Hidden technicians;music and radio-making at 3-PBS in the Prince of Wales

Introduction

Hidden histories infuse the relationship between music-making, sound and radio. The article explores this relationship by focusing on the work of broadcast technicians with 3PBS-106.7FM between 1980 and 1984, when the station was domiciled at the Prince of Wales (PoW) Hotel in St Kilda, a popular bayside suburb close to the centre of Melbourne. 3PBS, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019, was formed as a cooperative called the Progressive Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1975 and began broadcasting officially in 1979. PBS was one of the pioneers of the ‘special’ broadcast licence category, which provided for broadcasts of diverse musical forms that were not addressed by commercial radio at the time. ¹ One volunteer described how PBS tapped into ‘a series of micro-worlds revolving around music’ (David Stubbs, telephone interview, 17 September 2019). Many people with specialist musical interests began to curate broadcasts for PBS, often from their own collections. In performing to its licence conditions to present diverse music, PBS supported live music recording and broadcasting in various local venues, including the PoW, where limited resources necessitated an innovative process to allow live broadcasts direct from the pub. Live music broadcasts differentiated the sound of 3PBS-FM from other community and commercial broadcasters and elevated the role of PBS’s audio techs to that of providing valued musical experiences.

The hidden work of broadcast technicians can be personal, but it also has implications for the historiography of musical scenes. From the personal perspective, while conducting my researching a PBS volunteer revealed: ‘One thing I don’t think I told anyone was how I snuck into the hotel freezers with audio cushioning’ (John Roberts, telephone interview, 28 January 2018). It was early in 1980 and PBS was occupying its first, permanent home: the formerly abandoned accommodation rooms in the PoW hotel (the Service had previously staged pre-licence, experimental test broadcasts from volunteers’ homes). One morning when the pub was closed, John Roberts, a founding member of PBS, let himself into the hotel’s refrigeration rooms. He disconnected the chiller system and added buffers around the machinery to quieten the vibrations from the refrigerators. In technical terms, this guerrilla intervention aimed to improve the listening experience by hiding noises that may have been picked up the studio microphones. Other interviewees talked about working to rid broadcasts of extraneous sound as well (Stubbs, telephone interview). It would be some years before the radio station moved to purpose-built studios that were properly insulated against external noise.

Such anecdotal stories, memories, belie the larger project of the ‘techs’. The trope of ‘hiding’ noise – non-musical sound – is not simply a metaphor, it is on what music-making turns for these broadcast technicians: they manage sound so that radio listeners only hear whatever is associated with music. As another PBS tech explained,

I’m not a performer. I don’t feel I’m comfortable in front of an audience . . . But to enable people who are storytellers to tell their stories, so that the vehicle for story delivery is invisible to the consumer is something that’s very important to me. (Paine, video interview transcript, 21 May 2019: 2)

As well as recording music performances to be experienced by listeners, the techs also provided for the best possible conditions for specialist presenters and so encourage new listeners to appreciate the diversity of musical communities. The irony is that the technicians’ principle in eliminating extraneous sounds has contributed to their own histories being hidden.

While this article addresses a specific, exemplary subject – volunteer audio technicians in community radio in the early 1980s – as a way to engage with a history of music-making in Melbourne, it also has significance for popular music studies. The title references Ruth Finnegan’s (1989 [2007]) path-finding study of ‘hidden’ music-making in regional England, one of the first publications to address local music (Cohen, 1990). Finnegan’s work was also important as it revealed the extensive contribution of informal music to communities. Similarly, while not generally musicians, I argue that technicians make an important contribution to listening experiences and the broader development of musical communities that remains largely unwritten. ²

Yet, as a study, Finnegan’s book provided for a discussion of music that occluded its distribution by means other than through non-industrial forms, setting aside its subject – ‘amateur grassroots local performers and their face-to-face audiences’ (p. 122) – from mass media. Another ‘hidden’, then, is the intimate relationship between media and music within popular music, the study of which remains ambivalent to connections between music-making and media – and radio in particular. In developing a discussion of community radio in Melbourne then, I aim to raise questions about an assumed industrialisation of popular music and characterisation of participatory media as a post-industrial phenomenon.

