows in pairs, peppering their segments with an easy chumminess. There were weather and sports updates, music and friendly banter, talk of broken hearts and love.

There were the lone stars of late-night, such as Love Guru; a sad sort of perennially heartsick man who played only ballads, in a range of languages, aimed at causing heartache even among listeners who hadn’t lost a love lately, and tears in listeners who had.

And there was the hyperlocal lifeblood of this medium: traffic updates, and relayed messages (“Rita, Sumeet says he’s sorry. Can you forgive him? He is waiting… hoping you will give him a call”; followed by a song dedication; cue, Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You).

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Behind the banter and laidback riffing, frantic scenes unfolded in the studios.

Songs and advertisements had to be manually cued until about 2000, while requests and calls came in and the RJ continued chatting. When the early digital technology did arrive, it was neither flawless nor easy to master. Once in a while, the worst would happen and there would be seconds of dead air, or the wrong track would play.

This was followed by carefully nonchalant laughter and a little more of the friendly ribbing.

“In the first decade of privatised FM radio in India, we were still getting the hang of the technology. Sometimes, we would go on air without switching on the mic, or speak over a song having forgotten to pull down the fader, or cut ourselves short by accidentally hitting a button,” says voiceover artiste and former RJ Melodee Austin, 47, from Bengaluru, who worked with AIR, Fever, Indigo and Radio One for a combined 15 years.

The four- to five-week training courses conducted by studios helped. Here, new RJs learnt about controls, production, timing, styles and intonation.

“In training, we were often asked to imagine we were chatting with a close friend, to keep the banter breezy yet warm,” Austin says.

Today, production is computerised. RJs don’t have to watch the clock and manually keep a show on track. Songs are preloaded into vast digital libraries; track suggestions are often automated. And, even with social media, podcasts and streaming platforms, the FM-broadcast industry continues to grow. From December 2015 to June 2022, the number of FM radio stations rose from 243 to 388, the Economic Survey 2023 noted.

“Radio is able to curate information in a way that’s relevant to listeners, packing it in bite-sized segments with music and an easy, informative, crisp chat,” says Lajvanti Ganguly, 27, an RJ with Radio Mirchi in Kolkata. “And yet it is a passive medium; you can listen to it anytime, anywhere, without having to consciously engage.”

It’s easy too. One needn’t subscribe, pay or scroll. Just press a few buttons and you connect with someone somewhere who’s playing a song or telling a story you like.

It may not always be the song they had intended to play. Bloopers still occur.

Tellis remembers the time he had to make up an excuse for a missing Elton John. “In the early days of the digital era, we just had a couple of CD players, so we could cue no more than two songs at a time. The CD players would often jump tracks too. So, if I had to play track number six on an Elton John record, I would introduce the song and hit the fader. And it would end up playing some other artist’s song instead,” says Tellis, laughing. “I’d have to say, ‘Hey, sorry folks, it looks like Elton John’s busy with breakfast. Let’s try another artist instead!’”