Andrew Crothers, Creative Director of English Programming, MediaCorp, Singapore
By Jerry Vigil
Ever want to just pack up your bags and travel the world, working in radio in different countries, meeting new people, experiencing different cultures and drinking up all life has to offer? That’s exactly what Andrew Crothers decided to do 13 years ago when he left his home in Australia. But instead of Singapore being Andrew’s most recent stop, it was his first stop, and has been his only stop so far. This month’s RAP Interview takes us on our first visit to this island nation, located on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, just north of the equator. Singapore is home for some 4.5 million people, and home for MediaCorp, a state-owned group of commercial media companies, which includes 14 radio stations as well as television and print media. Andrew handles the imaging for MediaCorp’s English stations with a creative flair which was acknowledged with a RAP Awards trophy this past April. Andrew shares the creative process behind that award winner, and he takes us on a fascinating tour of radio in Singapore. Be sure to check out this month’s RAP CD for more top-notch audio from Andrew.
JV: Tell us how you got into this business, and how you wound up in Singapore.
Andrew: Well, I think like most people in this business, the business really chooses you. It always starts off as an interest in music and radio in general, but then as you start to step into the realm, maybe it’s the flashing lights that do it, or just the ability to have a bit more of a creative outlet.
For me, I got my first record player when I was about two, because I had managed to destroy my parents’. But the real breakthrough for me came with my first tape recorder when I was about four or five. I would just lock myself away and spend hours and hours recording and setting up little response systems so I could have interviews with myself and little McDonald’s drive-thru windows for all of my Lego people on this tiny, portable tape recorder. The other thing I think was that I used to listen to radio a lot. While the music was fantastic, I was always fascinated by the commercials and the little bits in between more than anything; so it was always a labor for me to get through half of the music before I would get to the stuff that would excite me.
When I stepped into radio in 1988, I was 15 years old. The government at the time in Western Australia had just begun to issue what they called C class licenses, which were for community radio. A group of us went out on the streets and rattled tins to get a few dollars together and wrote a lot of letters. And there was a station called 101 FM that was down in Safety Bay and the Rockingham area, kind of south of Perth — it was a very small community I was from. So they gave us permission, and we put a little transmitter on top of a grain silo and rented out a room in one of the council buildings. That station unfortunately went off the air, from what I hear, about five or six years ago, but I was amazed it survived as long as it did.
JV: Tell us a little more about this station. What kind of coverage did you get? How many people were involved in this?
Andrew: We probably had about a 40-kilometer radius. We did this with the money we managed to raise, and we also got a few grants from the government. As far as the technical setup and everything like that goes, we were able to hire some experts to help out, but in the process of the setup, we were all very present and attentive, kind of watching what was going on so that once the, quote/unquote, “experts” left the building, we were then able to take over. In the beginning, there were about 20 in the core group. I was the youngest at the time, and we had two people who were the only paid staff. The rest were all volunteers.
JV: Wow. Not too many people can say they got their start in the biz by putting together a radio station at age 15. Where to next?
Andrew: Then it was off to Austereo, just out of university. I was working as a musician about five or six nights a week in a band. We kind of did punk/ska and everything, and our lead singer was a sales rep over at 94.5 in Perth. I was chatting with him one day, and he told me about this incredible new piece of technology they had called a digital audio workstation. As a computer geek from way back, the whole concept fascinated me, the idea to be able to edit on a computer. Actually, just being able to touch a really powerful computer at the time was quite exciting to me. My radio experience up until then had been on an old Revox tape machine, which was about the size of a household fridge, of which the tape was more splice than magnetic.
So I went in and learned how to use it, and because of that, simply because I was the only one who really was able to get a handle on the technology, I had my foot in the door, which was fun. But that only lasted about six months before I decided I needed to get out of Perth and see the world. It was mainly because of the music and the whole scene I was in. I was having a little bit too much of a good time, and I knew that a change of scene would probably be a lot healthier for me. So it was going to be the world essentially through Asia, then over to Europe, and over to the States — grand plans. However, about three months after landing in Singapore, I caught the eye of this fascinating vixen, who then went on to become my wife. Soon as I got to Singapore, I met my wife, and that was it. I’ve been stuck happily here ever since, and that’s been about 13 years now.