Music and industry

An early consideration of the relationship between broadcasting, recording and music suggested that, ‘it is because of our experience of the immediacy of music- making that its industrial production has always been somehow suspect’ (Frith, 1988: 11). Frith suggests that popular music is defined by mass industrialisation and so is characterised by alienation, that is, it amounts to an experience sold back to us as a commodity. The separation of audience and producer evident in Frith’s structural analysis of commodity-as-alienation does not, however, allow for the range of approaches to recording and distributing music. Even at the time that Frith was writing, more than 30 years ago, cassette technology provided for a broad-based, non-mainstream, production and music-sharing culture (James, 1992) that was not commercially driven. In Melbourne at the time – as I discuss below – cassettes, as a form of media, were an important alternative distribution network for music that was often ignored by commercial media. Furthermore, Melbourne community radio enthusiasts led a burgeoning do-it-yourself (DIY) live recording industry, which in the case of PBS, produced hundreds of live recordings of local and overseas musicians. While some of the PBS tapes were produced as ‘live records’ and many were broadcast at the time, they were not commercial recordings. Today, they form an archive that allows for renewed broadcast performances and contribute to a legacy of PBS’s support for live music in Melbourne. These face-to-face musical experiences were a product of musical communities and were returned to them, as listeners, via broadcasting or, in the case of musicians, gifting. A recent anniversary publication argued that, ‘PBS was conceived as a community member-based radio station dedicated to music that wasn’t heard on other radio stations; a radio station unimpeded by commercial interests and where announcers were free to play what they wanted’ (PBS, 2019: 11). Alienated musical consumption may have been one effect of the industrialisation of music, but it does not necessarily characterise the industry of music-making. This distinction between alternative and mainstream media is important and we will return to it shortly.

To focus on industrial processes as alienating, impacts on how the experience of listening to and performing music is positioned in popular music studies. Music is often presented as existing outside of any relationship to media and other technologies. Finnegan’s description of her research subject as amateur performers and their audiences (p. 122) leaves no room for mediation. To paraphrase Will Straw (1991: 369), for many popular music scholars, cultural communities (music-makers) are guarantors of musical meaningfulness. For example, according to Bennett et al. (2016), popular studies of music-making propose to set aside ‘the scholarly penchant for dealing with music as a media text’ in favour of music itself as a currency in social meanings (p. 21). The positioning of ‘popular’ studies of music (initially a way that contemporary music scholars distinguished themselves from arcane forms of musicology – or music as text) acts to recuperate a direct relationship between performers and listening as a musical experience, despite music’s commodification.

Music-making is infused with meaningfulness and subsequently, communicated to an audience that incorporates that meaning into their own experiences. ‘Popular’ music, the argument goes, is about people experiencing music that they like. Within this formulation, popular music studies retains a continuity between contemporary music and folk traditions that underpin ‘the popular’, while modern, industrial technologies – radio, television, instruments, recording studios – are either simply channels through which meaning is exchanged between performers and audiences or, as Finnegan argues, require capitalisation that alienates musicians from the folk or listeners (p. 117). ³ In addressing cultural communities, technologies and music, this article suggests that media – recording and distribution – is integral to music-making.

