Want to understand what makes Melbourne tick? Listen to Triple R
The anarchic community radio station is celebrating its 40th anniversary in rude health
LAST Friday morning, at the end of a truly shitty week when the nightmare of Donald Trump in the White House had become a reality and reassurance was needed that the world had not gone completely mad, what else was there left to do but turn to Biggsy?
Born angry and a full-time shit stirrer, Tony Biggs hosts a weekly three-hour talkback show on 3RRR, ‘On The Blower’. In between playing a wildly eclectic assortment of music from his own collection, he rants, from a libertarian, progressive perspective . . . but unlike most talkback hosts, he also listens, and has a soothing manner.
Once he opened the lines on Friday, it became cathartic, with Biggsy taking on the role of a kindly agony aunt/uncle for those callers and listeners who were confused, angry and upset about what had happened in the US.
At a time when it feels like all of society’s structures and certainties are being torn apart, there is something comforting about being able to flick Triple R on and know that there is a community of listeners who will always be a safe refuge.
Today, that community numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Many of us are former teenage misfits, whose lives were literally changed by adolescent nights spent locked in our bedrooms listening to a little community radio station broadcasting until recently out of a Fitzroy back street.
If you grew up in Melbourne in the 1980s through to the mid-2000s and you wanted to have your finger on the pulse, you just had to tune into 102.7, Triple R-FM.
It seems almost quaint now, but long before Spotify, Facebook and YouTube infiltrated our lives, Triple R was our social media. It was how we discovered new music, kept up with trends, explored challenging ideas, and connected with others with the same interests and values. It opened the world to us.
Forty years after it made its first tentative entrance onto the airwaves on 17 November 1976, Triple R is still doing the same thing. It has lost none of its energy or its credibility, constantly renewing and rejuvenating itself. Even though much of the music and many of the ideas it championed in the early days have become mainstream, Triple R has remained true to its own values and is forever pushing the boundaries.
Against the odds, while other media have floundered in the face of online competition, Triple R remains in rude health, at the centre of the life and culture of this city.
As it enters its fifth decade, Triple R is a Melbourne institution in every sense of the word, a remarkable achievement for a station that started out suspicious of institutions and determined to avoid becoming part of the establishment.
Amid all the criticism of a supposedly out-of-touch mainstream media “elite” for their role in the rise of Trumpism, Triple R has remained defiantly local and grassroots and doggedly independent. In this day and age, those are values we need in our media more than ever.
And something else happened along the way over the past 40 years. Triple R became the glue for a community and part of the heartbeat of Melbourne.
The station, nowadays housed in East Brunswick, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this week with gusto, with live concerts, on-air documentaries and a showcase exhibition in the State Library of Victoria.
For those entire four decades, Triple R has been a beacon for music, cinema, theatre, visual arts, and comedy, a hub from which the spokes of a range of cultural activities radiate.
Its early years were fraught with financial difficulties and it wasn’t until the mid-90s that it was secure.
My own relationship with Triple R began at home in the eastern suburbs one weekday night, messing around with the radio looking for something different from the usual commercial FM diet of Chisel, Dire Straits and Mellencamp to provide background noise while I did my year 11 homework.
Out of curiosity I moved the dial across to this station called Triple R I’d heard mentioned at school. It was a revelation. It felt like a door had suddenly swung open. This was what I’d been looking for all my life.
From that moment on, Triple R became my teacher, mentor and constant companion, exposing me to the wider world of music and expression I had long been craving, and giving me the confidence to explore it further.
Who knows what kind of person I would have turned out to be if I had never discovered Triple R, but I have no doubt I would not be the person I am today without it.
Later I would dabble behind the microphone and the panel, doing graveyard shifts and occasional daytime fill-ins in the old studios in Victoria Street, Fitzroy, but primarily I remained a devoted listener. Even when backpacking overseas in my early-20s, I maintained my connection through cassettes of shows recorded by my sisters and mailed to me from the other side of the world.
When I was researching the history of Triple R for what became the book Radio City a decade ago, I came across dozens of stories just like mine, beginning in a teenage bedroom, desperately seeking escape from the stultifying boredom of suburbia — just like the character in the iconic “But Mum . . . it’s educational” poster from 1979.
People like the writer Christos Tsiolkas and musician David Bridie have spoken candidly about how Triple R was their lifeline. It taught us more than school or uni ever did.
It’s still the case, as Jenny McKechnie, vocalist/guitarist of young Melbourne three piece Cable Ties told EG last month: “I lived in Bendigo as a teen, so when I came to Melbourne at 19 I discovered music and the music scene through Triple R. It told me the gigs to go to, because I didn’t know anyone here to ask. Triple R was one of my first friends.”
The station burst to life at almost the exact same moment as punk. Within a couple of weeks in late-1976, Brisbane’s The Saints released their debut single ‘(I’m) Stranded’, the Sex Pistols released ‘Anarchy In the UK’, and Triple R began broadcasting. Like punk, from the get-go, Triple R’s mission was to push the boundaries and provide a genuine alternative to the mainstream, and it was imbued with the same DIY spirit.
But Triple R’s roots also went back further, to The Pram Factory in Carlton and the counter-cultural scene that revolved around it.
Literally hundreds of local bands and artists have been nurtured by Triple R, their precious first demo aired on the station, their early gigs promoted: from the Birthday Party and Sports in the late-70s, through Paul Kelly, Hunters & Collectors and Models, Dirty Three and Magic Dirt and Even, The Drones and Eddy Current Suppression Ring, through to Courtney Barnett and Dick Diver and my current favourite, The Peep Tempel.
Triple R has played the same role in theatre, film, visual arts, and literature. Has any other cultural institution been as important in this city over the same period?
And much is made of those who have worked behind the microphone over the years, names like Red Symons, Robyn Archer, Greig Pickhaver, Jane Clifton, Santo Cilauro, Kate Langbroek, John Safran, Karen Leng, Dave Hughes. The station has long acted as an incubator for extraordinary talents. It’s still attracting 20-something hipsters who in decades time will also be household names, along with long-time broadcasters like Max Crawdaddy and Stephen ‘The Ghost’ Walker.
But there is more, much more, to Triple R than those famous names.
Ultimately, it all comes back to that elusive sense of community.
With a young family and other commitments, I don’t get back to the station anywhere near as much as I’d like to. Even my listening time is limited to snatches here and there. But the connection never dies. Whether at the annual MegaHertz-Rock Dogs Community Cup or whenever I see a Triple R bumper sticker on a car, I feel a warm flush of goodwill. I recognise another member of my tribe, and I just know the car’s owner must be a good person.
But also, and this is crucial, we feel special ownership of the station, which is not beholden to government or commercial interests. It belongs to us.
Today, the station has the sheen of slick professionalism in everything it does, but it remains lovably eccentric and obtuse, fiercely independent, forever twisting down a new path and away from the boring, commercial and predictable. As the world gets smaller, the station remains steadfastly rooted in its home city, reflecting its community even as it is heard by a global audience over the internet.
Lacking the natural beauty, climate and history of Sydney, Melbourne has always laboured under the mantle of the second city, but whenever I want to introduce a newcomer to my city, one of the first things I will do is turn on my radio.
Just like the city itself, Triple R may not not be glamorous, but it is slightly anarchic, just outside the mainstream, and never too full of itself. I have ex-Melbourne friends who have moved to the Harbour City and the thing they miss the most is Triple R (life is easier now they can stream it).
Because you cannot truly understand the soul of this city without listening to Triple R.
