Back to index of Nerve 9 - Autumn 2006

Roger Hill Interview

By Kenn Taylor

In the foyer of the not quite finished new home of Radio Merseyside, another sign of the brave new Liverpool, I meet Roger Hill, one of the most significant people in Liverpool's arts scene for the last twenty-five years.
His CV is impressive: former director of the Everyman Youth Theatre, presenter of Radio Merseyside's PMS show and a contributor to BBC Radio 1, 3, 4 and 5, consultant to the Arts Council and The Council of Europe and President of the National Association of Youth Theatres, a former lecturer at LIPA, the list goes on. But I'm here specifically to ask him about his involvement and thoughts on the city's music scene past and present.

Roger is not local. Born in Leicester he later went to Cambridge University and then on to Leeds to become a teacher. He says: "I enjoyed teaching, but if you don't get restless in your teens you do in your mid-twenties and I decided I wanted to see America, so I went off to tour it for a year."

On return with no job and no home, he moved in with his brother in Newcastle where he was put on one of the first job creation schemes, and was finally found work in a theatre company in Liverpool. And so he moved to the city in 1978 and the theatre company duly closed down a week later. Planning to go back to Newcastle soon after that, he's still here nearly thirty years later.

Unemployed he lived "in a bedsit with a two bar fire, only one of which worked" and became involved in the Everyman Youth Theatre. His involvement with the music scene began soon after he arrived too. "The first thing I did when I got here was go down to Eric's,” he says of the famous punk nightclub. A more direct involvement began when he founded the famous ‘Merseysound’ fanzine with Ronnie Flood.

He recalls, "There wasn't really any music fanzines around, Roger Eagle [Eric's Manager] had a thing called The Last Trumpet and there were a few fanzines around with good writing but it wasn't necessarily about music. We wanted to create something that was a fanzine of record about music in the way The Times is a newspaper of record." Merseysound ran from 1979-1982, producing some twenty-six issues, making it one of the longest running magazines in the city.

Merseysound led to the start of Roger's radio career. Phil Ross was presenter of Radio Merseyside’s arts programme and founded its 'punk show' Rockaround in 1976 and he interviewed Roger regularly because of his involvement with the Everyman and Merseysound. When Phil left for London in 1982, Roger was asked to take over the show, though he was only the second choice - luckily the other guy was on holiday. Rockaround is still going - but now called ‘Pure Musical Sensations’ (PMS) - and has the accolade of being the longest running alternative music show on local radio. Due to internet streaming, it now has a committed national and international audience.

PMS is, however, unusual in its longevity. Music media like record labels, magazines etc have, by and large, not been successful or sustainable on Merseyside. Roger tells me why he thinks this is.
"The point was it is almost the nature of Merseyside - that it didn't necessarily want to do the work promoting itself. It saw itself as having the talent and others would pick up on that. That's not to say that there weren't hard working people who wanted to set up things, but it was always seen as subsidiary to the fact that there were an awful lot of colourful and talented and uniquely musically egotistical people locally, who just wanted to be put on the map. There was this feeling amongst that first generation of people in the post-punk era, that the real test as to if they had really made their mark on history was to be recognised internationally, and a lot of bands felt though they'd 'made it', they never quite made it, because they never achieved the successes of say, U2. Holly was the nearest with Frankie Goes to Hollywood but that didn't last very long."

Does he think music suffered locally because of that?
"To be honest there is an awful lot of mediocre music produced locally and it doesn't need any encouragement. If anything it needs discouragement, or at least I would say, 'Go back to the drawing board lads or listen to some more interesting stuff'. That is why I think PMS is important because it does introduce a richer diet of music. I mean you can hear that sort of stuff on Radio 1, but Radio Merseyside should do its bit to make sure that local bands listen to stuff that nudges them out of that ballad style, localised, someone-else-has-done-it-before-and-we'll-try-and-do-it-again type of music-making.”

With running and organising so many things, does he ever feel that he has been battling against the odds?
"If you want to champion it, the kind of music I'm into, and I have done with Larks in the Park [a series of popular gigs held in Sefton Park], the magazine and everything else, you're always having to work hard and I've always viewed myself as the maverick, the odd one out, which is not very Merseyside. But I feel the main thing for me is the difference between the long, the medium and the short term. There is quite a lot of short-termism in Merseyside generally, not just in the music industry and perhaps it's almost in the psychology of the area with it being built on casual labour. Grab a buck while you can, build a bar because everyone's building bars, build more apartments because everyone is building apartments. Basically do what everybody else is doing, and this produces low quality and mediocre work. In the medium and longer term you have to have a bit of planning to have an idea about what your music is about and where you're going. I also want to encourage people to break out of the mould and attempt music that might not be entirely congruent with the way Merseyside views itself, and indeed anything that is incongruent with the way that the rock music industry views as what will sell, anything that will create a chink in the capitalistic armour of the whole industry and shake it up a bit."

You can catch PMS on Radio Mersyside at 12am-2am Monday (late Sun nights!)