Ian Fish, Head of Production, Heart Radio, Birmingham, West Midlands, United Kingdom
By Jerry Vigil
This month’s RAP Interview takes another trip outside the good ol’ USA to the UK where we hooked up with Ian Fish, Head of Production for A/C formatted Heart radio, a Chrysalis owned group. Ian’s clean, professional production style has been featured on the RAP CD many times, but what you don’t hear on the CD is how diverse Ian’s skills are, and how his multiple talents play a big part in keeping Heart at the top of the ratings charts. Ian talks about his unique skill set and offers some ideas we can all use to further the cause of bringing our stations up to par with today’s technology, and strengthen our positions in the battle for listeners in this iPod-Internet-Satellite infested world of personal entertainment. Be sure to check out Ian’s sampler on this month’s RAP CD!
JV: Tell us about your start in this business.
Ian: I started in 1989 straight out of school. I basically did my A-levels, which I guess is like senior school for you guys. I didn’t go to university or anything. I managed to get a job and move straight into radio which was great. I started as an engineer at a small radio station in Worcester, just south of where I am now in Birmingham. I learned how to fix everything, how everything goes together, what to do with tape machines and record players if they break — that’s how long ago it was. That was kind of how I started, and it was five years there. During that time I came across an issue of RAP Magazine featuring a cassette at the time, which had a sweeper montage from MOJO Radio. I heard that and thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard, and it was like, “I want to do that.” So my desire to move into the production side was born.
JV: Where did you go after your five years in Worcester?
Ian: From there I got a phone call from the station that I used to listen to when I was growing up. I grew up in a very nice rural county of England, called Cheshire. I used to listen to the local radio station there, and they actually phoned me up and said, “Hello, we’ve heard that you do engineering, and you can do outside broadcasting, and you can produce a bit as well, and we’d like you to come and work for us.” So I moved back home to stay with my parents for a while, and worked for just 18 months at this radio station up in the northwest of England. While I was there, I took a phone call from the Program Director, at the time, of Heart, down in Birmingham, asking me to come and produce their new breakfast show. So in 1995, I came to Heart as a breakfast producer having never produced a breakfast show before. I was in the deep end with this relatively new regional radio station and a brand new breakfast show, but I have some great people here who taught me a lot, and it was great. Dennis Clark, who is now at KISS in Los Angeles, was our consultant and taught me loads about breakfast radio. I did that for five years. We got really successful, and then the job opened up as Head of Production for Heart, and that’s when I moved over into what I’m doing now.
JV: What are your responsibilities as Head of Production?
Ian: Basically, it’s looking after the imaging of Heart in the West Midlands, and we’ve just taken on a new station in the East Midlands, called Heart as well. So it’s imaging for both of those stations. And it’s also doing all the sponsorship and promotions production work when we give away the cars and holidays and all that kind of stuff. I do the production and the writing for that across both Heart East and West Midlands. So that’s kind of the main focus of the job, but I also get to work in the studio with recording artists when they come in for sessions, and I work with the presenters, teaching them how to work the new studios, loading audio, everything really.
I get to do some really cool stuff actually. We’ve built a reputation here of being able to do really good work with artists. We get a lot of artists coming into the studios specifically to record acoustic sets here at Heart. We also do a lot with them out on the road as well. I have a background in live events as well — that was back when I was also starting out in radio — and we do amazing live events. We have a great reputation for both of those things with the artists and the record companies.
JV: Where did you get your background in live music?
Ian: I had my own production company that was kind of a hobby that paid a little bit of money. It was called “Sounds Fishy Productions.” I was really interested in concerts and festivals, and how these things happen on stage and get to be heard by so many people. I set up a business basically learning all about staging, lighting, sound, live engineering, microphone techniques. It was great. I even did some touring. It was cool.
JV: And that experience is paying off now.
Ian: Absolutely. It’s amazing actually, that all this stuff that I did when I was a bit younger, is all really starting to pay off. And I think the whole radio business at the moment, certainly in the UK, is diversifying; and we’re all looking for what else we can do with radio. And this kind of thing I’ve been up to — live events and getting out and taking artists out to meet the public — to be able to produce those events entirely in-house is a real plus. Recording the sessions and getting them online or anything else we might do with them -- the job is all that, and diversity of experience is really paying off now.
JV: I would guess UK radio is taking full advantage of the internet.