One study that articulates the broad importance of media in popular musical cultures is Sarah Thornton’s (1995) work on club cultures. Linking media consumption and cultural dissemination, Thornton suggests that media are ‘fundamental to processes of popular distinction’ (p. 249) in contemporary music cultures. Her argument is not simply about technology; it outlines a different articulation between the popular and culture in popular music cultures. For Thornton, communities establish the value of music through engaging with media as ‘a network crucial to the definition and distribution of cultural knowledge’ (p. 30). She provides a succinct note on ‘the popular’ in cultural analysis, making a distinction between what might be called a ‘becoming-popular’ – a process of music attaining a social profile – and popularity. Thornton emphasises how, in the social construction of distinction or taste, alternative or community-based media distinguishes specific musical communities as an antithesis of popularity (p. 250). In many instances, creating a ‘scene’ requires distinguishing between a mainstream media that constructs popularity and alternative representations of music that is ‘un-popular’, that is, in a process of becoming popular. Thornton identifies various print media examples, in particular fanzines, as forms of communication that sustain such distinctions (pp. 211–213), and in this article I suggest community radio plays a similar role. For PBS, success in gaining a broadcast licence relied on them prosecuting the argument that, to curate listening to musical genres ignored by mainstream radio could provide for community formation.

Thornton’s analysis is helpful in understanding the relationship between media and popular music and how this was crucial to the success of PBS. It identifies how media affords music a sign of distinction rather than an experience in and of itself. In doing so, genres create cultural connections or, as Georgina Born (2011) put it, allow ‘the imbrications of musical formations and social formations’ (p. 377). Thornton’s research was also important because, by engaging with club cultures, she revised what could be ‘authentic’ in music consumption and production. Electronic dance music challenged traditional forms of music-making: it eschewed instruments for sound manipulation; clubbing was for party people, consumers who were not interested in who made the music or how, apart from its mediation by a DJ. In highlighting the value of music to such communities, Thornton allowed for a broader conception of how music was made and how it provided meaning.

In this article, I intend to read these insights into radio and music-making in the specific context of an emerging community radio broadcaster, 3PBS-FM. At the same time, this study builds on Thornton’s discussion of alternative media by suggesting that PBS provided for a meta-community – a diverse collection of communities and community building practices – and so community radio, as an alternative media, allowed for a participatory culture that was a precursor of the digital turn (Foster and Marshall, 2015: 165; see also Jenkins, 2009). In doing so, I want to highlight an intimacy between music, radio and media production, where forms of non-musical production are integral to musical scenes. The article draws from unpublished academic studies and existing historical material generated by PBS both online (e.g. Our history: https://www.pbsfm.org.au/history) and in print (Waves magazine). Primarily, however, the data are drawn from interviews with volunteers involved, one way or another, in conducting outside broadcasts (OBs). I interviewed eight volunteers from a larger number of audio technicians known as the OB Group.

The OB Group was crucial to outside broadcast activities in the early days of 3PBS-FM. The interviews are a sample of numerous people who cycled through the group over the 4 years that the station was domiciled at the PoW hotel. While just two of the interviewees were practicing musicians, they all saw their role as distributors of music by local, national and international performers. Live concert performances became an important entrepreneurial activity for the station generating income and establishing new audiences. For the station, outside broadcasting – live performances outside a studio – became the signature format for 3PBS. These volunteers, working behind-the-scenes, were crucial to the ongoing viability of the radio station. They contributed to the development of the PoW as an important live music venue and to Melbourne’s reputation as a music city.

The popular mechanics of music

PBS became established as a broadcaster in the late 1970s when local music in Melbourne – and in Australia generally – enjoyed a resurgence. This popular music movement became known as ‘pub rock’, as the hotels renovated old dining rooms into music venues, but the resurgence was broad-based. Performers of long-standing genres such as jazz benefitted from renewed interest in Australian music along with contemporary rock and pop and the new musical alternatives including an emerging punk and experimental music scenes. This renewed musical engagement coincided with the development of community radio. In the 1960s and 1970s community broadcasting – or, as it was known at the time, public broadcasting – was a social movement aimed at reforming access to radio (and later television) for various kinds of specialist programming content and engaging popular technical capacities in electronics and broadcast technology. A reformist national government – the Whitlam Labor government – elected in 1972 provided purpose for broadcasting reform enthusiasts and activists. Despite its demise in 1975, new community licences were granted in 1979 (Tebbutt, 1989; Thornley, 1995). Building meaningful communities against a mainstream media culture was an important characteristic of Australian community media and public broadcasting became, as Sarah Thornton (1995) described fanzines, ‘crucial to the definition and distribution of cultural knowledge’ (p. 30).

