Best of the Blogs: Paul Casserly: Rock radio's battle for drivetime

Jono Pryor, Ben Boyce and Mikey Havoc.

It’s been a busy year so we can’t blame you if you missed some of our blogs. Over the next two weeks, we’ll bring you the best of our blogs from across entertainment.

TV on the radio or the runaway express? Paul Casserly wades into rock radio's drive time battle.

Breakfast shows get all wacky names. They are "madhouses" or "rumbles" or "circuses", but drive time shows are usually just drive time shows.

Trust Mikey Havoc to be different with his new show The Mikey Havoc Afternoon Express which is competing for the black t-shirt demographic with another new show, Jono and Ben on The Rock Drive.

I like to picture these listeners driving home in Holden Utes with Cody bottles rolling around the tray.

Maybe there are people driving Priuses, carting sacks of Kale, while listening to Hauraki or The Rock, but I'm guessing that they are not the target audience. The 'target audience' is hopefully buying the things that clog the ad-breaks. If you're an old bugger listening to talk-back, that means products that clean the driveway along with ones that give you erections. It's important to keep the activities separate, as I found out one day, but more on that in my autobiography. You'll largely be spared the snake oil (aka 'supplements') if you're listening to The Rock or Hauraki, although I did hear ads for Tiger Paw, a shower-cleaning product from the makers of Wet and Forget, in amongst the spots for car yards, burgers and broadband.

Mikey Havoc guides his share of the black t-shirts through the traffic on Hauraki, back on drive time after a stint at night. I say "back" on drive time because that's where I first heard him on bFM all those years ago, and it's a natural place for his high-energy, high wire act, or "genuine volcanic enthusiasm" as the station's PR aptly describes it.

Driving at speed to rock music, when traffic flows allow, is one of the great pleasures of life. Indeed drum and bass only makes sense to me when I'm powering up an on-ramp or overtaking an octogenarian in a Daihatsu. Not that I have anything against slow driving, I practice it often, it's just I have a problem while behind the wheel listening to certain types of music. Let's assume the old bugger clutching the sheepskin steering wheel in the Daihatsu is nodding in agreement as Newstalk ZB's Larry Williams makes cracks about Cunliffe or Maori activists. But what's the tradie in the Toyota Hi-ace - 19inch rims, 32inch sub listening to? Mikey on Hauraki? Or Jono and Ben on The Rock?

If he's on Hauraki he'll be blasting Soundgarden's Burden In My Hand or perhaps Arcade Fire or The White Stripes. When I tuned into the The Rock, they were playing new metal band Chevelle, with a song called Take out The Gunman. I heard both stations play tracks from Nirvana.

If Mikey is a volcano, Jono Pryor and Ben Boyce might well be the sort of earthquakes we feel in Auckland; not threatening but unsettling enough, and impossible to ignore. Their TV forced-marriage has been such a raging success that the move to a civil union on radio makes all kinds of sense and, like the freshness that Havoc, Heath and Wells have brought to Hauraki, their pairing brings a certain freshness to The Rock, a station that's been around long enough to fray at the edges. ...

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- nzherald.co.nz