Strombo Reveals Details Of New CBC Radio Show

11/06/09 6:27pm

by Liisa Ladouceur (CHARTattack)

Do you like the music of Timber Timbre, Lamb Of God, Tom Waits and Ray Charles? Then George Stroumboulopoulos has a radio show for you.

The host of CBC TV's The Hour relaunches his Strombo Show this Sunday (Nov. 8) on CBC Radio 2. It's an ambitious project: four-hours of commercial-free music, interviews and live performance broadcast from his home's basement studio, with a focus on genre-bending song selection and listener requests.

The obvious question for a guy who heads a nightly national news show is: you have time for this?

"All I do all night during the week is lay in bed and listen to songs. I'm constantly digging around for new music," he says. "It's as important to me as anything in life. I started blogging and twittering about what I was listening to and I started a radio show on the Corus network, but as found new things and my own musical consciousness expanded I found I couldn't go as far as I wanted to."

The Strombo Show previously ran on selected (mostly rock) stations of the Corus network until Stroumboulopoulos pulled the plug this past summer. It was the head of the CBC network that approached the award-winning TV host and former MuchMusic VJ, who got his start in radio in Kelowna, B.C., to bring the idea to the national public broadcaster, convincing him there would be no holds barred.

"Corus never held me back, and my contact Dunner at CFOX was very supportive of what I was doing," says Stroumboulopoulos. "But knowing radio, I realized the majority of the listeners did not appreciate hearing hip-hop on a rock station. It was not the best place for me to be. I think you can tell a lot about a radio by its slogan, and CBC radio's slogan is 'everywhere music takes you.' That's where I belong."

Fans who know Stroumboulopoulos for his punk rock and metal tendencies and (mostly) all-black wardrobe maybe surprised he'll programme more "beautiful" music than people may expect. He also calls the show a "meeting of musical minds" and says it's as much about listeners across the country teaching him about their favourite songs as it is selecting music to present to them.

Regular features planned for The Strombo Show include a nightly Tom Waits track, entire album sides and music programmed especially for the approach of midnight — not black metal, but rather tunes to help put you to sleep. (Although, admittedly, for some of us here at CHARTattack that can be the same thing.)

"And we'll play sad songs," he says. "In fact, we'll have people come on to talk about their favourite sad songs and we'll have 'sad offs'."

How to make this divergent playlist work for CBC listeners from Nunavut to Newfoundland? By throwing away all the rules of radio programming, he says.

"I don't listen to music in radio genres and I think a lot of people are like me. I used to programme by sound, but I've changed my approach. I will programme not by sound but by feeling. The Ramones and Cat Power might not go together if you programme by genre, but there could be a connection if you make it flow by emotion. And I believe if you take people by the hand and walk 'em through the evening, they'll come with you."

Stroumboulopoulos says he's still deciding on the first track of the night, but expect it to be by either Joe Strummer or Johnny Cash. Tune in to find out when the The Strombo Show premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. on CBC Radio 2. Or try to sway him by calling the request line at 416-205-6226.