Fifty years since the launch of 2JJ, or Double Jay – the station that became Triple J in 1981 – radio’s former enfant terrible is now legacy media. Once the cornerstone of Australian popular music and youth culture, it risks irrelevance as listener numbers dwindle in the face of social media and streaming services. Or, as its defenders will argue, maybe the critics are simply nostalgic for when Australia’s youth radio station was aimed at them: there is a joke within the ABC that on the second day that Double Jay was on air, someone rang up and complained that it wasn’t as good as it used to be.
When Double Jay launched at 11am on Sunday 19 January 1975, the brief from Arthur Wyndam, then ABC’s head of radio, was that the station should: give public concerts, expose the public to new music, and record the music made in its studios and at its concerts for broadcasting purposes. At the time, youth radio was serviced by Top 40 AM stations; Double Jay was established along the lines of “underground” radio stations, playing an eclectic selection of music unconstrained by formats.
No matter what Marius Webb, one of Double Jay’s first two station coordinators, might say, naming the station after a marijuana cigarette and having the slogan “the Head of the Dial” was clearly provocative, as was playing songs that had been banned from commercial airwaves. Skyhooks’ You Just Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good In Bed was the launch track, followed by the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil – neither had been played on Australian commercial radio before. The first breakfast announcer, Alan McGirvan, had the dubious honour of debuting the word “cunt” on his first breakfast show during launch week. And so it went on.
The troika – Webb, his fellow station coordinator Ron Moss and program coordinator Ros Cheney – established Double Jay as a worker-controlled collective with a balance of professional broadcasters and enthusiastic amateurs.
“Ros was the rock for all subsequent women [at Double Jay] – more political and more dedicated than the men who, in turn, were either ego-driven, commercial radio tainted or ideologues,” recalls producer and programmer Sammy Collins, who joined the station in 1975.
It was Cheney’s influence that led to a large female representation at all levels of the station, which was the first music station in Australia to allow women DJs. One of them, Gayle Austin, once said: “In those days, the only portrayal of women in the media was that you were either draped across a car to sell this beautiful car to a bloke or you were in the ‘mum’ role. You were cooking or cleaning or looking after the kids.”
“[Gayle] just epitomised everything I imagined as this kind of really cool way to be as a woman on air and a really proud, loud female voice,” says Tracee Hutchison, who presented on Triple J in the 1980s. “I just thought ‘I wanna work there, I wanna be part of this’.”
From the outset, Double Jay was regarded with suspicion by the establishment. Asio tapped the station’s phones. Outraged members of the public regularly complained about the station’s moral turpitude. Announcer Bob Hudson described its collective management system as “a combination of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Mickey Mouse Club”. (He was suspended from his breakfast shift by the “collective” for his comments.)
The station looked more like a share house than a public broadcaster, even though the talent was totally professional: Ted Robinson, Lex Marinos, Chris Winter, Mark Colvin and Jim Middleton were among the station’s early staff.
Colvin, who died in 2017, once told me in an interview: “The thing at those group meetings was that there was an anarcho-syndicalist thing going on where you would have these weekly group meetings and everybody had an equal voice, and everyone sat on those bean bags or on the floor or on those big baggy sofas and had a big argument.”
Hutchison recalls her time presenting the weekend breakfast slot in the 1980s: “I’d be out all night. It was not unusual to come in on a Saturday or Sunday morning and the mid-dawn person would be cutting lines of cocaine and speed on the desk. Which is not to say I participated in any of that. There were always stories of people having sex in the sound booths or the studios.”
There was rock’n’roll to go with the sex and drugs. Prior to 1975, Australia’s unquestioned music capital was Melbourne. Double Jay provided a focus on Sydney musicians, with the daily What’s On segment being the first real source to tell fans when various musicians were playing in the city. That made a big difference. Double J also played artists such as Midnight Oil, Radio Birdman, INXS, Mental As Anything and AC/DC years before commercial radio or Countdown gave them airplay.
During a Double Jay concert in April 1978, Jimmy Barnes introduced Khe Sanh by thanking the station this way: “Apparently, there are a few lyrics in this song that aren’t considered too good. We’d like to thank Double Jay, which is the only station that plays it.” The offending lyric – “And their legs were often open/But their minds were always closed” – was too much for the commercial stations in those days.