The movement had a vibrant character. From the beginning, it included community activists as well as educational institutions, classical music lovers and rockabilly and jazz fans. DIY technologists, in particular, made a significant contribution. This group partly developed from employees in small businesses servicing the electrical industry, public servants and students in electrical engineering courses. ⁴ In Melbourne, four groups began staging experimental broadcasts that would eventually lead to licences: a federation of community groups (which became 3CR); a broad-based group of student broadcasters (3RRR); aficionadas of fine music (3MBS); and a cooperative society dedicated to diverse music (3PBS). (In regional Victoria 3GCR, Gippsland Community Radio based in Morwell, combined student, union and community activists and was also granted a licence).

When the permanent licences were issued in 1979, PBS was virtually homeless. The publican of the PoW Hotel in St Kilda, Brian Ballantyne, became convinced of the mutual interests between the public house and the public broadcaster and provided PBS with rooms in his hotel to set up studios and offices (see Tebbutt, 2018). At the time St Kilda, a popular beach destination close to Melbourne’s inner city suburbs, was undergoing considerable demographic change and the hotel was looking for new patrons. PBS provided access to young music loving patrons for the pub. Once the arrangement was in place, by the end of 1979, volunteers moved in to renovate the hotel’s unused accommodation rooms into studios and offices and the first official broadcasts of 3PBS-FM took place in December that year.

On-air 3PBS provided an outlet for a diverse music, as their licence conditions required. Volunteers were engaged with a range of media. In Thornton’s (1995) terms, PBS created meaning by setting traditional popular musical forms against contemporary, commercial popularity. In a letter, one of the initiators of the station Felix Hoffman listed the genres incorporated in ‘progressive music’ as ‘jazz, blues, country and country western, rock, folk and swing’ (Crowley, 2008: 13). Later the station incorporated emerging music shunned by commercial radio including reggae, punk, metal and experimental music. There was also a diversity of presentation. Often, DJs brought in their own collections of recordings they felt passionate about and were happy to proselytise their values on air. The broadcast of this ‘unpopular music’ provided informal yet important contributions to scene formation. This often came from combining distribution technologies such as cassettes and radio. The 1980s, as Foster and Marshall (2015: 165) have noted, were ‘a moment of creative industry catalyzed by [. . .] low-barrier media technologies’ that contributed to what has been described as ‘a vast international network of musicians and music fans’ (Jones, 1992: 6; see also Roy, 2014). One example of this informal musical proselytising was the activities of Mick Geyer. Geyer presented music on PBS and edited their ‘zine Waves, but he also created and distributed cassette tapes from his own extensive record collection. One volunteer recalls Geyer giving him cassettes with obscure names including ‘Delicious hot, disgusting cold’ (Stanistreet, telephone interview, 17 September 2019). Geyer would often curate tapes for particular musicians, including Henry Rollins and Tex Perkins. Nick Cave credited Geyer as his musical researcher, noting that he been presented with a tape of ‘around 15 versions of Stagger Lee’, which were amongst hundreds of that Cave listened to in making the 1993 album Murder Ballads (PBS-FM, 2006). In 2014, Cave dedicated an album – Abattoir Blues – to Geyer. In combining his radio presentations and cassette distribution, Geyer engaged the affordances of low-barrier audio broadcasting and reproduction technology to provide for an influential form of music distribution that existed outside of commercial and mainstream industries. Cassette distribution was also important for another volunteer at PBS, who came to know of developments in contemporary music through listening, with his friendship group, to pirated recordings of John Peel’s radio programmes. For Cameron Paine, Peel’s programme opened him to a world of music that was not represented by Melbourne radio at the time (Paine video interview transcript, 21 May 2019: 11). Cameron Paine went on to become one of the youngest foundation members of PBS and an important part of the station’s coterie of outside broadcast technicians.

