Smooth Radio

As yet another of the many alternatives to the mainstream BBC radio stations that Manchester offers is Smooth Radio.
It’s aimed firmly at those a bit older than myself, and as such it’s not really for me. I find it’s playlist just a bit too sickly and well, «smooth» for my liking.
To emphasise why Smooth Radio isn’t really for me, you can «go back in time» with pete Waterman through the 60s and 70s at 6pm on Sundays. No, thank you. I don’t want to.

It’s probably a little bit unfair of me to review Smooth Radio, as I have a tendency to immediately dislike anything that furiously pedals away from any media which could be considered the least bit edgy. It’s squarely aimed at the middle-​aged, and therefore rescinds any notion of actually playing good old music by going for the ‘smooth’ variety. And for ‘smooth’ read ‘shit’.
Okay, maybe I’m being harsh here, but I don’t get it. It’s aimed at the middle-​aged, right? So, those people who had their teenage and young adulthood in the 70’s? And they play smooth music? Why not classic rock or anything like that, you know, like the kind of stuff that was really popular back then and which middle-​aged people are mostly likely going to have fond memories of? Ah, I’ll just stick with Rock Radio.

My father despairs in me because I can’t take Michael McDonald seriously. It’s not my fault, I say, Judd Apatow’s ruined Michael McDonald for me due to the genius of having a Michael McDonald DVD on repeat (‘for two years straight’, Paul Rudd’s character protests) in the electronics shop in The 40 Year Old Virgin. ‘I’m gonna Yah Mo Burn this place to the ground.’ And even the one song I could still actually quite like in a funky tongue-​in-​cheek sense, ‘I Keep Forgetting’, well, Will Ferrell only went and danced to that dressed as George Bush and now the sound of that triggers belly laughs too.
I also defy anyone to take Kenny G seriously after the scene in Wayne’s World where Garth’s personal hell is a Kenny G concert, surrounded by couples, he himself getting a root canal.
Smooth Radio is aimed at the over 40s. And no wonder, since our generation can’t take any of its content seriously thanks to comedy media taking the mick. Heck, Chris de Burgh turned up on Smooth Radio a while back and I was reminded of Bill Bailey labelling him ‘that monobrowed purveyor of absolute filth’ and putting him on ‘the axis of evil’. I can’t win.
To try and take an objective perspective, well. The whole ethos of Smooth Radio seems to be to unwind. It was born from the unholy amalgamation of Jazz FM and Saga Radio. Urgh, see, I can’t be objective. Jazz… Matt and Phred’s, John Thomson saying, «nice» in The Fast Show, sexy beats, smooth basslines, berets, strong coffee, beatniks, now that’s cool. Saga… radio for the over 50s. Easy listening. Can it possibly work?
Yes and no. I just feel like you don’t know where you are with it. One minute you’re listening to something exceptionally funky and cool like ‘Superstitious’ by Stevie Wonder, making your head bop, and the next, you’ve got that Oleta Adams wailing that she doesn’t care how you get here, you can reach her by caravan, the least sexy method of travel, but if she keeps whinging like that no one’s going to bother even wanting to go. And come on, it’d be more of an incentive if she offered something nice. If someone’s going to cross the desert like an Arab man for her, she might want a nice cake or a pie waiting for them. Just saying.
There’s swings and roundabouts between motown and funk, there seems to be very little jazz (hence I think why they’ve relaunched Jazz FM as a standalone station on DAB), and then it slides into the musical equivalent of a bath of treacle. The station’s slogan is ‘Unwind with Smooth’. However all the genre-​switching to me is a little too stressful for that.