JV: Have all 13 years been with MediaCorp?
Andrew: The radio side of it was, yeah. When I first arrived, the plan to travel was just to do some teaching along the way, because it’s a very easy job to get. So when I first got here, I was actually teaching drama and English of all things, but then when I realized that I was going to be staying put here at least for the short term, I just decided that I couldn’t hang around and not do what I truly love to do. So I went and approached MediaCorp, and they gave me a little room and a little key and off I went.
JV: Tell us about radio in Singapore. As I understand it, the only radio stations and TV stations there are state owned, and MediaCorp is the organization that runs them. Is that correct?
Andrew: Well, that’s a very simple way of putting it. It’s slightly more complex than that, but it does boil down to the same thing. It’s very important that the government is able to have a certain degree of control over the media for their own purposes, be they benign or otherwise, generally benign. We live under a “friendly dictatorship,” I guess would be the way to put it. As time’s gone on for me here in Singapore, the best way to think about this country, especially when you’re living here, is as a company rather than a country. And it runs very efficiently in that way simply because geographically we are very small and very self contained. We have a large population, but human beings are our only natural resource, so the government’s done a very good job of making sure everyone’s happy. It’s a great place to live, a great place to work.
Yeah, media is controlled by the state, although through private companies. MediaCorp itself is obviously the biggest player. We’ve got 14 stations, digitals, all up and running. We have four TV stations, newspapers, magazines. There is competition in the form of Singapore Press Holdings who runs the major newspaper The Straits Times. And there are other competing radio stations. One, however, is owned by the armed forces, so that’s obviously under government control, and the other network of two stations, one English and one Chinese, is run by the National Trades Union Council, so that’s obviously under government control. MediaCorp is still a private company, its largest shareholder being Temasek Holdings, which is owned and run by the government. So yeah, to cut a long story short, it is state controlled; however it’s not as bad as you would imagine. The freedoms and liberties are there to be as creative as you want.
JV: What are your responsibilities there?
Andrew: As Creative Director of English Programming, I deal with a number of stations, Hot AC, CHR. We have a classic oldies station. We have one station which does news/talk, and there’s an international channel. I’m just responsible for overseeing the imaging production and a smattering of commercial production, but it’s mainly all of the station-based stuff. We actually have a separate department staffed by about 30 people which handles in-house commercials alone, but that covers four languages.
JV: That must take a few production studios.
Andrew: Each radio station has its own production studio, and that includes all of the other stations, all of the Chinese, the Malay, and the Tamil stations, as well. But what that means essentially is that we don’t have any backup on-air studios. So there’s no Studio A or Studio B. Each station just has its one on-air suite. And everything is housed in the same building, so it’s 14 stations all running out of one building.
JV: Sound like a big building with a couple hundred people at least.
Andrew: On staff total we’ve got about 600. We’re also integrated with TV as well, plus one of our newspapers is housed in the same building. So it’s a very large complex, but it’s fun because there’s always something going on. The cross pollination of efforts has also been fun along the way. I’ve been able to dabble in a bit of TV here and there apart from the regular job, so that’s been fantastic.
JV: And I suppose there’s no problem finding voice talent down the hall.
Andrew: Oh, absolutely. That’s no problem. And all of the studios are all networked quite happily. I work from home whenever I can, as well; I’m VPN’d into the system. So yeah, it’s very, very easy to get somebody at very short notice, which helps.
JV: What’s your DAW of choice?
Andrew: I’m a Pro Tools guy. It was Pro Tools I first touched in Austereo. When I moved to Singapore, I was actually a beta tester for Pro Tools back at Version 4, and it’s all I use. I desperately, desperately wanted to like the new version of Logic simply because of its portability. And we have a good relationship with Apple, me and my partner in crime, a guy named Don who I did a radio show with for a while. We had a nice partnership with Apple. They brought us in and showed us Logic. Don, who since left MediaCorp, has actually started to integrate Logic into it. But for me and for radio, just for ease of use and for editing and simply because I’m so used to it, Pro Tools is my choice.
JV: How do you think MediaCorp stations differ from commercial radio stations our readers are most familiar with here in North America and Europe? What are some of the major differences, perhaps in terms of guidelines regarding commercial matter, for example?
