There are a few significant radio milestones on the way in January 2025, with 2JJ celebrating fifty years since Holger Brockmann first turned on the ABC‘s flagship youth station microphone on Sunday January 19. You can watch that moment below:
The first track played was the banned Skyhooks’ song ‘You Just Like Me ‘Cos I’m Good In Bed’. Double J will mark anniversary with a 12 hour rebroadcast of day one. You can listen and read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/doublej/music-reads/music-news/triple-j-50-birthday-broadcast-first-day-skyhooks-holger/104804002
Marius Webb, the founding station co-ordinator told Double J on its 40th anniversary:
“Young people of that time had learnt that you don’t have to bow down to the ideas of people from a generation before. We gave that feeling a voice.”
The station was a policy promise from then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to appeal to the youth vote. Countdown had debuted three months earlier. Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, who incidentally never performed on Countdown as he refused to mime to a backing track, said that 2JJ allowed Australian music to find its identity:
“Double Jay had a much more open, much more transforming approach to what music could be and they were prepared to play anything and everything. Of course diversity breeds incredible things over time and I think that’s why you had such a flowering of Australian music. It was really a launching pad for Australian music from that point on.”
Founding announcers and staff were Holger, Marius, Arnold Frolows who died last Sunday, Australia’s first female rock music presenter Gayle Austin, Alan McGirvan, Mike Parker, Chris Winter, Ron Moss, Mark Colvin, Jim Middleton, Don Cumming, Mac Cocker and Bob Hudson.
Bob was not a radio broadcaster like Holger who had been poached from 2SM. He was a folk, doo-wop and country singer handy with a ukulele, born in Sydney before moving to Newcastle to study as a young adult.
When I was a child I believed that everyone in Australia was connected to Newcastle in some way. My mum was born there. I used to stay with my grandparents in Charlestown every school holidays, once running into a primary school mate on the same street staying with their grandparents too. 2HD, this country’s second oldest existing radio station which, on the subject of anniversaries, turns 100 later this month with much more on that closer to the date, was where all the cool kids worked.
And there was a song about the place too!
In 1974 Bob teamed up with ABC Musical Director Chris Neal to record, live in concert, a both sung and spoken word tribute album to Newcastle, its blokes, sheilas, holdens and milk bars called, with great originality, The Newcastle Song. Please savour the details and back story on the album cover below:
Outsiders listening to this song would feel they’d stumbled on an alien language. None the less a trimmed down version, totally as incomprehensible to foreigners and also responsible for the follow up Rak Off Normie, went to No 1 mid 1975.
By that time Bob had scored a gig on the fledgling 2JJ, later moving to 2BL (now ABC Radio Sydney) to present a music trivia show alongside historian Glenn A. Baker. I’ve included below one of the prides of my vinyl collection, an album of truly wonderful or dreadful Australian songs, depending on your outlook, that they released at the time.
Hudson is 78 now and did a total career pivot in the 80s going back to Uni and completing a PhD in archaeology so that he could dig up old objects as well as music.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo.