Black Stone Cherry - Secret Session

This Black Stone Cherry acoustic set is the fourth Secret Session that I have been fortunate enough to attend and the first I've been to since Rock Radio became Real XS. It is also the first that I've been to where I was already a serious fan of the band before going to the session.

All four of Black Stone Cherry, a photo
by DavidDMuir on Flickr.

I have been a bit snowed under with work recently and it has taken me too long to get around to writing a review.In fact, it has been so long that the details have already begun to fade from my aged brain, so I'll start with the clearest abiding memory - it was outstanding!

They only played four tracks, the first of which was (I think) In my Blood and I'm pretty sure they also played Blame It On The Boom Boom as well as White Trash Millionaire but as I say, my recollection is a bit hazy so I'm willing to be corrected. Update: I have consulted with Daughter Number 3 and she assures me they only played three tracks. The second was Like I Roll and the third is described below. See told you my memory was going!

I am absolutely sure about what they finished with though - a cover of Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash. It is a track I have attempted to learn to play myself as I struggle on with my guitar lessons and the band did it fairly straight. At least the did so for the first couple of sections until the music began to morph... At first, I thought they were going to segue straight into one of their own songs. But when the vocal came in, it became clear that what they had done instead was get all Black Stone Cherry-esque on Folsom Prison Blues. Rather than just doing a straight cover version of a Cash classic, what they did was take the song and make it sound like one of their own. As I describe it here, it sounds terrible but trust me, it sounded great at the time!

I have posted some of the pictures I took on Flickr but you'll see a much better set on the Real Radio XS website. (I'm fairly sure they took video of the session too, but if they have posted it online, I certainly can't find it.)

And, in the "Isn't that just the way it goes..." category, this is the first Secret Session I've been too where I already CDs by the band, so I took one along to get it signed. But it's also the first Secret Session I've been to where they weren't signing stuff, they were just posing for pictures. Curses!

To finish on a more positive note though, they seemed to be a really great bunch of chaps and handled comments and questions in almost impenetrable (to them) Galswegian accents with good humour. So thanks to all at Real XS and more importantly, thanks to Black Stone Cherry for a great acoustic set.

{Edit: This post was flagged by blogger who claim: "Your content has violated our spam policy...". I have checked their spam policy. It says: Do not spam. This may include unwanted promotional or commercial content, unwanted content that is created by an automated program, unwanted repetitive content, nonsensical content or anything that appears to be a mass solicitation." It does not contain any "promotional or commercial content" - it is a report of an event I attended. It was written by me, not "an automated program". It may be "repetitive" and "nonsensical" in places but that is down to my writing rather than anything to do with spam. I'm not sure what "mass solicitation" means but I'd be happy to edit it out if someone can point me at the offending section. Have asked for the post to be reviewed and await their judgement.}

Rock Radio - Final Look

How long have I been promising to look at the Real Radio XS output? And yet, I keep going back to the Rock Radio data. I think this will be the last visit... I hope.

Outside Rock Radio FM, a photo by 
DavidDMuir on Flickr.

Why are we back here again? Well, as I did the analysis on genres and broke it down by DJ (see What genres of music did Rock Radio play?) it occurred to me that Tom Russell is the link between the old and the new. Since I concluded that DJs had an influence on the output of Rock Radio, it occurred to me that one test of Real Radio XS would be if Tom could still make a difference to what was played. Now, there are differences beyond just a change of station of course. Most importantly, Tom has moved from drivetime to breakfast. That could well have an influence on what is played but it should still be instructive to compare what Tom played on Rock Radio with what he is playing now.

So, I promise this is the last time I look at the Rock Radio data before I start publishing stuff on the Real Radio XS... probably!

Going back to the first post on this topic (Rock Radio Playlist) I gave an overview of what was played. Here then is the same sort of analysis but broken down by show.

Over the thirteen shows, 427 tracks were played altogether. This breaks down as 205 tracks over the six breakfast shows and 222 tracks over the seven drivetime show. This means that on average, Billy played 34.2 tracks per show, or 8.5 tracks per hour. Over the same time period, Tom played 31.7 tracks per show, or 7.9 tracks per hour. I'm assuming there's a similar number of adverts in both shows and no significant difference in the length of the news and traffic reports etc. (although it feels like there is a bit more traffic news in the morning). If, however, the non-music sections are of similar length in the two shows, it appears that Tom played fewer tracks than Billy. There could be a few reasons for this: Tom talked more between tracks than Billy (not my impression); Tom played longer tracks (possible); or I'm just wrong and there was more non-music stuff in the drivetime slot (also possible). Having noted the difference, it is worth saying that it is only a difference of roughly two extra tracks per show. I know enough about statistics to know I should really check if this is a statistically significant difference or just down to random chance... but I know enough about my own limited understanding of statistics to know that I would have to spend more time than I am willing to give to it to work out how to check for statistical significance! All offers of help from statisticians will be gratefully received.

