Wheatley returns to his roots in radio and live events

GLENN Wheatley is returning to his roots with a plan to build an expansive radio business and get back into live events.

MORE than four decades after Glenn Wheatley plucked bass guitar strings on 1970s hit Turn Up Your Radio, the entertainment entrepreneur is returning to his roots with an ambitious plan to build an expansive radio business and get back into the live events sector.

"There's immediacy about radio that I love," Wheatley tells The Australian in a rare interview.

"We can talk to a person at any time, which is even truer in the regional markets where radio becomes a friend and develops emotional ties with the audience. Radio will be always here in its very basic form. Other mediums may vary but radio will always be here, and events are in my DNA."

It has been a long road back to normality for Wheatley since he was jailed as the first high-profile casualty of the Operation Wickenby tax crackdown in 2007.

The events that led to the jailing, and the prison time itself, clearly remain an uncomfortable subject for the artist manager who has looked after some of Australian's biggest acts from the past four decades, including John Farnham and Delta Goodrem.

He emphasises that he does not wish to dwell on the events that led to his jail time.

Wheatley says that he was given "bad financial advice" and prefers to "look forward".

What he is happy to talk about is his role as the linchpin in the $17.75 million private equity-funded deal announced last week that has seen Southern Cross Media offload two radio stations on Queensland's Sunshine Coast to a company in which he owns a substantial shareholding.

In doing so, he has joined forces with investment firm Oceania Capital Partners.

Wheatley first became nationally famous as a member of rock band the Masters Apprentices.

He later had deep experience in the radio industry, having been a founding director of Australia's first FM radio station, Melbourne's EON-FM (now TripleM).

In 1987, Wheatley negotiated a series of acquisitions that resulted in the merger of Wheatley Communications with Hoyts Media to form the national TripleM FM network.

He will become the public face of FM radio stations Sea FM and Mix FM based in Maroochydore, north of Brisbane. He talks with enthusiasm about his comeback, but there's a strong sense that under the surface he has something to prove and a legacy to burnish after the negative headlines from his very public tax saga.

"Regional radio is a good industry in my view," he says. "It's robust, and holding up. I've been a long-time supporter and participant in radio. We feel very strongly that these two stations are strong. There's a lot more loyalty than in capital cities. We're pretty fickle in the cities; we can just punch a button and move around. In the regional areas, radio is the major form of communication."

He says Southern Cross Media was a "reluctant seller", having had to let the the stations go after its acquisition of two Brisbane FM stations in the same broadcast market following a ruling by the media regulator 18 months ago on competition grounds.

After a bidding battle, Oceania acquired all the issued capital of Sunshine Coast Broadcasters from Southern Cross Media through a subsidiary called Eon Broadcasting, in which the Wheatley Organisation owns a 10 per cent shareholding.

"I will get involved personally to the point where I do want to know the nuances of the area," Wheatley says. "I will spend time there, and I think that's terribly important."

Resilience has been the watchword for the radio industry throughout the advertising downturn.

The two stations are No 1 in their youth demographic but with difficult trading conditions set to continue, and increased competition from internet radio, music streaming and the arrival of digital radio in regional Australia next year, Wheatley says innovation will be vital even in a market with captive audiences.

"A lot of people are a bit nervous about digital radio but I'm not at all," he says. "It's where we're heading. I'm going to take digital head-on and make it an advantage to us. There's now more cars being sold with digital radio as standard in them."

Wheatley reels off an anecdote from the early 1980s about "knocking on people's doors and trying to convince them to put FM radio stations in their cars" and says the media business is always in a state of flux.

"I had a real task for a couple of years," he says. "We will prepare for digital radio and have a strategy in place for our digital licences that will be awarded as the incumbent in the area.

"I'm entrepreneurial in my outlook, so I will take advantage of activity in the local marketplace and the stations will become part of those activities and hopefully synonymous with those activities. I love putting on events that are successful -- that people have a good time at -- and if I can make the radio stations part of that, it's going to be better for us. It's all about being part of the local community."

OCP managing director Robert Moran sees a big upside in the investment, describing Sunshine Coast Broadcasters as a predictable business with a low capital expenditure requirement.

But he also sees plenty of opportunity for further growth, with Wheatley set to play a key role. "He's one of the best connected people in the entertainment industry. We see him playing a very strategic role," Moran says.

He says OCP could hold on to the company indefinitely. "As economic confidence returns, advertising revenue across the sector will return and we've already been through the hardest part of the media cycle.

"We'd like to see some growth in the business but we're not factoring in a massive increase in profitability from existing activity, so we've got some thoughts around working with the team to drive a bit more advertising return."