Revealed: Fox FM stars spill secrets on 40 years of success
He’s rock royalty, but did U2 superstar really have the authority to knight Fox FM stars Hamish Blake and Andy Lee? As Fox reaches a 40 years milestone, Lee and other broadcast legends reflect on fun times at the station
Confidential
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Andy Lee has revealed the behind-the-scenes story about being knighted by U2 superstar Bono.
“We couldn’t believe it was happening,” Lee told the Herald Sun “Bono told us to kneel down, and said, ‘I think I have the power to do this.”
Lee, who co-hosted a successful drive show on Fox FM with Hamish Blake, reflected on the Bono moment while celebrating Fox FM’s 40 year milestone this month.
Blake and Lee threw a farewell party at the Myer Music Bowl in 2010 to mark a hiatus from radio.
U2, who were playing a stadium show in Melbourne at the time, asked if they could be involved in the Hamish and Andy event.
“We couldn’t believe it,” Lee said. “We asked if they could play, and they said no, but if we could think of a good way to incorporate them, they’d be up for it.”
Lee and Blake wrote a song about how their show was better than U2.
“The idea was, U2 would come on stage and interrupt our song. Bono and the band were amazing about it. Then, they said they’d love to play (a set at Hamish and Andy’s party).”
There were conditions, though. Lee and Blake had to clear it with already-booked musical acts, including John Farnham, and they couldn’t tell anyone about, or promote, their U2 coup.
To maintain the ruse, Jack Post, who appeared on their radio show as Cacklin Jack, assembled a bunch of mates to soundcheck at the venue with instruments that would eventually be played by U2.
“We had to pretend Jack’s band from high school was playing at our party,” Lee said. “Everyone kept asking him about the show, and they couldn’t understand why he wasn’t nervous.”
At the show, Lee and Blake performed We Are Better Than U2, and as planned, U2 strode on stage and took over. Bono did his royal duty with the radio hosts, the band performed Desire and Vertigo, then left to do their stadium show at Docklands.
Lee says: “We went back to our dressing room, relieved we’d done our last show for the foreseeable future, there were four bottles of Guinness on ice, and note from U2.
“It was a really nice moment.”
Lee’s U2 flashback came as Fox FM legends including Barry Bissell, Dee Dee Dunleavy, Mick Molloy, Tracy Bartram and Matt Tilley also paid tribute to the radio station for clocking up 40 years on air.
“I remember those years as some of the happiest of my life,” Dunleavy, one of Fox’s first broadcast stars, now a 3AW afternoon host, said.
Fox FM began broadcasting on August 1, 1980. Its music format was easy listening, and the station’s first presenter John Amies, played the opening song, George Benson’s Breezin’, on the wrong speed.
It was, perhaps, an omen that radio listeners wanted their music a bit more upbeat, and a few years later, Fox’s laidback jazz playlist was dumped for pop and rock, catering to a wider audience and mainstream tastes.
“I remember it as exciting new beginnings, and building everything from scratch,” Bissell said. “FM radio was new, and everybody was chasing their tails, but getting an audience was the fun part.”
Bissell hosted drive and morning shifts, but shot to prominence fronting the national countdown show, Take 40 Australia.
It became an institution, which Bissell hosted for 21 years.
“Take 40 was about having a good time and wanting the audience to feel the same way. It was fairly upbeat time in the world, and you wanted to reflect that,” Bissell said.
“We all worked hard,” he said of Fox’s formative years. “But there was an incredible feeling of creating something that actually worked.”
Farnham was so impressed by Dunleavy, he suggested her radio bosses should give her a shot in the hosting chair. Soon after, she joined the breakfast show helmed by Kevin Hillier, with Denis O’Kane on news, and Peter ‘Grubby’ Stubbs, covering sport.
It was top-rating, wacky stuff, chocked with sound effects, stunts, and hilarious serials, How Green Was My Cactus and Chicken Man.
“I actually have the audition cassette that I sent in to Fox back in 1985, and I sound exactly the same,” Dunleavy said, adding: “But I don’t like hearing my voice.”
Hillier captained the show to No.1 glory, but cites writers including a young Mick Molloy and Ian McFadyen, of the Comedy Company, as part of the success equation.
Their contributors also gave great scoops, including Robert DiPierdomenico reporting from his hospital bed with a punctured lung after Hawthorn won the 1989 Grand Final, Simon O’Donnell revealing his cancer journey, and Merv Hughes almost getting kicked off an Ashes tour.
“Merv talked abut David Boone’s 50 can plane trip,” Hillier says, laughing. “The cricket bosses were not happy.”
From those early days, Fox success stories, like Tracey Bartram, Matt Tilley, Jo Stanley, Hamish Blake, Andy Lee, Mick Molloy, Tony Martin, Fifi Box, Jules Lund, Dave Hughes and Kate Langbroek became part of the Melbourne soundscape.