As for what they played, direct comparisons are tricky because I missed one of the breakfast shows. The headline figures though are that Billy played 124 different artists and 186 different tracks over the six shows while Tom played 129 different artists and 210 different tracks over his seven shows.  It is worth noting that although (allowing for the extra show) Billy and Tom played a similar number of different artist, Tom clearly played a much greater range of songs. This can also be deduced from the tables shown below.

These tables display repeated tracks. Presumably, the most repeated tracks were down to the station's playlist obliging the DJs to play them a certain number of times.

Artist (Billy)	Song (Billy)	Number of Plays
Mr Big	Undertow	4
Sixx A.M.	Lies Of The Beautiful People	3
Whitesnake	Love Will Set You Free	3
Michael Monroe	78	2
Extreme	Get The Funk Out	2
Bad Company	Good Lovin' Gone Bad	2
Led Zeppelin	Houses Of The Holy	2
Guns N Roses	November Rain	2
Gary Moore	Out In The Fields	2
Kiss	Rock And Roll All Nite	2
Foo Fighters	Rope	2
Dr Feelgood	She Does It Right	2
Aerosmith	Toys In The Attic	2
Bob Seger & The Silver...	Turn The Page	2
Metallica	Turn The Page	2
Manowar	Warriors Of The World	2
Pink Floyd	Wish You Were Here	2
Artist (Tom)	Song (Tom)	Number of Plays
Mr Big	Undertow	4
Michael Monroe	78	3
Ozzy Osbourne	Bark At The Moon	2
Ramones	Blitzkreig Bop	2
Saxon	Dallas 1pm	2
Bad Company	Feel Like Makin' Love	2
Sixx A.m.	Lies Of The Beautiful People	2
Whitesnake	Love Will Set You Free	2
Foo Fighters	Rope	2

Finally, the table of most played artists for each DJ is shown below - only artists played three or more times are displayed. Again, direct comparison is tricky because of the missing Breakfast show data.

Artist (Billy)	Number of Plays		Artist (Tom)	Number of Plays
Ac/dc	7		Ac/dc	7
Aerosmith	6		Aerosmith	5
Foo Fighters	5		Bad Company	5
Pink Floyd	5		Def Leppard	5
Deep Purple	4		Free	5
Def Leppard	4		Rolling Stones	5
Guns N Roses	4		Guns N Roses	4
Mr Big	4		Kiss	4
Who	4		Led Zeppelin	4
Bad Company	3		Michael Monroe	4
Free	3		Mr Big	4
Kiss	3		Queen	4
Led Zeppelin	3		Ramones	4
Metallica	3		Saxon	4
Sixx A.M.	3		Thin Lizzy	4
Steve Miller Band	3		Van Halen	4
T Rex	3		Deep Purple	3
Whitesnake	3		Foo Fighters	3
			Foreigner	3
			Jimi Hendrix	3
			Joe Elliot	3
			Journey	3
			Ozzy Osbourne	3
			Red Hot Chili Peppers	3

Surely there is no more to be milked from the Rock Radio data at this stage, so the next post will have to look at Real XS? Time will tell!

What genres of music did Rock Radio play?

In my last post about Rock Radio (What did Rock Radio play? An explanation) I tried to justify how I allocated each of the bands played by Rock Radio over a seven day period to a particular musical genre. You may or may not have been convinced by the method I adopted but it at least gives an indication of the range of styles played.

The reason I wanted to do this was because the range of music played was one of the regular discussion points about the Rock Radio output. Discussion (i.e. complaints) usually focused on one of three questions:

1. Why do they never/always play [band X]?
2. When they play [band Y], why is it always/never [track Z]?
3. Why do they play so much/so little [type G] music?

I tried to address the first two questions ages ago when I wrote the Rock Radio Playlist post (although I may say a bit more about that topic before moving onto look at the Real XS output). This post though will focus on question 3 by looking at the genres of the music played over the seven day period when I collected the data.

So without further ado, here's a graph:

As you may be able to see if you have particularly good eyesight, even allowing for the occasional dodgy classification of a track, the dominant musical forms on Rock Radio were Hard Rock (33%) and Rock (23%) with Heavy Metal some way behind with 11% of the plays. The complete table of genres is:

Genre	Times Played
Hard rock	143
Rock	100
Heavy metal	47
Alternative rock	34
Blues-rock	24
Punk rock	16
Glam rock	15
Progressive rock	14
Psychedelic rock	13
Roots rock	10
Funk rock	8
Alternative metal	3

This more or less matches my experience of listening to Rock Radio. I always said I was reasonably relaxed about what they played. Obviously, they should have played more Rush, but in general I liked what I heard. I liked hearing stuff I wouldn't normally listen to and they introduced me to bands that I might have otherwise missed: Airbourne, Apocalyptica, and Black Stone Cherry to name but three. Of course there was stuff I didn't like but in general there was more that was rocking than was shocking (to borrow from Tom Russell).

But to get back to the numbers above, for a station calling itself Rock Radio, I think that's not a bad balance of styles; especially since I was looking at the Breakfast and Drivetime shows which will inevitably aim to appeal to a more general Rock listening audience than one of the speciallist shows such as the Metal Hammer show. I might liked to have seen a bit less Punk and a bit more Prog but otherwise I can't really complain. What do you think? Unbalanced or about right?

Before I leave this analysis of styles, I think it is worth putting the output from Billy Rankin beside Tom Russell's output. I think it shows that individual DJs were able to shape what was played, at least to an extent.

Tom played a bit more Heavy Metal than Billy and Billy favoured Blues and Prog a bit more than Tom. Again, this reflects my memory of the DJs output and probably explains why I preferred Billy over Tom. (Not that I dislike Tom you understand!)

So bottom line as far as I'm concerned is:

• The output from Rock Radio was not unreasonable for a rock station
• DJs make a difference

But what does the data say to you?

What did Rock Radio play? An explanation.

This post was supposed to give a bit more analysis of the old Rock Radio data but as I wrote it, I discovered a good bit of explanation was necessary first...

In my original post, I noted the number of tracks played, the number of artists that featured and how often the different artists were featured across the Breakfast and Drivetime shows over a period of seven days. (Although I missed one of the Breakfast shows, so I only have the data from 13 shows.) The next thing I wanted to do, but never got around to, was to look at the genres of music that featured. But, before I can look at genres, I need to make a couple of disclaimers.

First, I realised after collecting the data that not everything that is played on the radio features on the website. It seems that if the DJ played something that was not in the station's database of songs, it didn't feature on the "what was played" page. Sometimes the webpage claimed that the same song was played twice in a row and my guess is, that when a track was played that was not in the database, the system just reported the previous track had just been played again. It looks like Real XS does something similar - it has solved the repeated track reporting problem but there are still gaps when a DJ goes "off piste". For example, on the last Friday before Christmas, I submitted a trio of festive songs for Tom's Godfather of Rock feature (or Godfather-Christmas in this case). I asked for The Black Crowes - Back Door Santa; The Darkness - Christmas Time; and Black Stone Cherry - Santa Is Back; but as you can see from the screen dump, Back Door Santa is conspicuous by his absence!

So any analysis of what the station played will be incomplete because I am relying on what their website says they played rather than listening to the output and recording what they actually played.

From Wikipedia entry

The second disclaimer relates the the way I have decide on the genres of music played. Picking a genre is, inevitably going to be subjective, so I tried to assign a musical style in a way that was as fair and transparent as possible. But the main problem was that I had data on 361 different songs. I quickly decided that I had neither the time nor the inclination to go through 361 songs and assign a musical genre to each one! Since there were only 185 artists ("only 185" - ha!) I decided to assign a genre to each artist and then assume that each track of theirs that was played was an example of that genre. Clearly this is daft, for example I have classified Kiss as "Hard rock" (for reasons I'll explain in a moment) but had the misfortune to hear the abomination that is I Was Made For Loving You on Tom's show the other day, which couldn't be considered Hard rock by any stretch of the imagination! I hope though that reporting on genre by artist will give a reasonable view of what the station played since it is as good as I can manage in the time available.

The last piece of the puzzle therefore is how did I allocate genres to artists. The problem is, of course, that if you got five Rock fans in a room, you are likely to have seven different opinion on how to categorise any given artist. Also, some artists defy easy categorisation and over the course of their career, or even the course of one album, they can range across umpteen genres. I decided therefore to rely on the wisdom of crowds and turned to Wikipedia for help. Pretty much every artist listed in Wikipedia has a number of genres associated with that artist listed in a sidebox along with basic information such as when and where they were formed; years active; and past and present members. I decided to allocate the genre listed first in this sidebox as the genre for the artist. So, to take Rush as an example, I would probably have categorised Rush as "Progressive rock" but accept that they are a band that are difficult to pin down to one style. As you can see from the screen shot here though, the sidebar in Wikipedia, while listing "progressive" as one genre, puts "Hard rock" first in the list. In this instance, the list happens to be in alphabetical order but this is not always the case. I cannot find any information to explain the convention in the order of listing genres but have assumed that the first listed is the one that is considered by the Wikipedia community, to best categorise the artist and in general, on the face of it this seems to be a reasonable assumption to make. There are one or two exceptions I made to this method. If an artist does not have a Wikipedia entry (and the overwhelming majority do) I chose a genre based on information either from the artist's own website or (preferably) a site such as AllMusic. The other main exception was where the first stated musical genre in the artist's Wikipedia entry would have left them in a category of one. In those instances (again this applied to fewer than ten artists) I chose the next listed genre instead.

