If you’ve ever been mindlessly scrolling through the Foxtel TV guide, your ears would have been graced by the sweet tunes of the Foxtel DJ.
You might have Shazammed the hell out of said TV guide and felt a dopey grin cross your face upon being reminded of such gems as Chicane’s ‘Don’t Give Up’ or Angie Stone’s ‘Wish I Didn’t Miss You’, or hearing a really obscure track that you only came across for the first time at a club last Sunday afternoon after a three-day bender and never thought you’d hear again.
But just who is the Foxtel DJ, and how is he or she spinning such certifiably sick tunes? Is it a random 21-year-old bedroom producer? A robot programmed for perfect track selection? Some kind of DJ-slave trapped in a cage deep down in the bowels of the Foxtel head office and forced to mix 24/7?
The truth, dear mates, is wilder than any of us could have imagined.
It turns out that Foxtel outsources the task to a third party company named Stingray. And the person who curates the tracks for all 29 of Foxtel’s ‘Air’ music channels – including the TV guide – is 69-year-old music guru Gill Robert.
The man himself.
Which raises more questions than answers, quite frankly.
“I’ve been in the music business for over 50 years,” says Robert. “I was a musician in the 60s. I worked at Festival Records and Sony. I ran the country music channel at Foxtel for 10 years.“
“In 2011 I decided to take a break and my old boss, who runs Sony Music, called me. He said, ‘We’ve got nobody to run [Foxtel Air], would you come back and do it?’ I said, ‘Hold on a minute, I’m in the middle of Europe feeding ducks!’ He said, ‘Mate, we’ve got 29 music channels that need programming’. I can’t play golf so I decided it would be a good thing to do.”
Robert started out as a pop star in the 60s and was known for such hits as a 1970 cover of ‘Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha’, which peaked at #19 and stayed in the charts for 13 weeks. He still has an office at Sony, where he works three days a week weaving his insane Foxtel DJ magic.
“People keep marching through my door asking questions about music all the time, which is fantastic,” he says. “The brand is very young so people walk in to get the history of the music. They call me ‘the oracle’ around the building here, which is hilarious.”
“I love doing it because if somebody wants to find out about the 50s or 60s or whatever, I think that’s very important if you want to be a full time employee in the music business.”
Is he aware that the Foxtel TV Guide soundtrack has a pretty keen appreciation society?
“Actually I wasn’t,” he says. “It is one of our better performing channels. A lot of musicians I talk to ask me about that channel—they tell me they love all the different sounds and they go chasing after the music.”
Which raises a good point: where does Robert find his delicious ear candy?
I look at what people are playing around the world. I have access to a lot of music charts. When you’re doing jazz, chillout, relax, you really have to look and see who’s got what released. I’m always trying to find interesting music, interesting sounds. I spend a lot of time in record shops—although you don’t see as many of those these days. You need to have a pretty good spread of music, I guess.
And because he’s a legend, one of Robert’s favourite parts of the job is that he gets to share music from local talent.
“There are a lot of little local DJs in Australia that I’m in touch with,” he says. “When you put it out there, there are a lot of guys doing music that’s quite surprising. It’s just a matter of finding them.”“There are incredible DJs around. They ring me also, and say, ‘I’ve got some music, do you mind if I send you some stuff?’ The harder channels are the ones you have to look for—you have to go looking for it. You have to go to labels and do deals with them.”“We’re not a commercial broadcast station so we need to get different licences.”
According to Robert, nothing is strictly off limits, but his job involves the delicate art of experimenting without completely freaking people out. “It’s the first thing people hear when they turn on Foxtel. You can push the envelope but you can’t make people go, ‘Woah!’”
“Some of the dance music just fits,” he says. “Chris Coco, Christophe Goze, Animassacre… if I can fit things in between those, it should work okay.”“You know if you find the right mix, you think, ‘Let’s give it a go’. The worst that can happen is someone writes a note complaining.”
Unfortunately, you can’t head down to some underground nightspot to witness the master in action, because Robert doesn’t play gigs. In fact, he’s never actually worked as a DJ.
“That’s one thing I’ve never done,” he says. “To be honest I’ve never had the time.”
Other fun facts uncovered in the course of researching this story: you can listen to the Foxtel TV guide music UNINTERRUPTED by going to the Foxtel Air channel ‘Chillout Lounge’ (no more sudden flickbacks to that ‘Will & Grace’ episode you lost interest in halfway through).
Also, you can change the EPG aka TV Guide soundtrack to any of the other Air channels if you want (but why in God’s name would you?)
To Gill Robert: from the bottom of our hearts, thank you, and please never stop playing the bangers.
Photo: Paris Hilton.
