This might do major structural damage to my credibility, but I’ll admit it – I used to listen to Radio One. Yeah, I did. It was good for a while. From a channel that previously served up Culture like a prescription for cough medicine, you were getting a genuine slice of the underground. This couldn’t last, could it?
It could not.
Realising that actually playing good music was diverting the nation’s young away from their future punching data into computer screens for multinational corporations for the next fifty years, the blokes at the beeb quickly changed the act. The black and Asian shows were all moved to five minutes a week at 3:39 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and Satan was given a probationary contract to Destroy Music.
He chose Colin Murray to do it for him.
Murraynacht happened about eight months ago, as I recall. One morning the listener awoke to find out that all the other DJs and producers who used to fill the evening schedule had suddenly disappeared, never to be mentioned again. Any who brought the issue up were led down to the cellars of the British Broadcasting Corporation to have their brains smeared over a rusting pipe, while balding, sweating BBC Commissioners looked on through a glass wall, their glasses slowly steaming with excitement.
And so it was that Colin Murray began to spew a stream of twittering shite through the loudspeakers of the land.
Since then all leftfield indie, underground hip hop or Asian desi have been cancelled and replaced by Colin Murray – who’s on for eight or nine hours a day, from six in the evening to about three in the morning, playing the occasional bit of music but mostly just chatting, with his friend, about, well… stuff. His girlfriend’s toe operation. The time he tried to move some book-cases, but got stuck halfway through and had to wait till the removal men came round. The funny film he saw last Tuesday. Oh, it was so funny! What a funny film it was… Did you see it?
And all this in a mild, bubbly Belfast accent that could have Beatrix Potter hacking the heads off blind children from sheer rage. Because Murray’s a nice guy. Murray’s ridiculously nice. Murray’s so nice that heat-seeking missiles would stop mid-flight, turn back around and belly flop happily into the sea rather than blow him up. So fucking sickeningly nice you want to take a desklamp and ram it through his head, then twist the glass down into the gaping empty hole of his brain until a twenty foot high geyser of blood spatters the radio mixing console and his screams of pain haunt your conscience for eternity. That nice.
You remember when you were a kid and you wondered what would happen if you mixed all the colours together, and you tried it, and you ended up with a crappy muddy brown? That’s what Murray is – an insipid mix of regions, tastes, agegroups and demographics, offensive to no one, repugnant to any single person in possession of a working soul.
Personally I’m convinced it’s the product of a new sinister Blairite initiative to stop all subversive thought by drowning it out in a tidal wave of pitter-patter. Soon, no doubt, windowless cells in Guantanamo will be filled with the sound of Murray being played at three hundred decibels while prisoners scream for mercy at the thought of spending the next five years of their life hearing about his trip to Tesco’s followed by another one from the Foo Fighters. What better for the War on Terror than the kind of anodyne shite that could rot the brains of a chess champion at thirty paces? This level of stupidity is practically a military asset.
I have no doubt that in years to come, gigantic telescreens erected in every public space throughout Britain will feature Colin’s eternally Nice face waffling on in a Nice voice about which kind of chocolate he likes while lines of gawping, lobotomised shoppers drop to the ground with heads bowed in fevered awe. When we finally invade Iran he'll be there with the latest Snow Patrol track to take our minds off all those upsetting civilian casualties. There, there, your government is protecting you. Shh...