Articulating radio

Of all the community broadcasters licenced in Melbourne, PBS had the least capital to draw on for survival. The PBS technicians connected the broadcaster with physical and cultural resources. To save money, the station housed their transmitter, rent-free, in the plant room of an inner city hospital. This led to circumstances that limited broadcasting periods to the afternoon after 4 pm and weekends until 1987, when there was enough financial stability to secure a slot on a broadcast tower (PBS, 2019: 72–73). The lack of start-up capital was offset by enthusiasm and invention. Bill Runting was the volunteer with responsibility for the transmitter. He often took leave from his work as an electrical engineer at the nearby State Bank of Victoria, to attend to transmitter maintenance duties (Bill Runting, telephone interview, 26 September 2019). Live broadcasting at PBS was born as much from good fortune as the necessity to innovate and invent.

Most radio stations did not do outside broadcasts because the cost was prohibitive. Dedicated telephone lines needed to be booked to allow the feed to a studio for a live broadcast. The use of ad hoc lines like this was very unusual, which is why the siting of the PBS studio in the PoW was so important. It gave the station an in-house live music studio at no cost (Runting, telephone interview, 26 September 2019). The technical capacity provided by skilled volunteers, and the low costs allowed live music broadcasting to happen without the financial burden of bringing in landlines from other venues.

In settling into the PoW – also rent-free – the public broadcaster had to make the rooms fit for purpose. That meant turning storerooms into studios and accommodation into offices, with only voluntary labour to draw upon. Peter Jetson, an electrical engineer and John Maizels, an audio technician supervised the technical operations. Maizels was active in a number of Melbourne’s radio experiments in the 1970s and had hosted test broadcasts for PBS. John Roberts, another early volunteer, had gained valuable skills by being involved with the Victorian cooperative movement. He had helped to set up two sustainable cooperatives, including the Bend-of-Islands community in north-eastern Melbourne, where he and other cooperative members supported each other in building their own houses. This experience was important in shaping the team that built the original PBS studios, which was not without its complexities. Apart from the problems of noise from the pub’s refrigeration referred to earlier, during construction work on the first studios, the crew accidentally cut through the main power circuit, buried deep inside a concrete block wall, blacking out the entire pub (Roberts, telephone interview, 28 January 2018).

Melbourne also saw a flourishing small industry in live recordings, at this time, associated with community radio. Roberts had an interest in recording live jazz in local venues, while PBS attracted other enthusiasts, such as Rod McCubbin, who recorded folk music. Across town, in Fitzroy from late 1979 to the early 1980s, RRR volunteer Alan Bamford recorded the music of the ‘little band scene’ for his programme on another community broadcaster, 3RRR. Bamford carried a two-track Revox reel-to-reel tape machine to gigs. Taking a ‘split’ from the mixing desk, Bamford took the quarter-inch tapes he recorded from the evening’s performances directly into the studio for broadcast on RRR, often the same night as the performance. At PBS, McCubbin was an enthusiast for live recording and encouraged other technically minded volunteers to be involved. He built his own studio-mixing desks and carried recording equipment in his Kombi van to the One-C-One club in Princess Hill where he regularly recorded the evening’s folk music performances (Paine video interview transcript, 21 May 2019: 8; Crowley: 46). Paine recalls that McCubbin’s recordings and his van were important for the nascent broadcaster:

we probably did more stuff away from the Prince of Wales initially than we actually did there. And Rod’s van was an integral part of that because PBS had – maybe [. . .] one microphone and one lead and one stand that we could take anywhere [for recordings] – PBS was pretty poor. (p. 8)

