Tuning in to Rage, ABC TV’s late-night music video program, every Saturday morning during the 1990s was, for a certain generation, a little like waiting to hear Casey Kasem present the American Top 40. Would your favourite video make it to No 1, or would Savage Garden’s To the Moon and Back beat it to the top spot and ruin your entire weekend?
Yes, there were other ways to access the Australian top 50 but there was nothing quite like getting up early and feeling your eyes turn into spirals over a few hours of back-to-back music videos coupled with the high sugar content breakfast cereal of your choice.
It eventually became customary in our house and my friends’ to “guest program” our own Rage playlists to enjoy throughout the week. The method was the same every week: find a VHS tape, set up the VCR and be very quick with the record/pause button whenever your then-favourite video appeared. (There was an additional stage that involved dubbing the VHS tape on to cassette for school bus rides but that’s a story approaching Eric Olthwaite levels of boring detail.) Yes, I could have shelled out for a Smash Hits compilation or similar but where was the fun in that?
And though I’d like to take the credit for putting Maxi Priest’s That Girl in the close vicinity of Butthole Surfers’ Pepper on one of my Rage tapes, that honour goes entirely to the good CD and cassingle buying people of Australia, who made the Aria singles charts of the mid-90s one of the most mind-bogglingly diverse collections of popular song in memory. (Pepper entered the charts on 2 June 1996 and peaked at No 15, a scenario difficult to imagine occurring today.)
Looking back, making wildly illegal bootleg Rage compilation tapes was just our way of making a commonly held Australian dream a reality: getting to guest program Rage.
The show itself began in 1987 and was very nearly titled Rage Til You Puke, at least if then executive producer Mark Fitzgerald is to be believed. As for the iconic logo, as Fitzgerald reminisced during the show’s 25th anniversary, “I said, ‘Look, I want it to look as close to vomit as it possibly can look’ [...] There was about 20 alternatives and I picked the one that I thought was the closest to vomit and that was it.”
The guest-programmed playlist was introduced early on in the show’s life (1990, to be exact, with noted musical hero Andrew Denton the inaugural video-chooser), a far more personable slant on the “veejays” that populated MTV and its ilk.
As the guest program format found its feet, the mid to late 90s and turn of the century was a glorious time to be a Rage viewer. In fact, I stayed up to watch so many episodes in 1999 alone (shout out to Gerling’s Enya and Aphex Twin combo) that I’m amazed I didn’t completely fail year 12.
I also vividly remember the first guest program I watched “as a grown-up”, Trent Reznor’s effort in February of 2000, and credit him for turning me on to Atari Teenage Riot’s Destroy 2000 Years Of Culture. The following year, my university boyfriend and I camped out in the living room to watch Stephen Malkmus’ playlist. Those were my heroes but there were other times I came to see certain artists in a new light thanks solely to their choices during a guest program.
Guest-programmed episodes were an incredible way to discover new-to-you music, an experience made even cooler by the fact that your favourite artists seemed to be recommending them directly to you. (Though I am ashamed it took the Darkness to introduce me to Yes’ Owner Of A Lonely Heart.) Rage was a crucial part of my musical education; I wouldn’t have become a music critic without it.
The show has occasionally offered viewers the chance to submit their own playlist, most recently for the upcoming 30th anniversary specials, well clued-in to the fact that there’s unlikely to be a single person in the country who wouldn’t jump at the chance. I took this fantasy so seriously that, for many years, I kept a “Rage guest program” document just in case I somehow became famous enough to record my own stint. It started with Steve Miller Band’s Living In The USA, took a swerve to Wu Tang Clan’s Gravel Pit and only got less coherent from there.
As the not-so-new millennium has rolled on and budget cuts and streamlining mean that many alternative TV shows and formats have disappeared to make way for the dreaded “factual entertainment” era, that Rage is still choofing along 30 years after its launch is something of a miracle. Its place in Australia’s pop cultural pantheon is assured (more than once I’ve seen “they’re getting rid of the Rage opening sequence” employed as a particularly cruel April fools’ rumour).
And though I will show my age if I complain about the relative lack of musical diversity in today’s Saturday morning charts, I hope that there’s a new generation of young people staying up late to watch their heroes’ favourite videos and maybe even complaining about the No 1 spot on a Saturday morning over a bowl of low-GI gluten-free single-origin breakfast cereal.
• Rage’s 30th anniversary special is showing on ABC TV on Saturday 15 April. The documentary Rage30: The story of Rage is showing at 10pm, on 17 April on ABC TV and ABC iView