Ian: Yes, absolutely. We’re just redesigning websites at the moment for the Heart brand, and it’s going to be huge. We’ve got this real ambition to make the websites, not just a bolt onto the radio station, but a kind of media setup in their own right, which the radio station promotes. I think these days the audiences are becoming so much more aware. They don’t just want the opportunity to vote on a TV show. They want to watch 24-hour webcams, and they want to be interactive with it the whole time. The internet, the mobile phone connections, texting, the emailing, the voting — everything is all part of a package that people expect now as the whole picture, and we’re really trying to catch up with that and be a part of that on the radio side.
JV: You mentioned the Heart brand in both the East and West Midlands. Are there other Heart stations?
Ian: There are three Heart stations, plus a Heart digital that just goes out in DAB format. We here in Birmingham, the West Midlands station, were the first. Then London came online a year later, and we’ve just taken over a radio station and turned it into a Heart over in East Midlands. So we now have this real group of stations, and the East and West Midlands, that whole middle section of Britain, is covered.
JV: Is the programming on these stations independent, or is some of the programming simulcast?
Ian: All the program content at the moment is independent. We have one network show on a Sunday evening which is a network show that goes across lots and lots of stations in the UK, but the rest of the time, we’re completely independent. But the advantage obviously of all being called “Heart” is that we can now start pooling resources in terms of production and idents and jingles. We’re just launching a new jingle package in fact, and that same jingle package is running across all three stations.
JV: How would you define your style of imaging?
Ian: You know, so many amazing people read RAP Magazine and you hear so much amazing stuff on the CD every month that I feel like I shouldn’t even talk about my imaging. But, I’d say my style is deliberately clean. It’s deliberately very simple. It’s there to be quick and functional and get the message across and really not intrude too much. There’s enough clutter going on throughout people’s lives and throughout radio stations without the imaging getting in the way of that. So, hopefully it’s clean and neat and simple, but effective.
JV: You mentioned “quick.” Are you guys producing promos as short as you can make them, 15 seconds, 20 seconds?
Ian: It’s very much about the quick in, quick out. If we can get away with 20-second promos for the programming led items, then that’s great. And we try to do that. With the S&P [Sponsorship & Promotions] stuff, generally clients have paid for a 30 second ad, so we need to fill the 30 seconds. But it’s very, very rare that it’s ever longer than 30-seconds. And because of the way we build the promos and write the promos, there’s imaging content at the start to introduce the promo and some imaging at the end to end the promo, and the client there in the middle gets around 22-seconds or so.
JV: Twenty and thirty-second promos don’t leave a lot of room for “Theater of the Mind” storytelling.
Ian: No, it doesn’t. It’s been a real challenge actually. I’ve always kind of written quite short. I’m a fan very much of getting to the point, and “Theater of the Mind” is something that you sometimes just don’t have room for. But wherever we can squeeze some in and tell a little story, we’ll try and do that. But you’re right; it’s hard to kind of crowbar everything you want to do into a 30 or even a 20, and make it interesting, compelling, and effective.
JV: What do you do under those constraints to make the promos stand out?
Ian: I think it comes back to this very clean style. In our marketplace, particularly here in Birmingham, we have Kerrang Radio which is imaged and produced by a guy called Chris Thorpe, who is amazing and very into the big whiz-bangs and a lot of production. It’s really product focused and very charged at the younger audience. And then we have another station that is kind of halfway between that and us, but still very noise intensive with lots of zips and zaps and loud music. I think what I’m trying to do to make us stand out is be much cleaner and much more conversational and much more real in the production. People are getting really good with their bullshit meters, as has been covered in RAP mag several times. They can spot it a mile off. Keeping it clean and to the point I think has really paid off. Certainly, we’re the market leader at the moment, so we must be doing something right.
JV: Plus, it’s an AC format, so you’re not talking to a bunch of 18 to 24 year old males.
Ian: Yeah, our core audience is 30 to 39 year old females. So you’re always kind of writing for that kind of demographic, and our style of production really seems to work.
JV: What’s your audio software of choice?
Ian: Pro Tools is what we use. I’ve got a really nice TDM Pro Tools running on Windows XP with a couple of screens in the studio. We just changed over to that a couple of years ago. Before that we had been through Sadie and Soundscape. But Pro Tools is great. I was a bit resistive to the change at first because I’d hear some not great things about Pro Tools amazingly, but since using it, it’s great. I just wish you could bounce out of it faster than real time. When you’ve got a three or four minute long song edit, you have to sit and wait three or four minutes for it to bounce down to a stereo file.
JV: How’s Pro Tools behaving on the PC?