I hope this makes sense and that you don't disagree too violently with the approach I have adopted but let me know what you think. And now, after this long attempt to justify myself, I hope to actually post some new analysis of the old Rock Radio data in the very near future.

Rock Radio and Real XS

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Rock Radio Playlist. I always meant to go back to the data and do a bit more analysis but somehow I never got around to it. A lot has happened since April 2011, not least the transmogrification of Rock Radio into Real XS.

Moving at the speed of rock!,
a photo by DavidDMuir on Flickr.

Had Rock Radio continued on, the data was so old that  it would not have been worth digging it up but, with the changes, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to poke the data a bit more and then compare it with an analysis of data from the current Real XS output. So, over the next couple of posts, I'll look again at the old Rock Radio data and over the next couple of weeks I'll collect data from the Real XS breakfast and drive time shows to see how it compares.

First though, four observations I should have made at the time of the switchover:

1. I understand the station had to save money but cutting DJs may be a false economy. I don't tune into radio to hear uninterrupted music - I use my iPod for that. The DJs are the glue that keeps me stuck to a show; them and the community of listeners that grows around a show. For example, Billy Rankin used to regularly get hundreds of comments on his facebook page and I am still in contact with a number of people that I only know because of their contributions to his programme. You don't get that loyalty and community with an uninterrupted rock block!
2. Rock Radio had the Metal Hammer show and the Classic Rock Magazine show both of which have now gone. I don't know how much money the sponsorship of these shows brought in but I wouldn't have a problem with more sponsorship if it allowed the station to hang on to more DJs. (Poor Tom Russell seems to be given no time off. Are there no employment laws about exploiting national treasures?) Perhaps the Classic Rock Presents Prog magazine would have sponsored a show, or a Blues/Guitar magazine. Or, the station seemed to have a good relationship with Roadrunner Records - would a company like that not have been willing to sponsor a show? (I'm aware here that I may be trying to teach my rock radio management grandmother how to suck eggs but thought it was worth saying.)
3. I became increasingly uneasy about the Real XS trails that were supposed to reassure us. They kept telling me not to worry because they would be playing Kylie. It never occurred to me that they would not be playing Kylie! Why did they feel they had to keep telling me they wouldn't? In fact the more I thought about it, the more annoyed it made me because if Kylie ever produces an out and out belter of a rock track, I hope they would play it! For example, look at the people that collaborated with Slash on his recent album - would you have anticipated hearing someone from the Black Eyed Peas or Nicole Scherzinger on rock radio? Yet, the Slash tracks fit perfectly with a rock radio playlist. So, bitten from both ends: if they are a rock station it should go without saying that they wont play pop; but if a pop artists starts producing great rock songs, of course they should be played!
4. I've kept the one that annoyed me most to last. At the time of the changeover, the people in charge appeared to treat their listeners with contempt. (Thought long and hard about that, but I think "contempt" is not too strong a word.) This seems odd since up to that point, they were a station that knew how to connect with their listeners with (as mentioned already) the DJs facebook pages; a great website; and regular events such as the birthday bashes, curry-oke nights and secret sessions. Yet when the rumours about the changes started circling, the management kept a stony silence. Now, there may be commercial reasons why they could say nothing but when the news broke "officially" on another website there was still nothing from Rock Radio management. It was Father Ted who understood the listeners and broke the news a couple of days later - against (I suspect) the wishes of management. And it was Father Ted (of blessed memory) who caught the mood of the listeners and when he thought: Rock Radio's going down the tubes, so let's party! Meanwhile, Rock Radio management's response was too little and too late when they finally put a corporate-speak announcement on the website and tried to pretend that it was business and usual: "Nothing to see here, just move along and keep listening." Bah!

That was then, but where are we now with Real XS? A while down the line, it's fair to say that it is not exactly business as usual (the complete destruction of the evening schedule is particularly upsetting) but it is also fair to say that the popocalypse feared by some has not taken place either. There is a feeling abroad though that the playlist has changed somewhat. I hope the next few posts will shed some light on that...