Andrew: Well, in terms of formats, we kind of try to follow world standards as much as possible, so there’s nothing particularly different there. But the point you make about guidelines and regulations, I think that’s where things start to get a little bit different. As far as advertising goes, it’s the same as it is everywhere — all claims must be substantiated and be able to be verified. So that aside, as far as commercials go, I find that things are probably a little more liberal, whereas in the States, it seems these days disclaimers take up about 30 percent of the promo message.
Over here it’s not so bad. The main restrictions we have are when it comes to on-air content, certain subject matters, simply because we have a large multicultural society here. We have the Malay community, primarily Muslim. There are the Indians, the Tamils, and the Chinese. Then there’s just the general Asian sense of morals that comes into play, so sexual references and sexual content really is kept at a minimum. Even innuendo isn’t smiled upon too much. And the main one, of course, is politics. We simply do not discuss politics as a rule here.
JV: What’s the cost of living like in Singapore, housing, food, and such? How much is gas over there?
Andrew: Right now we’re looking at about $1.80 to $1.90 a liter of petrol.
JV: And we’re talking Singapore dollars, so converting that to a US measure of dollars per gallon, that’s about $5.25 a gallon US. And we’re complaining about prices near $4.00.
Andrew: Well, what some people are doing these days is driving over the bridge to Malaysia where the government has a whole bunch of measures in place to keep fuel prices down for its citizens. So folks are going over there, filling up on a tank of petrol, and then coming back, although they’re starting to stem that now.
JV: What about housing?
Andrew: Everything goes by square foot here, and the high density of population here means that everything is really, really built up. I’m one of the few who actually has a house on a piece of land. Most people live in a box in the sky. The average price for a condominium — let’s say maybe 2,000 square footage — you’d be looking at about a million Singapore dollars. So it’s comparable to all the major cities in the world. It’s like New York. It’s London. It’s Sidney in terms of pricing.
JV: Congratulations on your RAP Awards trophy, by the way. It’s a PSA for the MILK Compassion Fund. Tell us a little bit about the fund, and then tell us about the creative process on that piece.
Andrew: Thank you very much. MILK the charity, “Mainly I Love Kids.” Every year, all of the stations within MediaCorp adopt a charity. Once every two years that is rotated, and this was our second year of having MILK on board. Mainly I Love Kids is helping children from all walks of life, mainly those from disadvantaged homes, and the Compassion Fund they had recently set up as a way for people to be able to donate to help kids who were having troubles at home financially.
As far as the creative process goes, “M.I.L.K./David” was actually part of a series. The wife of a major politician here also runs the charity, so she and a few of the other office staff all came in to read their little scripts. David was actually the first cab off the rank; they wanted to have a little kid on board. He came in with his little script all ready to read and everything, but as soon as he walked in the door, this little kid was just jumping off the walls. He couldn’t contain himself. He was doing everything he could to make all of the faders on the mixer light up like a Christmas tree, and he was just as chatty as heck. He wanted to play with all of the computers. I think within about ten seconds I realized I was going to get most of the material from that and not from the little speech that they had him prepare. So I just hit record and let it run.
After that, it came time to edit it down. As a lot of your readers will know, when a promo starts writing itself, you really just sit back and let it happen. This was one of those cases. It was actually surprisingly an emotional experience for me as I was putting it together, and the rhythm of it just started to materialize. I started to actually get a little teary myself. I thought, if I’m the one producing it and have that objective point of view on the whole matter, and I’m starting to get emotionally affected… I knew I was on to something, and I knew at least the message would get across.
As far as the scripting for my part of the voicing went, that was actually one take, on the fly. I actually didn’t write anything down as a script. After what I’d cut up and edited and put in place of David already, it was just a case of hitting record. And I do this from time to time with a lot of work that I do. You’re really needing to communicate person to person, and when you script it out there’s always going to be something that pops up that stilts the message. So from time to time, I’ll just hit record. I’ll just say what I need to say and then go back and edit it if necessary. Fortunately, this one didn’t require any editing. Like I said before, it just really wrote itself.
JV: What resources do you use to ignite some of the ideas you use in your work? How do you get the creative juices flowing?