Ian: It’s really good. I think at first it was a little bit clunky. It was clearly a transfer from the Mac format. But on the PC now, I’m on Version 7.1 just about to go to 7.2, and it’s really stable.
JV: You also have your hands in some video work. Tell us about that.
Ian: Well, the video work has been really great. It’s another one of the strings on my bow, without wishing to be too big-headed about it. It was one of the things I fell in to. I did some freelance camera work for TV news crews, and I did some freelance editing for TV news programs. I kind of kept it up you know, editing home videos at home on the software you can buy now, which is amazing. Then one day I had a presentation to do at work, and I added some video into it. People were like, “Wow, I didn’t know you could do video!” And it’s really taken off.
So, on the same computer that runs Pro Tools, we have a video editing software package. I can flick from one to the other and chop up video that we shoot. Whenever we go out to events, we film and put a little package together that can go online. We do a lot of stuff for internal presentations and presentations that go to clients. We shoot a little video or make a little montage. And we just started looking at content for the websites and what we can do in video content that compliments the radio that we do. I think I’m quite lucky in that I’ve got the video skills that I can really relate it to radio. You know we don’t want to become a TV station, but we do want to do video content that relates to what we’re doing on air. So, that’s what we’re trying to develop now. Its things like, rather than just kind of sticking a camera in the studio and watching a guy do a radio show, it’s finding a balance that is one of our DJ’s doing a piece to the camera but introducing a pop video. It’s kind of like an MTV but a more radio-focused version of it. So the links are short and snappy, and the station name gets said at the top and at the end. It’s almost like making a little TV clip but using the station style and the station format and the station sound to make that work as part of our overall imaging.
JV: Radio stations using video on the web — is that pretty much throughout UK radio now or is that just starting to flourish?
Ian: I think what’s happened at the moment is people have run their websites as just extensions of the radio — you know, the stuff that we couldn’t fit on the radio, we’re putting on the web. I think what’s going to start happening now is that people are going to develop websites to be almost stand-alone things to visit. I think at Chrysalis, we’re kind of the first to be thinking about what content we can put on that, and how we can use visual imaging to complement our audio imaging and our audio content, and I think it’s fairly new at the moment. I think in the last few years it’s traditionally been just a bolt onto the radio station. We’re now looking towards this fully functional, first port-of-call website that happens to be related to a radio station.
JV: How many people are working on the website? There’s you, and you must have a web designer of some kind.
Ian: Yeah, we do. We have a local webmaster who updates content daily. He’s full time and works for our marketing department. Then we have a few people down at the head office in London who are working on design and content. And we’re working now with a new company to come up with the whole look of the websites.
JV: There are several people working on your site.
Ian: Lots of people. And it’s more than it was a year ago. I think what’s really telling is that I have a Program Director here at Heart, Andrew Robson, and there’s a Program Director in the East Midlands station, but we also have a Brand Program Director, Francis Currie, who kind of oversees the whole Heart brand. What’s really telling is that he’s been very heavily involved in the development and the look of the websites. It’s been really interesting to see that coming together, the programming side and the web side, and to create a unified look and feel to both products.
JV: Sounds like you have a few Program Directors to keep you busy!
Ian: Yes. Andrew has only been with us less than a year, but he’s got a background as a producer, which has been amazing for me. I’ve never had a PD with that kind of knowledge of what I do, and that’s been absolutely incredible. He comes in and sits in the studio with me, and we’ll spend an hour and a half, two hours going through how we’re going to image the music. And it’s great that he knows compression, EQ and everything else. So yes, I have one direct PD that I work with, which is Andrew, and then Francis, the Brand PD, and sometimes I deal direct with Francis as well. But most of the time day-to-day I’m talking with Andrew at the local level. We also have a PD over at the East Midlands Heart who I deal with as well, so, three PDs to keep happy. What an enviable position to be in!
JV: We’ve featured some “Live Lunch” promos of yours on recent RAP CDs which promoted these artist road shows you mentioned earlier – further incorporation of your live sound experience from years ago. Tell us a little more about these events.
Ian: Well, they came about because we were doing these acoustic sessions with artists, and we were doing really well. Tour managers would phone up and say, “I need an SM58…” and a this and a this, and I’d be like, “oh yeah, I can get all that and have it all set up for you.” And my colleague Mike Zeller, who’s the Head of Presentation here, came up with this idea of rather than just doing these acoustic sessions, why don’t we take them out on the road? Instead of just doing private acoustic sessions in the studio or sometimes in front of a few staff, why don’t we do a contest on air where somebody can win a fairly big name artist to come to their workplace and perform for them. I was like, “That’s great! Let’s do that!”