McCubbin (who, at the time, taught at the now defunct Moorabbin Technical College) ran an informal music recording and broadcasting course sometimes using the resources of his workplace, including classrooms. Roberts and Paine were among his students as was a 22-year-old, newly arrived New Zealander who adopted the broadcast name of Sally Ann (Sage Forest, audio interview transcript, 16 May 2019: 6). Sally Ann would become a key member of the emerging outside broadcast group at PBS and was likely Australia’s first woman sound engineer. She broadcast an experimental radio programme and established an exposure venue at the PoW called A Venue El Cheapo, where new bands could play to a small audience, be recorded and have their songs broadcast on her programme whimsically named, Story time with Sally Ann (Forest audio interview transcript: 2. See also PBS, 2019: 46–47). As a local music touring industry developed, community radio technicians doubled as sound engineers for bands, including international performers such as Iggy Pop who, on his initial Australian tour, was recorded by volunteers from RRR and PBS (Forest audio interview transcript: 14). In January and February 1980, PBS promoted and recorded a series of concerts at one of Melbourne’s most prestigious venues, the Dallas Brooks Hall, featuring international folk and jazz artists including David Bromberg, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dollar Brand and David Liebman (PBS, 2019: 49).

In developing his interest in recording, Roberts gained a rudimentary knowledge of mixing and learnt how to record live music and set up stage mics from McCubbin. With portable mixing and recording equipment, loaned from Moorabbin Technical College, Roberts began recording live jazz performances, taking the equipment to venues in his EH Holden station wagon. While he was in the process of renovating the rooms in the pub to make way for studio administration and technical offices and a music library, Roberts became aware of the opportunity to provide a space for local and touring jazz musicians and record them for PBS. A venue room at the PoW provided the chance to stage and record jazz performers adjacent to the broadcast studios and cut down the legwork from recordings in other live venues (Roberts, telephone interview, 28 January 2018). It wasn’t long before he and Maizels had worked out that you could snake a long cable between the venue room in the hotel and the studio to broadcast live shows. Live broadcasting began with jazz performances, but it also became a regular strategy for the broadcaster to promote diverse and new music. To mitigate broadcast rights, the techs often negotiated with promoters, artists and venues to record performances for 3PBS (Roberts, telephone interview; Stanistreet, telephone interview, 17 September 2019). If it was a recording, bands reviewed the tape before it was broadcast. Depending on the band, some were fine with anything that was done as long as they got a tape. Some agreed for the station to have unlimited broadcasts because they understood it would not be a commercial recording. Others would insist that there only be one or two broadcasts and then the recording master would be returned to them (Stanistreet, telephone interview).

Sally Ann, as a novice radio ‘tech’ worked with Roberts to set up broadcasts for the jazz. She explained that she enjoyed the clean sound:

[J]azz was really the best genre of music to perfect that, the purity, to keep really the purity of the work, of the job, because the musicians know their instruments so well, they’re well-tuned instruments. And if we’ve got the right microphone on the right gear, then it was easy to get a really beautiful mix. (Forest audio interview transcript, 16 May 2019: 6)

While alternative, under-represented historical and contemporary music underpinned the enthusiasm that set up PBS, the possibility of live broadcasts added greatly to the excitement around the new station. Broadcasting live jazz performances was crucial evidence that the music enthusiasts were fulfilling their license obligations to cater to alternative music communities.

The jazz venue and other performance rooms, such as the one hosted by Ken Fargher’s Soul-a-go-go band roster, established the PoW as an important venue in the St Kilda area (Ken Fargher, interview, 28 February, 2018). While the mores of the area changed as it became gentrified, the PoW bandroom has remained a constant and it continues to be a popular venue that contributes to Melbourne’s status as a music city (Tebbutt, 2018). The historical precedent set by broadcasting live jazz in the early days at the PoW and PBS relationship is largely forgotten, although some extant recordings – such as Georgie Fame, Weather Report and Mike Nock – are held by PBS. In general, PBS’s association with contemporary popular music has overshadowed the historical role of jazz in establishing the PBS tradition of live recording and the PoW bandroom as an iconic Melbourne venue. Roberts related how he became uncomfortable with the influx of rock promoters and managers once the PoW became an established live music venue. Around 1982, he moved on from PBS to concentrate on his landcare and alternative living cooperative activities and to work in Northern Australia on indigenous issues (Roberts, telephone interview, 28 January 2018).