Andrew: Well, apart from being an avid Radio And Production Magazine reader [thanks!], the ideas just come from everywhere. I think you cannot close yourself off to any source, and I mean any source. So often we’ll troll around other radio stations online to see what’s going on, and I do that. And that’s a fantastic thing. My clock radio has Internet radio, so now I can listen to anything, and that’s a fantastic way just to hear different things. But I don’t think that always really works, and one should always endeavor to never take other people’s ideas as much as possible. That’s where you really have to start looking around.
I don’t think it’s just pop culture that provides a lot of inspiration, and I don’t think it’s just interpersonal relationships or the news headlines that provide all of the inspirations. There are so many strange and unthought-of sources. I’m not sure if it’s just simply my personality, but I think if you can’t find inspiration out of a packet of frozen peas in the supermarket or from a butterfly that’s sitting on a leaf in front of you, then you just need to look really, really long and hard. What I find in terms of inspiration is normally it comes to you if you just keep your eyes and your ears open.
JV: What are some of the more memorable moments you’ve had there in your 13 years in Singapore radio?
Andrew: There are a few. One big one for me was the launch of a station which took off in 2005 called Lush. It’s very rare that you get the chance to have a blank canvas to create a radio station, and it’s also very rare when you have a boss who trusts you and when you have a group of senior management and a board of directors who are too busy with other things to really bother with what you’re doing. So we were able to fly under the radar with that. Back at the time, it was the first FM station in the world, to our recollection, that was playing the Chill format — new jazz, a dash of electro, essentially chill out music — and the imaging for that was a lot of fun.
Back in the days at community radio, for some reason I just loved finding old nonsense that was lying around, because everything, of course, was donation, so most of the records and CDs that we had all came out of secondhand sales, people’s garages, and even some of the older defunct commercial stations would just unload stock on us. So we had all of these old carts and reel-to-reel tapes. I amassed this huge collection which I transferred digitally. I’ve got LPs of Mohammed Ali and Jimmy Carter preaching the evils of drugs. I’ve got some series from the 1950s, a woman called Katie telling you how to cook up a really nice rabbit and how the price of bread in the year 2000 will be $10 and all this sort of stuff, a lot of weird and quirky things which I was able to then throw into the mix along with some liners and promos that really hit our core audience.
The target was very high net worth, so with the format that we created, before we even launched in fact, based on the test transmissions alone, we had Mercedes-Benz, United Overseas Bank, a lot of the phone companies. Everyone had come on board. The test transmissions aspect was a big thing for me. It was eight full hours of production bordering on the surreal for the most part. I had the engineers down in the basement calling me up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning a couple of times saying, “I think there’s something wrong with your test transmission,” and I’m assuring them that, no, it was all perfectly intentional. I was just messing around with phasing and levels and things like that. That was quite a trip to have that going, and the buzz was enormous. It was amusing.
JV: Now when you say eight hours of production, do you mean eight hours of finished audio?
Andrew: Yes. Eight hours of finished audio. And the inspiration, obviously, is from those legendary Virgin test transmissions where I don’t think 15 seconds go by that something new isn’t happening. Of course the tone wasn’t heritage rock. The tone was kind of kitsch, chic, urban living so to speak. It was certainly a little more out there than what our audience was ready for, but they lapped it up, so that was fun.
JV: Any other highlights come to mind?
Andrew: Back in 2003 we held like a reality radio competition where we sent three teams down to Sidney to do a bunch of challenges, and we were sending everything back over the net, all of the audio, and that was all pre-produced as that went along, so it was a slightly delayed telecast. That was a lot of fun.
Then, once a year here we have a benchmark where we give away a car, but the idea is, whoever can keep their hand on the car the longest wins it. So after 72 hours without sleep, we get some pretty nutty contestants in that.
But perhaps one of the most memorable was the Tunnel Project. The Land Transport Authority had setup this huge tunnel basically from one side of the country to the other, and the grand plan was to have a radio station within the tunnel promoting safety messages, things like that. And they actually commissioned an album to be done. Again, it was Don and I, and we had another chap called Jason. So an album was produced, and a radio show was going to be put together.
Now here was the concept: I had accidentally stumbled across a nice little feature within RDS in radio transmission. I was driving through the central business district in Singapore one day when my radio suddenly switched over from the station I was listening to, to a competitor’s. I made a number of irate phone calls and discovered that they were actually doing a little bit of adjustments to the RDS data that was being streamed across. I found out you can actually use that to change stations on people’s radios. So the plan was, as people entered the tunnel, their radio, as long as it was on, would automatically be switched over to the station that was broadcasting in the tunnel.
