About

Deep, within the solid brick walls of the inner core of the The Corporation, sit the radio studios.  From here, all the national major networks: The Nations Favourite; Little Sister Radio;  ABC1; Radio Tea, and all the others, endlessly cast their output into the air, 24/7.

Through the imposing doors of its buildings – The Mothership, The Maid Of Orleans and Wobegon House – pass the embodied voices of the educated, the entertaining, the cool, and the powerful.  All in the name of having their thoughts, opinions and wares strewn around the globe.  But how do these voices and this music get into your radio, your smart speaker, your head…?

Well.  Roughly speaking, radio programmes require three categories of job role to get to air: a presenter, a producer, and an engineer.  Think of it as a mouth, a head and some fingers. The presenter is highly visible, the producer is responsible for the content… and in the hidden, mysterious undergrowth of the whole ecosystem lies the lowly sound engineer.  A precious jewel of a job – fought to the death for on a regular basis with hand, tooth, nail and lightsaber. And failing that, a combination of skill, nerve and wit.

The radio sound engineer’s role is an invisible place within an invisible medium.  The listening audience expects the mechanism of the audio signal path – the microphones, the cables, the equipment – to be utterly transparent.  Quietly and diligently residing in the eye of many a media hurricane,  there these passengers sit.  Facing the front, smiling through the glass, pressing buttons and opening and closing faders on huge mixing desks. They have sat through all of the ‘legendary’ music sessions, interviews, major radio events, however their story remains largely untold… until now.

This is an account of the extraordinary everyday experiences of a humble audio butler to the rich and famous, our hero: Pop Shield. Most of the time things go ok, but when they don’t, Pop blogs…