Phantom 105.2: the pirate that went straight

Before it existed, the alternative music station Phantom had an audience. “Before it existed,” is how Keith Walsh, the station’s current programme director, briefly and jokingly refers to its unofficial prelaunch incarnation as a pirate radio station. Phantom has been operating, depending on who you ask, since 1996 or 1997 – first from a shed in Sandyford, then above an internet cafe on Grafton Street, and later from an unused apartment next door to music venue Whelan’s.

Phantom was, “before it existed”, a much-loved part of Dublin’s rock infrastructure. Unlike many of the other pirate radio operators in Dublin, it was relatively professionally run, kept pretty consistent schedules and never hid its aspirations to be a legitimate licensed station. It ran nightclubs (Phantasm), played niche indie-rock music when such music was hard to find, and provided local bands with much-needed airplay (I was in one of those bands; they always gave us tea and biscuits).

When Phantom finally became a legal station in 2006 as Phantom 105.2, many of its listeners, DJs, and certainly its founders (a bunch of music and radio fans) thought the struggle was over. But in many ways, Phantom won the war and lost the peace.

Six years later most of those founders are gone (some voluntarily, others not), the station is now 33 per cent owned by Communicorp, 33 per cent by Gaiety Investments and 33 per cent by Principle Management, and is run from Marconi House alongside other Communicorp stations. The founders’ company, Wireless Media, sold what remained of its stake in 2012. The staff has been cut back. Shows by presenters including Alison Curtis have been cancelled, and other presenters, such as Jim Carroll and Michelle Doherty, have moved on of their own accord.

The current programme director acknowledges there is a perception, perhaps not entirely fair, that Phantom can never compete with its glory days as a pirate.

“Some people actually say: ‘It was better when it was in the shed’,” says Keith Walsh wearily. “Nostalgia’s a terrible thing.”

Even the departed founders don’t think it was actually better in the shed. “I have a recording of Glen Hansard out there doing an acoustic version of Revelate,” chuckles Simon Maher, until 2011 the station’s deputy programme director and afternoon DJ.

“And next door there was this dog that used to bark like a bastard and midway through Glen takes a little break and you can just hear the dog, ‘Arf! Arf! Arf!’”

There was, says Maher, no great plan at the outset. “Seven or eight of us were all involved in various things – radio or playing bands, DJing in clubs,” he says. “There wasn’t a real organised thing, we just ended up together. I used to have a radio station in the back garden of my house in Ballybrack. It was called Coast FM and it ran from 1992 to 1996. It was really 1997 to 1998 when a group of us got together to do a rock-station thing. We’d rent the shed, which would include the studio and the transmitter and all that stuff.”

The 1990s were still heady days for pirate radio. Transmitters would be housed up on Three Rock Mountain, and were sporadically raided by the police and occasionally stolen. “Ours was stolen twice,” says Maher. “In one case we got it back because the guy started broadcasting with it and we could trace where it was.”

Conditions were rough and ready, but bands needed an outlet and radio audiences were desperate for something different. “There was literally nothing like it at the time,” says James Byrne, host of the cancelled late-night show Nightlink, who still fills in at the station.

“When you came across it, it was like meeting some cool new friend who’s got an awesome record collection and who’s willing to talk to you about music all the time. That generation of people who were in their teens in the mid to late 1990s – they’re the people who really care. I remember ringing in and texting in and that’s how I got involved – by pestering them.”

Community feel

Derek Byrne, who hosts The Lounge, recalls coming across the station when it was called Spectrum. “They were playing Hey Jude and the DJ actually gave out a landline number and I rang it and got through to him and requested a track and they put it on straight away,” he recalls. “Sometimes you could get the phone to ring on air. You always felt part of a community.”

Phantom felt like a family affair and the fans were generally behind its bid for legitimacy. Its first bid for a licence in 1999 was unsuccessful. The core team, including Maher, “Sinister” Pete Vamos, Brian Daly, Gerard Roe and Neill Austin, continued in earnest, and Phantom was clearly doing something right. Many of its DJs were poached by other stations (Cormac Battle, Dan Hegarty and Jenny Huston went to RTÉ). Some tried to juggle the two.

“I was working on the breakfast show with Ian Dempsey on Today FM when I was on Phantom in those days,” says Alison Curtis. “Ian didn’t have a problem with that because of his own pirate days but it wasn’t that well known within the station. Then our chief executive at Today FM asked me to finish at Phantom because he was going to give me a weekend show.” Curtis left Phantom, but returned in 2011.

Even the authorities seemed relaxed about Phantom’s pirate status. “They didn’t have an issue with it as long as before applying for the licence you were off the air,” says Maher.