While the development of live broadcasting from the PBS home at the PoW hotel provided another attraction for technically minded volunteers, PBS had always been able to secure significant input from DIY technologists. As Crowley (2008: 23) has noted, ‘the fact that the station would [sic] attract this talented pool of willing individuals played a key role in its survival during those formative years when funds were tight’. Other community stations at the time were supported by educational and community organisations or, like the classical music broadcaster, 3MBS in Melbourne, could attract an affluent listening audience. Before Roberts departed from PBS, he helped the station secure a deal with Yamaha for the company to provide studio and outside broadcasting equipment in return for on-air sponsorship announcements and advertisements in PBS publications. This long-standing arrangement allowed the station to avoid hire costs for outside broadcasts (Paine video interview transcript, 21 May 2019: 11).

As a cooperative, PBS relied on its members, for many of whom the most valuable thing they owned was a record collection. Paine, who had attended his first PBS meeting as a 15-year-old schoolboy, recognised that the society

was a collection of people with multiple professional talents whose single gluing-together-passion was a love of music . . . the technical coterie was small in number [but] they were all passionate about music. And if not seeing themselves as presenters of music [they wanted] to hear the music they were passionate about, being presented. (Paine video interview transcript: 16–15)

Technical volunteers, while also running live broadcast gigs, made the gear that the station relied on. Paine recalled that

PBS was pretty poor . . . we constructed most stuff ourselves and I mean transmitters and panels and amplifiers through to monitors in the studios. The only purchased things were microphones and faders, [the] subcomponents of things rather than things themselves’ (Paine video interview transcript: 8–9)

For him ‘the hands-on tangible engagement’ (p. 4) was appealing and for Sally Ann it provided a ‘fun and real hands-on opportunity to understand more about the way that electricity flows’ (Forest audio interview transcript, 16 May 2019: 12). In 1982, a federal government grant provided for purchasing new outside broadcast equipment (Crowley: 26); however bespoke, handmade equipment continued to be a feature of early PBS technical facilities.

The use of handmade cables and equipment in volunteer-built studios, and for recording live broadcasting events that promoted local music, made for a strong commitment from technical volunteers to the craft and skills associated with broadcasting at 3PBS. A small live room at PoW fostered by Sally Ann was utilised as an exposure room for new bands. Forest explained,

I had a real minimal PA and lighting system and I charged a ridiculous amount, like $1.32 or something to see two bands. So the bands were performing for nothing and any money I got from the audience was to cover the PA and lights. [I have] no idea how long I ran that for but I recorded it – that was part of the deal. I recorded those bands and had a slot for them on air as well. (Forest audio interview transcript, 16 May 2019: 10)

With the station having its own bandroom, PBS technical volunteers were able to engage innovative practices for live radio gigs:

Certainly we were doing things like micing audiences, which these days is very commonplace, with in-ear monitors . . . [but] back in those days, no one ever miced an audience unless you were a radio or a TV station and needed to have that sense that there was an audience in the house. (Paine video interview transcript: 12)

This technique allowed for a radio audience to have a sound experience similar to that of the live audience.

Conclusion

A 1981 report from John Roberts on behalf of the OB Group identified that about 100 recordings had been produced by December that year by PBS volunteers (PBS, 1981). By 1984, volunteer techs at PBS had recorded a number of impressive performances, many of which are archived at the station. A comprehensive catalogue was planned (although it is not clear that it eventuated) and the high-quality recordings of the live material were made available to station presenters through the PBS record library. To this day, PBS continues to broadcast these early recordings as a part of an occasional From the vault series. The jazz broadcasts attracted renowned international and local musicians. British alternative band The Fall released their live broadcast as an album as did the seminal Australian indigenous band No Fixed Address. Critical local musicians and bands such as Paul Kelly and the Dots, The Go-betweens and experimentalists Essendon Airport played live-to-air gigs for PBS.

