Renowned Irish musician challenges RTE's Music Policy

Pierce Turner is on a high after a recent appearance with renowned composer Philip Glass and cellist Rob Thomas at the City Winery in New York. But if there’s anything likely to get him down, now that he’s back in Ireland, it’s his belief that music fans are being shortchanged by RTÉ, especially by Radio 1.

Speaking to Hot Press he says: “There’s a huge section of the population that’s not being catered for musically at all on a national basis, especially outside Dublin. Yet we are the people who pay for these stations, not only through our taxes and the license fee. We also buy the products they advertise. So why are we being ignored? Is it because we don’t shout loudly enough?”
It’s Turner’s belief that radio in Ireland is too heavily driven by listenership figures which only evaluate the number of people tuning into a station or programme, but do not measure the intensity of that listening activity.
“They use statistics to justify everything. Statistics are ruining the world. From seven in the morning Radio 1 is practically all talk all day long until the mid-evening, with the exception of Ronan Collins ,who’s like a musical oasis in a desert. But why is it so hard to hear acts like Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens, Ham Sandwich, M Ward or The Shins on Radio 1 as part of an ongoing commitment, not just the odd play here or there? They’ll probably use statistics to justify that. Then they’ll ignore the statistics when it suits them. Lyric fm has only a 2% listenership. Surely that tells them something? Why has RTÉ set up a specialist national station for classical music anyway, and not one playing a broad mix of rock music for people with a mature ear for the genre? Radio 1 could be that station.”
While 2fm is usually RTÉ’s most likely platform for rock music, Turner has virtually given up on the station.
“2fm is unlistenable. It won’t play anything deeper than your thumbnail. They wouldn’t play any of the new music that I’m interested in as an adult with very broad rock music tastes. I like to be informed and challenged by music on radio. The aerial broke on my car recently and I didn’t bother fixing it, because there’s nothing on that doesn’t make me feel that the programmers think that we’re all so lacking in curiosity that we can only handle the same music we’ve heard over and over. I don’t need to hear ‘Hotel California’ ever again in my life!”
So, Turner’s answer is to have Radio 1 committed to broadcasting intelligent rock music in its broadest sense to a mature audience. “They could move the current talk shows to Lyric so that the station would broadcast a mix of news and classical. That would free up Radio 1 to play an intelligent mix of music for mature music fans who don’t want to be treated like children scared of anything new or deep. But whichever way they choose to do it, RTÉ needs to wake up to the responsibilities they have to all of us. Music fans like me deserve a better return for our money. This can be done in other countries, so there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t they do it in Ireland. RTÉ need to realise that the kids who fought the punk wars are around fifty now! The long-haired youthful revolutionaries of the ‘60s are now in their sixties. The fans who first got excited about rock’n’roll in the ‘50s are now in their seventies! Yet there’s this bland and insulting assumption that people who are outside the youth market are only capable of listening to classical music or the most unadventurous, safest kind of pop and rock music. It just isn’t so!”
Nor is he impressed by the range of options offered by RTÉ’s new digital service. “None of the four stations they’ve introduced on digital come anywhere near serving the audience I’m talking about either,” he maintains.
The Wexford man also believes that the preponderance of talk shows and the subjects they relentlessly cover harms the spirit of the nation at a time of recession and that the healing properties of music could have a more uplifting effect. “In their own right, Radio 1’s broadcasters are very good at what they do. But the fact that there’s a non-stop feed of mainly negative talk all through the day every day has to have a depressing impact on how people feel about themselves, the country and the world we live in. I know there are awful things going on that we have to be told about, but they only give us part of the overall picture. There are still exciting, uplifting things going on in the world, and rock music is one of them. The fact that such music is nearly left out of the equation altogether is very unhealthy and totally unfair to us who actually pay for RTÉ.”

Pierce Turner plays The Sugar Club, Dublin (June 20) and The Pavilion, Cork (25).