In 2003 and 2004, the way for legitimisation was paved by two temporary licences and, in the background, the founders gathered a heavy-hitting consortium of investors, including Denis Desmond’s Gaiety Investments and Paul McGuinness’s Principle Management.

This was a culture shock. “Myself and Gerard Roe [later Phantom’s chief executive] would have had a certain amount of businessy experience but we weren’t necessarily used to dealing with people used to such huge cash transactions on a daily basis. And I think they always viewed us as well-intentioned hippies,” says Maher.

In November 2004, when Phantom was awarded a permanent licence, the station founders, not to mention most of Dublin’s rock-music fans, were thrilled. The first block in the road was an unsuccessful court appeal challenging the award from a rival consortium, Zed FM, which included Hot Press’s Niall Stokes and Bob Geldof, among others. This delayed the launch of the station until Halloween 2006.

“That caused us to lose a lot of momentum,” says Maher, “but 2006 and 2007 were very good years. Things went very well. We were PPI station of the year. Revenues were good. But we had to bring in a million and a half [euro] a year to keep it alive. Compared with pirate days of 75 quid a week to keep the landlord paid, that was quite a difference.”

Struggling

By 2009, the station was beginning to struggle creatively and financially. Its high-cost base meant it went through money quickly. “We went in very big,” says Maher. “But in order to get the licence we had no choice . . . Going in at €1.5 million was actually low. But realistically, as a business model, it was too rich.”

He also thinks they tinkered with the formula too much. “There were a lot of debates: ‘Should it be more mainstream or less mainstream?’ . . . Rather than change the business model we changed the core of what the station was.”

By 2010, Phantom had lost founding members and was facing serious cashflow problems when Trevor Bowen of Principle Management, also chairman of Phantom, brought in a potential investor – Communicorp. Maher was one of the few to object – “I felt we should have looked for other options” – but he, chief executive Gerard Roe and marketing manager Brian Daly were soon gone.

Maher describes the period after his departure: “I was walking around in a hulk-like daze – kicking stones – what do I do now? I went from 26 to 40 years old with the station and then found at 40 that it was reinvention time.

“It’s strange to see the station continue without me but I don’t want to see it struggle. People I would have taken on 10 years ago are still there and they haven’t stopped being talented or good or hardworking.”

It is Maher’s understanding that Communicorp then took over “operational control” of the station, although Ricky Geraghty – who eventually replaced Roe as chief executive – says that “while Communicorp doesn’t have operational control of the station, we are located in the same building as two stations that it does control, namely Newstalk and Today FM”.

Cost-cutting

When the station moved to Marconi House it continued cost-cutting. It shed presenters such as Shane Galvin and Pearl. Alison Curtis’s entertaining talkshow also came to an end in December after the station was given permission by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to reduce its speech content.

“I was a bit shocked,” says Curtis. “But the reality is that speech is expensive and with a station pitching itself as a niche music station, a talkshow had a precarious position on the schedule anyway. But I was very surprised. We were the only show to see a rise in listenership.”

Phantom still has good presenters such as Nadine O’Regan, Derek Byrne and Clare Beck, but its market share is a mere 0.7 per cent (it was 1.8 per cent in 2009). As a music station, its challenge is to find legitimacy in a world where people don’t always look to radio for new music any more and where the indie music Phantom plays regularly breaks through to mainstream radio. At the moment, Phantom’s biggest threats may come from digital stations such as BBC Radio 6 Music and, closer to home, the growing classic-rock station Radio Nova.

“The world has changed so much,” says Curtis. “You can’t break records any more because people acquire and digest their music differently. When we were a pirate you could play someone like Brendan Benson before people could download it, so it meant there was a huge relevancy. But what is alternative or indie any more?”

Of the original management team that went seeking a licence, only head of music John Caddell remains. Keith Walsh, on the other hand, is a returning figure. In the early days he presented a comedy programme with Joe Donnelly, before they absconded to Spin 103.8. The pair are back on the morning slot on Phantom, and Walsh is also programme director.

“When I came back there was a bunch of people who were really passionate and hardworking but seemed a little . . . lost. The people who started Phantom and had the dream about getting a licence and making it a legit station were all gone. So where does that leave Phantom if the people who dreamt it up were all gone?”

Yet Walsh is optimistic. “[In September] we opened a pop-up shop on the quays and broadcast from there and hosted a business for a few hours and had free coffee . . . It felt like we were right back in the heart of the community where Phantom needs to be . . . It needs to get out on the street with everyone else. It needs to get back to where it was as a pirate.”