Remembering Rocktober: Would this old wrinkly still fly today?

When it comes to living and breathing one’s work, legendary radio production whiz Nigel Haines must truly qualify as an expert.

During his days at Melbourne’s 3XY, when he was immersed in the iconic month-long radio celebration known as Rocktober, he practically lived at the station.

As Haines tells Radio Today, “I remember when I first started doing Rocktober, somebody said to me ‘You get an extra week’s holiday when you’re a producer.’ I said ‘How come?’ They said ‘Because when you work for Rocktober, you don’t get to go home.’”

This proved to be correct.

“You’d go in, you’d start doing your specials and basically you’d work all the way through to the next morning, have a bit of sleep and then come back and do it all again,” says Haines.

Starting in the mid-1970s and continuing through to the early 80s, come October, Haines would effectively give up his life for a whole month.

“It was non-stop specials, non-stop interviews by the guys, and then building segments for the month.”

A standout memory was the day Haines was tasked with transforming the Skyhooks classic Living in the Seventies into a Rocktober jingle.

“To do that, we got given the straight Skyhooks music track. Shirley (Strachan) came in with Stephen Cummings and Ross Wilson, and they redid all the vocals for Living in the Seventies.”

“I just remember having those three guys in the studio, doing the vocals in the radio station in Spencer Street on a little mono four-track recorder.”

Rocktober went to air for the first time in 1974, not just on 3XY, but also on Sydney’s 2SM, Brisbane’s 4IP, Perth’s 6PM, Newcastle’s 2NX and Canberra’s 2CC.

Throughout the month, the stations featured live concerts, on-air music specials showcasing the biggest hits of the time, competitions and promotions, a major highlight being a mega concert on the steps of the Sydney Opera House which was simulcast on 2SM and drew a deafening crowd of 100,000 people.

The brainchild of creative genius Jaan ‘John’ Torv, Rocktober gave the stations involved their distinctive Top 40 sound.

In 1984, 3XY celebrated 10 years of Rocktober with the Rocktober Revolution Concert at Melbourne’s Olympic Park, featuring Skyhooks, Australian Crawl, Richard Clapton, Uncanny X-Men, Kids In The Kitchen, Electric Pandas, The Radiators and Austen Tayshus.

Tickets cost the princely sum of $10.90, and a large chunk of Skyhooks’ performance was broadcast live on the Nine Network’s Hey, Hey It’s Saturday.

Pseudo-politician and former Sydney Breakfast radio regular The Hon. Nick Jones described Rocktober as quite possibly the greatest radio promotion Australia has ever seen.

Stations around the world would later jump on board with the concept.

In the UK, Rocktober is still alive and well, with Absolute Radio this month broadcasting a series of special shows, archive live performances and classic rock songs.

Half a century on, could Rocktober still fly on Australian radio?

Former SCA Content boss Craig Bruce thinks so.

“Oh for sure it can work,” Bruce tells Radio Today. “Forget the clever play-on-words, Rocktober is just a device to celebrate the uniqueness of a format like Triple M. It’s essentially a month-long product promotion.”

“It’s no different to the Rock’s legendary Rock 2,000 countdown in New Zealand, which is the number 1 cume driver of their format, or Radio Hauraki’s ‘The GOAT’ – the greatest 500 songs of all time.”

“There’s a finite list of songs that are available to stations like Triple M. The aim should be to add colour and context to those songs so that people connect with them in a different way.”

Though Rocktober was at one stage revived by Triple M, Haines can’t see the promotion being replicated on radio stations today, at least not in its original form.

“At 3XY during Rocktober, you’d have someone coming in from overseas basically every day of the week. Gone are the days, I think, of having Meatloaf coming in one day and Duran Duran coming in the next.”

Not to mention working out ways to smuggle the Duran Duran boys out of the building to avoid getting mobbed by the screaming hordes of teenage girls staking out the front of the radio station!

Source: For The Record Vol 3 by Steve Woods. Special thanks also to music historian and Skyhooks tragic Ken Francis for his input.

Images supplied