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Classic FM startles with radical change in format

• Moving spirit Richard Cock says many people will miss the radio station that has been their friend for 24 years

Yvonne Fontyn

Tuning in to my usual 102.7 FM frequency this week and hearing the Faithless song Insomnia (“Insomnia, please release me and let me dream / Of makin’ mad love to my girl on the heath / Tearin’ off tights with my teeth”) it struck me that the new Hot 1027 won’t be taking many of the old Classic FM listeners with it. Not when the new station, which spans the greater Joburg and surrounding areas, plays disco and R&B, and posts chats with drag queens on its Facebook page.

It’s all in good fun, but this must rank among the more startling “format changes” ever in SA radio. Classic 102.7 listeners were told weeks ago that a new, “more commercially viable” format was coming that would include contemporary music and R&B, but they could not have been prepared for a radio station that doesn’t even pretend to nod in their direction.

To be fair, you can now access it on DStv audio, from 7pm until the “graveyard” slot that ends at 5am. So, a station for classical music-loving nightshift workers and insomniacs. That will surely leave most of its fans behind.

This relegation to small pockets of access sounds like a death knell to classical music in Gauteng. Because, as Richard Cock, who was on the station’s original planning committee 24 years ago, put it, Classic 102.7 wasn’t just a radio station, it was “a community of like-minded people”. And not such a shrinking one, either. He says he received hundreds of emails after the station officially closed on June 29, and from an extremely “varied demographic”.

It wasn’t just that the station had various quizzes, contests and other perks that kept listeners engaged — from morning DJ Mike Mills’ painstakingly researched musicians’ birthdays to Peter Terry’s choral specials and Shireen Hollier’s fun facts — but it was a link to classical music in Gauteng and beyond. When there was a classical music event in town, you got to know about it on Classic 102.7.

The station, with a vision to be a dedicated classical music station along the lines of the UK’s Classic FM, was launched in 1997 as a kind of philanthropic cultural project with the help of the Liberty Foundation, and first managed by then presenter Eon de Vos. This was about the time that state funding was withdrawn from the National Symphony Orchestra, leading to its demise.

Cock, who with his wife Sue Cock is a champion of the genre in SA, then started the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra, and has since been involved in hosting countless international performers in SA, especially at the Linder Auditorium, as well as the

much-loved RMB Starlight Classics shows, held outdoors at the Joburg Country Club. Its last performance, filmed at the venue in 2020 due to lockdown, featured Phantom of the Opera lead Jonathan Roxmouth and operatic star Pretty Yende. Performers ranging from the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra to Buskaid and the Soweto String Quartet were part of the Classic 102.7 fold, and thanked the station in their programme notes.

I suspect that few of its former listeners see Hot 1027 as an alternative, because this is not so much a revamping of a brand as a demolition. The station may have migrated to DStv audio, but that is not a format that is available to many of its fans, particularly young emerging ones. Ditto the 7pm to 5am slot, when most people are watching TV or will, when things return to normal, be out and about. Not much advertising revenue there, I should think.

Money talks, and over the past decade, shrinking listenerships and advertising have eroded the station. After battling along for years, tweaking the format to include jazz and “easy listening” like Shirley Bassey and Frank Sinatra, it went into business rescue in 2019.

Someone who made a fortuitous move just three months before the station closed was conductor and cellist Kutlwano Masote. He’s hosting a new programme on SAfm called Weekend Sundowner Classics, on Saturdays and Sundays from 4pm to 6pm. It’s another pocket where you will find classical music on radio in Gauteng, though Cape Town’s Fine Music

Radio has so far escaped the chop.

Masote, who helped host operatic events in Joburg and Cape Town in May, is planning more music shows for when things get back to normal.

“I realise that necessities must come first,” he said, referring to issues such as health and education, but seeing first-hand the depression and resignation of colleagues in the music industry is something that haunts him.

The ever-ebullient Cock is not despondent, though. “It’s definitely not a death knell for classical music in Gauteng,” he said in a phone interview. “There is live music going on, which we stream online.” He is looking forward to the day the pandemic is contained and we can go back to music concerts in chambers, halls and parks.

It won’t be on 102.7, though. “People are going to miss it a lot. It’s been a friend to many people for the past 24 years.”

People like Pamela Wood, 93, who had two bouts in ICU in hospital in 2020 — one for a fall and the second for Covid-19. Not able to receive any visitors, she said her recovery wasn’t helped by being tended by staff dressed up like spacemen.

“Classic 102.7 was a friend to me,” she said. “It kept me going. And now I feel like I’ve lost a friend.”

Wood hasn’t got DStv; she relies on her portable radio. “There’s nothing to listen to now,” she says.

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2021-07-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

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