Enjoy music but insist on checking the artist’s passport before listening to it? Then you’re in luck with the launch this week of GB News’s spin-off sister radio station.
As first reported by Rats in a Sack back in September, bosses at the cash-draining hard right channel have launched GB Music Radio, a channel which promises not to play anything other than UK artists. Its slogan is “all British, all day” (although one jingle proclaims it to be “as British as Morecambe and Wise at Christmas”, something the Tory-supporting Morecambe might have appreciated).
Initial listening suggests that GB News has learned from its TV experience of throwing large amounts of cash at presenters. GB Music Radio has presenters only at breakfast and drivetime, the rest of the time operating more like a Spotify playlist. Weekday presenter Paul Coyte, previously a GB News sports presenter, said little of note other than a tedious anecdote about how he once saw Mick Jagger getting out of a taxi. The station openly boasts its travel updates are AI-generated.
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Like its TV counterpart, whose advertisers include a Sheffield jewellery shop, GB Music Radio also appears to be struggling to attract ad spend, and those it has appear to be targeting those in their dotage. Frequent advertisers on launch day included Ableworld, a mobility and stairlift retailer, and a cremation service.
But it appears also to be struggling with its self-imposed ban on artists born outside the UK. Among the playlist on its first day of broadcast were Cliff Richard (born in India), Queen (whose lead singer, Freddie Mercury, was born in what was Zanzibar to Indian parents), Sade (born in Nigeria to a Nigerian father) and Dua Lipa (who was born in London but has described herself as “very proud to be Albanian”).
Other artists on the playlist are very much British but hardly simpatico with the value and politics of GB News’s output. Elton John said at a concert in 2019: “I am sick to death of Brexit. I’m a European. I am not a stupid, colonial, imperialist English idiot. I’m ashamed of my country for what it has done.”
Damon Albarn of Blur, whose Country House featured on the first day’s output, told Channel 4 News in 2023: “Brexit was a travesty. If people are waking up to it now, thank goodness, but it was a disaster. Spiritually, economically… just rubbish.” Meanwhile, his old sparring partner Noel Gallagher, whose Wonderwall was the third track to air on the network, said in 2015: “Nigel Farage doesn’t look like he could be mentally capable of running a corner shop, far less a country.” Farage is, of course, GB News’s star evening presenter.
Of course, the act widely considered Britain’s greatest featured on the very first morning. And the Beatles track they chose? Get Back. Obviously.
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