We’ve done some really good shows. We have big name artists here in the UK like Ronan Keating, and Simon Webbe, and Daniel Bedingfield; and we literally say on air, “If you’d like Ronan Keating to come to your workplace, send us an email.” We go through and we choose somewhere to go. We go down and my crew and I put in a stage and lighting and sound, and we do the performance. So far, we’ve done four or five, and every time the local news and press have come down and covered it fully. We’ve had thousands of pounds worth of publicity from it. It’s been really good for us.
JV: How long does it take to set up for one of those?
Ian: It varies really, but if it’s just the artist and the guitarist, it’s quite quick. For Ronan Keating we decided to go to the local Air Force base. There are a lot of people from there working out in Iraq and involved with all that, so a lot of families were kind of home alone for Christmas. So we thought this would be great. We’ll go up there and take Ronan Keating along. We did a big concert with Ronan and his full band in one of the hangars with a Harrier Jump Jet on either side of the stage. That took about nine or ten hours to rig for that, but it was amazing.
JV: And I understand you’re a photographer too.
Ian: Well, yeah. I’m a photographer, and this kind of ties in with the TV and the video thing. You know, one has moving pictures, one has still, but the same kind of thing applies. I started taking photos when we went out on “staff night out” or if we had a client party or something. I’d do some photos and it kind of progressed. Now the press department here uses me to do photos of the presenters and the artists that come to visit and all kinds of stuff. So yeah, I really get to exercise all my skills. It’s a great, great way to earn a living really, isn’t it?
JV: You have quite a skill package there – the production skills, the engineering experience, the web experience, the photography, video, live sound. That’s a lot of skills to bring to the table!
Ian: I always try and think of how I can use my skills, and how it can relate to radio. And I guess I’ve developed those skills that have been useful along the way as part of what I do in radio. Producing is definitely my first love, but those things like photography, like video, like engineering, I’ve kind of stayed with because they really do add something to my satisfaction of doing the job. Also, it’s a useful thing to bring to the station that I work for. It was a conscious decision several years ago to kind of really build up my skills package and not just be a guy who can work Pro Tools, but be a writer, operate Pro Tools, be a photographer, do video, whatever I can do to really enhance my employability, I guess.
JV: What’s down the road for you?
Ian: Well, it’s a big question. I would love to come and work in America at some point in the future. I’ve holidayed out there several times, and I know a few people in the industry out there. I love the fact that American radio is such a big part of the American media scene. UK radio is still a relatively young media compared to press and TV. And I love the fact that in America, radio is on very much an equal footing with those other media. So I’d love to spend some time out there, doing what I can and just experiencing what it’s like to live and work in a different part of the world. That’s definitely kind of in the future for me at some point.
At the moment, I’m really just loving what I do. We’re the market leading radio station, and it’s hard to know where to go from here in the UK. We’re one of the biggest stations in the country. Outside of London, certainly we’re one of the biggest stations, and it’s kind of hard to know what else to do. I just really want to get better at what I do and learn more about what I do. I find this whole convergence of different media through podcasting, and internet, and radio, and digital, and satellite radio — I find it all fascinating, and I think I really want to be a part of that next stage of development in radio.
JV: How’s podcasting taking off in the UK?
Ian: It’s big actually. There’s a few podcasts by radio people over here that regularly hit the top chart of downloads, and it’s definitely something that we’re going to be looking at as part of our arsenal on the websites. It’s also now something that our sales guys are starting to look at — offering clients the opportunity to have a professionally created downloadable feature, and obviously, it needs to offer the listener something other than just the chance to listen to an advert. But there’s loads of opportunity there for sales to get together with a client and create. Maybe a travel company could do a guide to the hidden gems and the secret attractions of America. And you make it a download instead of making a minute and a half long ad on air. Make it a download with a 30 second promo for that. So it’s definitely something exciting that’s happening, and I think rather than being too scared of it, we’re very much going, “Wow, how can we really make this work for us? How can we really be involved with this?”
JV: Any parting thoughts for our readers?
Ian: I’d really love to mention that since joining RAP mag, it has been so great to get emails from people from all around the world commenting on your work or asking questions or suggesting you look at this website or do that. It’s been really good to have that communication startup with other producers around the world. At the end of all your interviews, and at the end of any pieces people do, you say “so and so welcomes your comments,” and you put their email addresses in there. I love that, and I want you to put my email address at the end of this because I really would like to hear from people. It’s a great way to share ideas and network and get to know people.