In the early years, Double Jay’s music programming could vary from avant-jazz to Paul McCartney or Daddy Cool, depending on the tastes of the announcers and producers. “People would individually champion stuff,” Hutchison recalls. “I remember when Ed Kuepper released Also Sprach the King of Euro-Disco – I played it six times in one shift on Saturday morning breakfast.”
Double Jay lived on the tension between the tastes of various factions until 1980, when the station moved to the FM band and became Triple J, and the first attempts were made to establish a station-wide playlist.
“I thought at the time that the station had turned into the alternate to the alternate to the alternate,” the late presenter Stuart Matchett once told me. “It was like every track that you played on air had to be one that had never been played before and that no one else played. Some of the presenters were negative about other music and would say how terrible other popular bands of the time were.”
Anarcho-syndicalist communes have a way of burning themselves out. The last hurrah came in 1990 when the station went on strike over the NWA song Fuck Tha Police being censored by ABC management; the on-air team replaced every song on the playlist with NWA’s Express Yourself and played it 82 times in a row.
Commercial radio veteran Barry Chapman was installed to supervise a cultural change. Producer Jo Chichester recalls meeting with Chapman to discuss the annual International Women’s Day lineup and being summarily shut down. Nothing gets in the way of flow programming.
But the 1990s were a golden age for Triple J. The station was perfectly placed to spread the new grunge zeitgeist. For the next two decades, Triple J set the cultural agenda, particularly for Australian music.
“You knew something was happening,” says Richard Kingsmill, a former music director at the station and its longest serving announcer until last year. “Spiderbait, the Beasts of Bourbon or the Cruel Sea were playing to 40 people at Max’s Petersham Inn in Sydney and they were suddenly winning seven Aria awards. You knew something was happening and we were right in the box seat.”
By 1995 Triple J had been rolled out to all the regions, which meant the bands it chose could suddenly tour nationally. “After 1995 everything was great,” Kingsmill recalls. “The music was great, the bands were selling. In among all of those you had a splash of hip-hop and dance and we were still playing Midnight Oil.”
By the turn of the century, the political and social policy elements had been mostly leached out of the programming and “the Js” was very much a music station. But the arrival of Napster and internet piracy began a shift that saw music fans curating their own listening rather than relying on radio to shape their tastes. Like all legacy media, Triple J has lost listeners and influence as artists flock to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify to find their big break.
One record label manager, who asked not be named, says: “Under 25s all around the world are used to consuming entertainment on demand, curated for them by algorithms which ensure they only see and hear stuff they probably already like. The idea of tuning into the radio at 7pm to hear the songs most requested by other people is as foreign to them as tuning into the 7pm news or buying a newspaper.”
This doesn’t mean Triple J, or its newer digital sister station, Double J, have no place or influence any more. “Yes, they’re nowhere near as dominant as they were,” the record label manager says. “But it is still a tastemaker with knock-on effects like making it more likely for a playlisted band to land a booking on a cool festival. An Unearthed breakout can lead to artists getting noticed by labels and agents. So Triple J still matters, but it matters less than it used to … like all radio stations everywhere”.
“If you asked that founding crew what they thought the future of vinyl looked like back then, I wonder how many would have predicted how big it is today,” Lachlan Macara, the current head of Triple J and Double J says. “We’ve been about a lot more than just radio for a long while now, and I think those who get that are able to make the most of all the platforms Triple J has [made] available to them. The success Royel Otis have had following their [performance on weekly Triple J program] Like A Version last year – the song has done over 30m combined views on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and has been streamed 60m times on Spotify – isn’t possible if we’re only focusing on radio.”
These days, there are no larger-than-life announcers such as Bob Hudson or George Wayne; no one is going to throw in some avant-jazz or a wildcard song. Triple J is more like an algorithm focused on delivering flow programming for its target demographic. Perhaps the way to return the station to something like its heyday would be to allow for more surprises, more individuality and more controversy.
But Australian music is now largely absent from the hit parade, and given digital platforms are dominated by overseas companies, the situation is likely to only get worse. It will probably continue to fall on Triple J’s shoulders to save what it can.