In 1984, PBS moved residences from PoW to another location in St Kilda. In the move, the live broadcasts from the venue stopped. While the live-to-air coordinator (PBS, 1984) expressed confidence that the station would be soon broadcasting live-to-air music again, the studio set up in the new location did not facilitate that (Mara Smarelli telephone interview 31 May 2019). There was no proximity between an adequate live room and the broadcast studio. Later, another visionary St Kilda publican – Bruce Weibye of the Esplanade Hotel (The Espy) – provided a space for PBS to broadcast live-to-air and produce venue recordings again. Weibye funded the necessary permanent telephone cable links to allow for 3PBS to broadcast live from The Espy (Paine video interview transcript 21 May 2019: 21). In the interim, a number of technicians found other work, sometimes as band mixers or audio engineers. Nevertheless, the reputation of PBS’s role in live music has continued to be acknowledged. The station is about to move again from a permanent home in Easey St Collingwood, where they have been regularly providing live drive time performances on Live-at-five. Their new home will include a new digital studio in the yet-to-be-completed Collingwood Art precinct. The facilities will include dedicated digital links to a performance room and the ability to live stream video performances.

This article was inspired by Ruth Finnegan’s (1989 [2007]) study of how music existed in the midst of English society, yet remained hidden. In the early 1980s, when Finnegan was conducting her study in Milton Keynes, Melbourne was experiencing a media explosion after community radio was licenced in 1979 and hundreds of volunteers took to broadcasting, recording and sharing music and information about local culture and politics. The hidden performers of this article are technicians, particularly those that congregated around 3PBS-FM 106.7. The history of the technical component of community radio – and we could say media in general – largely remains unwritten. In addressing this gap in discussions of media and music, I have also attempted to address another hidden aspect: the place of media in popular music studies. This silence maintains an analysis that is framed within a communication model of media where the actual carriage of content is neutral or ignored in determinations of meaning. In developing a profile of technicians as passionate media performers that contributed to Melbourne’s music scene, I am also raising questions of how we study popular music. Specifically, the role of technologies and technicians is highlighted as an important contribution to music cultures of production and distribution and its related community and identity formation. These positive and passionate contributions belie the neutrality that is generally associated with media’s relationship to music as a listening experience.

While I have addressed scholarly critique, the article also identifies that the ‘techs’ themselves contributed to this particular conception of neutrality of carriage and media technology by doing what they can to ensure its invisibility. That the technical history of media remains largely unwritten is also a factor of this professional commitment to the opacity of media technology. The separation of media techniques and technology from a relationship to content and audiences reflects how industrialisation has been constructed as a model that relies on the separation of production and consumption. Now, in post-industrial society, we are more able to revisit such models and in doing so, to highlight the long history of social and participatory media.

In this article I have attempted to contribute to this revision by exploring the intimacy between technicians, music and production. Considerations of technologies such as cassette cultures and community radio as participatory media are already becoming important precursors to understanding traditions of participation in digital media (Cammaerts, 2016; Foster and Marshall, 2015; Spurgeon, 2015; for a similar point with regard to journalism, see Deuze, 2006; Forde, 2011). The audio technicians at PBS in the period I have been exploring, between 1980 and 1984, were passionate about the music they presented even though they were not necessarily musicians or even fans of the genre they brought to air in live productions. Their commitment was to disseminate music to audiences and finding innovative, creative approaches to do this. This often meant managing in less than optimal technical conditions to provide the best possible outcomes for listeners. Here we have an articulation of music, media and commitment that belies the analysis of music-making in isolation of skilled technicians and the recording and distribution infrastructure they support.