So we did that. We had the entire radio station all set up. We had all of the transmitters in place, all of the money had been spent, and literally at the eleventh hour, the Media Development Authority came in and said, “You know what? We’re not so comfortable doing this after all.” So the upshot of it was that, first of all, I got paid, so that’s okay. But in the process, I’d actually developed my own little automation system which I could control remotely — very simple, bare bones, but it allowed me full functionality. I also could do music and commercial insertion via a web interface from anywhere in the world on a secure line. I had a guy who I worked with out of China writing all of the backend for me, and it’s that which I have decided to take into the mobile sphere, which is another story. So that was the positive side of it.
JV: Well, you didn’t get to travel to as many places in your career as you intended 13 years ago, but what advice would give some of our readers who might have the thought about leaving their home to work in radio in other countries?
Andrew: Radio aside, for anyone to pick up and leave home, there has to be the push and the pull factor to do it. I mean, if you really want to go overseas, I’d say be fully aware that whatever country you’re going to, particularly if it’s somewhere like Asia, that things will be different, that there will be a rather large period of adjustment. Even to this day, I’m still adjusting.
One of the main things I find, especially when you’re doing radio, is something as simple as sense of humor. It’s been 13 years, and I’m still trying to get a handle on sense of humor. What’s happened in the end is I’ve decided just to kind of let go and do my own thing and hopefully somebody catches on. Back to Don again, we did a radio show called “The Don and Drew Show,” a once a week program kind of like a pre-produced “Whose Line Is It?” We would accept musical challenges for people who wanted to write songs about certain topics or do mash-ups or remix certain songs. So once a week, we’d take everyone through the whole production process of that. We developed a bit of a following, and then podcasting has kind of taken off here. So we did a series of TV commercials, one where I am kind of singing a song in Chinese about my sister who had a cat. The cat goes missing, and we find it in somebody’s backside. For some reason, that just struck a nerve and went down well here. I still don’t quite understand it, but it’s been fun.
JV: What’s down the road for you, any plans?
Andrew: For the moment, things are fine as they are. Life’s been quite good, although one can never stay stagnant for too long. I’ve been traveling to India a lot recently, and you’d never think of radio as a booming industry anywhere in the world, but over there it is. I was over there twice last year doing consulting work for two of the networks. Actually, it was funny; you had a “Q it Up” question not too long ago about, “What have you learned recently?” Going over there, it was the first time for me running these large summits where you’ve got about 50 people in the room and it’s just you up there speaking for two or three days and taking them through radio. It’s only when you do that that you realize how much you know. So what I’ve learned recently is how much I’ve learned over the last 13 years or so being here in Singapore.
So India is going very well. I’m also over there to teach a lot of voice workshops later on this year. Aside from that, on a personal level, I’m looking at developing some software just to enable mobile broadcasting. I’m hooking up with a couple of the telcos here and some of the record companies. What I love doing is creating radio stations from scratch, just having that blank canvas after the good experience I’ve had in the past. So creating customized radio stations for clients is a goal. At the moment it’s record companies, but we’re talking with the other multi-nationals — your Coca-Cola, some of your alcohol companies — to setup radio for them not only online but also on mobile phones. I’m thinking five, ten years down the track, as data plans come down, as entire countries become WiMAX enabled. I’ve developed a small Java application for phones so you can tune into the radio stream wherever you are in partnership with the telcos. That’s where they come in handy in that they’ve managed to keep the costs down. So that’s the other thing that I’m working on at the moment.
JV: If you could start your career all over again, would you do anything differently?
Andrew: No, I can’t say that I would. It’s been quite a wild ride so far, the ability to be here to experience the different culture. There’s nothing that stops me now from being able to hear what’s going on in the rest of the world. There’s nothing that’s stopping me from traveling out there to meet the people and say hi. Singapore is also a hub for a lot of cable TV stations, and I’ve been very blessed to have the opportunity to be one of the voices for CNN International here. I do Discovery Channel, Animax, AXN, a whole bunch of them. I never thought in my wildest dreams that that would all happen. So no, I don’t think I would want to change anything.