“I was a breastfeeding mother of a two-year-old when I started at Fox,” Tracy Bartram says. “I was told they wanted they wanted a woman who was funny and had strong opinions.”
Bartram and Tilley dominated the breakfast shift.
“How did the Fox years shape me?” Bartram asks. “It made me braver, it made me stand up for myself. Fox was a real fishbowl. We were all young, committed and riding an amazing tidal wave of success.
“It was an absolute juggernaut. If you were at Fox, you were either the absolute best, or you had that ability. Everybody walked that talk. Everybody,” Bartram said.
She said the programming genius of that time was simple: target women. “That audience — women — is incredibly loyal.”
Matt Tilley, who co-hosted with Bartram, and later Jo Stanley, says: “We were that era where it turned into group chat and relatable. It was like the Seinfeld-ification of radio, where everyone talked about random life bulls---.
Soon, Tilley became famous for his prank — Gotcha! — calls.
“They were hard work. It took a long time, the strike rate was low, or people were on to you,” he says. “But it’s a pretty good life when you’re trying to make people laugh.”
Mick Molloy agrees. Although then-radio bosses, Brad March and Jeff Allis, would have struggled to see the funny side when he and Tony Martin pitched their idea for a national drive show.
“I had them around to my share house,” Molloy says. “We didn’t have any chairs, so I popped them on bean bags. The show was pitched to two of the most powerful men in radio while they sat on bean bags.”
The pitch: “If people have to drive to work, they have to drive home from work.”
When Martin-Molloy was green-lit, Fox adjusted its music policy.
“Our first day at the station, they announced they were changing their format to completely chick music,” Molloy said. “All we played was female vocalists. It was the worst case of luck ever.”
But Martin-Molloy was a massive hit, and remains a benchmark and influence for many radio shows.
“Martin-Molloy was the first show I put my name to in any medium, and it was a game changer for me.,” Molloy says.
Andy Lee and Hamish Blake grew up on Martin-Molloy, and took that two-mates-trying-to-make-each-other-laugh dynamic to the station.
Asked to recall the moment he found his radio voice, Lee says: “I don’t think I did. I always did the show for Hame. It was what he loved doing. I never thought too much about the outward broadcast. I’d get too nervous if I did that.”
Hamish and Andy loved to test conventions, though.
When then-content director Craig Bruce challenged them to suggest a phone topic he hadn’t heard before, with a “crisp 50 dollar note” as an incentive, Lee and Blake went to air with: “How was your day?”
Bruce was indifferent. “I’ve never heard that phone topic before,” he told them. “It wasn’t very good. Here’s your 50 bucks.”
However, it wasn’t just tent pole shows like Martin-Molloy, Tracy and Matt, or Hamish And Andy that made an impact during Fox’s 40 year journey.
Danger Lowbrow, a comedy show which started at Triple R before moving to the Fox, is still regarded as trailblazing radio.
“It gave me a whole new career, and a chance to broadcast for fun rather than just serious stuff,” Danger Lowbrow co-host Brett McLeod, now a Nine News reporter, said.
“We were a bunch of friends sitting around talking about things we’d talk about off-air anyway,” McLeod said.
“News parody was a large part of what we did. It was picking the balloon of seriousness, which we feel news had.”
McLeod said Danger Lowbrow took its cues from 1960s British and 1970s American comedies.
“We were trying to, in our tiny little Melbourne way, make sketch comedy, and observational humour. We weren’t reinventing the wheel, but what people responded to was, we enjoyed each other’s company.
“You heard it with Martin-Molloy, The D-Gen, and Hamish and Andy, and you heard it with Danger Lowbrow.”
Jules Lund was a life coach at the Reach Foundation, a support group to inspire young people, when he got his break on the Tracy and Matt show, before returning after a stint on TV, to co-host a drivetime show with Fifi Box.
“People running TV shows are a lot older. It’s so regimented,” Lund says. “In radio, you’ve got a microphone and everything is boundary-less. You can experiment, and if it doesn’t go well, you move on to the next thing. There’s a sense of excitement and pace. You come up with an idea at lunch, and it’s got steam in the afternoon.
“In radio, as a presenter, it really shapes you, refines you, improves you, and enriches you.”
He recalls, with glee, “blackout challenges” he and Box would undertake, which landed either of them in random real-life scenarios including a tattoo parlour, waxing salon, open mic comedy night and a romantic dinner date with Chopper Read.
“Radio hosts are a weird species of human. They’re larger than life,” Lund says. “If you put a few of those in the same studio there can be complicated relationships. The key to getting the best out of everyone is making them feel safe. You’re working with fragile performers.”