Enter ‘The Ghost’
From ‘Radio City: the First 30 Years of 3RRR-FM’
STEPHEN Walker’s first encounter with Triple R was as a virgin subscriber.
One afternoon in 1980, he trekked into Cardigan Street from his home in the Dandenongs to claim a Snakefinger album and tickets to a Melbourne University concert he had won in a ‘bribe to subscribe’ promotion. Walker was intrigued to see this little station he had been picking up on his tinny FM radio in the laundry at Menzies Creek. There was an innocent charm amid the chaos in the tiny Carlton terrace house.
“I was just amazed at going in these tiny corridors of what would have been a family home and piles of magazines teetering and records piled hither and yon, and all these people wandering around and looking as if they had purpose with pieces of paper in their hand or tapes, in this beehive that was just so compact,” he says. “It just seemed like another world.”
The visit to Cardigan Street left a major impression on Walker, but it wasn’t until he met Geoff King at a party that the thought of going on air entered his mind.
Born in 1950, Walker, an ex-drama teacher, was running a youth crisis centre in the Dandenongs when he first entered the Triple R orbit. With his swept back hair flowing down to his shoulders and piercing blue eyes, he looked like a modern day Viking.
Walker had worked on farms, made jewellery, dabbled in acting at the Pram Factory and La Mama, but had long since left the inner city for a semi-hippie lifestyle in the hills with his young family and massive record collection. His mother had instilled a passion for music in him at a young age growing up in Ringwood, and the discovery of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home had a life-changing effect. So had punk, which had reached Walker all the way out in the Dandenongs through the weak signal from 3RRR.
Walker and King bonded over music at the party in Carlton, and by the time he left Walker had an open invitation to try out as a volunteer presenter. In the sober light of day, he put the idea aside, waiting several weeks before he plucked up the courage to ring King. His first broadcast opened with Cabaret Voltaire and closed with Pere Ubu (“I have no embarrassment about any of the music that I played”). He left the studio after his first all-nighter feeling high as a kite, and soon afterwards was doing the overnight shift once a week. Walker would catch the train into the city straight after work with a crate load of records and try to get through the night without any major blemishes, before catching the dawn train back to Belgrave. It was late 1981, and Triple R had just moved to Fitzroy.
“I felt like a hick from the sticks who had stumbled onto this thing.”
With the summer break looming, Walker was asked to fill in for some regular presenters, including Bohdan, and in March Brenda Kelly handed him a weekly slot on Wednesdays from 8pm to 10pm. The arrangement was perfect, giving him enough time to catch the train in from the Dandenongs, scour record shops in the city, do his show and take the last train home at night. Walker named the show From the Bunker, after a book about William Burroughs (“There seemed to be this image of this little guerrilla radio hunkered down in this bunker sending out these revolutionary thoughts and ideas courtesy of the music,” he says).
But the cult persona of ‘the Ghost Who Talks’ had not yet emerged, and Walker was petrified of feedback about how he sounded. He felt like an intruder who didn’t really belong, and would eventually be exposed as an impostor. He need not have worried. Verbose off air, he was a natural behind the microphone with a form of DJ patter that has been much imitated since.
“I felt like a hick from the sticks who had stumbled onto this thing. Just the way the announcers conducted themselves and referred to each other, it did feel very inner city. You had the feeling that the people who ran the radio station and probably most people who listened to it lived within a hop and a spit of the physical station itself.
“And for us to be listening way out in the Dandenongs seemed like an aberration rather than any intention on the station’s behalf to have people out there listening. We didn’t feel like they were broadcasting to us.
“It was like eavesdropping on this group of inner city people . . . I was far too under-confident to feel I could ever be part of this group because I felt alienated from the culture geographically and probably socially.”
This is an extract from chapter 8 of Radio City: the First 30 Years of 3RRR-FM, published by The Vulgar Press (2006).
