The Reaperman Cometh

Somewhere in the distant past I owned a rather nice shortwave radio. This lead to all sorts of fun tuning into exotic foreign radio stations. I would also occasionally stumble upon the odd pirate station, often manned by enthusiastic amateurs with somewhat idiosyncratic tastes in music. I’m not sure how many pirate stations are still knocking about – I couldn’t find any on my radio now – but there is a new phenomenon in niche broadcasting which encompasses the enthusiasm of the music aficionado without the risk of running into trouble with the law or doing inadvisable things with lightening conductors. It’s internet radio.

Last week, I was delighted to find out that a sometime drinking pal from Liverpool was having his first go at internet deejaying. As well as a common interest in proto-alcoholism he also shares my love of the kind of music that causes tinnitus, fashion faux pas and goes Kerrang! Not free-form Jazz or 20th Century atonalism, but Heavy Metal. So I tuned in to Total Metal Radio last Sunday to listen to the first broadcast by Dan “Reaperman” Thomason (to give him his full metallic moniker – well, I’m assuming that the middle bit wasn’t a birth name.)

I think he actually made a good job of it. The music was a fair mix from Budgie to Megadeth with a fair bit in between. The radio station also has a request board for when it isn’t manned and it gives an idea of what the range of music is. The problem with genre radio stations is where to draw the boundary. John Peel used to get around this by simply playing whatever he felt like (and sod the rest of you) but Total Metal Radio definitely seems to insist on a certain amount of distorted guitar. This obviously includes the likes of Iron Maiden, Metallica, Judas Priest but also picks up on bits of punk, grunge and so on. However, I couldn’t see Led Zeppelin or The Who on their playlist which, whilst not Metal as such, did approach and greatly influence the genre. Then again they have quite a few AC/DC tracks despite them having no fundamental difference to the likes of Little Richard or Chuck Berry other than the Marshall stack.

It did make me wonder what I would play on such a station. I suppose the problem with my tastes in music is that they are very broad and I don’t go in for any major categorisation. The only split in my music collection is classical and everything else and that is simply how I listen to them: classical by composer and everything else by artist. The one element I find with Metal over other genres is that it lends itself to internationalism. Pop music seems to default to the English language but there is no reason why it should do. The Metal genre relies as much on the timbre and harmonics of the vocals as it does on the lyrical content and this may partly explain the worldwide popularity of what, by any standards, can be some extreme music. It also explains the popularity of non-English language acts like Rammstein with Anglo-American audiences otherwise uninterested in non-English singing performers. In fact the language can have a great influence on the sound giving particular sonic niches to Scandinavian metal, Russian metal, Far Eastern and Japanese metal.

Anyway, “Reaperman” is on Sunday afternoons between 15:00-17:00 GMT. I’m certainly going to be listening.