In tune with the listeners

THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:Martin Block, Chief Executive, 4fm speaks to CIARÁN HANCOCK.

HE’S NO Arnold Schwarzenegger but when Dublin-based multi-city radio station 4fm went live at 6am today, its chief executive Martin Block probably felt like kicking open a door and exclaiming: “I’m back!”

Almost six years after taking his leave of Dublin station Lite FM (now Q102), Block is back in radio, and this time he’s gone national.

“I really wanted to get back into the business,” he explains. “It’s almost like a drug, I can’t seem to get away from it.”

Block, a 29-year veteran of the radio industry here, made about €1.5 million pre-tax from the sale of Lite to UTV at the end of 2000. Most people would have put their feet up, lit a cigar and enjoyed their free time with a vintage bottle of wine or some caviar.

Instead, the silver-tongued Englishman has decided to visit the roulette wheel and put it all on red.

“It’s all going back into this project, what’s left. The truth is that I didn’t want to sell Lite. I would’ve liked to continue running it as it was,” Block explains. “But the shareholders got a fabulous offer [€15 million] from UTV and they couldn’t not accept the offer. They were given five to six times their money back. I’m passionate about radio but I’m a businessman as well.”

Block remained with Lite after the sale but left in 2003. “My heart just wasn’t in it ... it just wasn’t for me.”

4fm is very much Block’s baby. He began working on the project about four years ago having spotted a gap in the market, one that he hopes 4fm will plug with style.

The station is promising an easy-listening format for over-45s in Dublin and its commuter belt, Cork, Clare, Galway and Limerick.

“It will be a hybrid format of music and entertainment with intelligent speech,” he says, adding that he wants it to be a bridge between RTÉ Radio One and 2FM.

Block has turned to experience to fill his schedule. Former 2FM DJ Gareth O’Callaghan takes the breakfast shift, followed at 9am by Jimmy Greeley. Damien Kiberd takes over the mike at midday to provide a bit of hard-nosed journalism while RTÉ presenter and Sunday Business Post columnist Tom McGurk has the wheel for the key drivetime slot. Marian Farrell, also formerly at RTÉ, will take the graveyard shift.

The weekend schedule is liberally sprinkled with seasoned voices, including former RTÉ broadcasters David Harvey and Derek Davis.

“I don’t think we could have done any better. We’ve got a good mix of music and credible broadcasters across the week. It’s certainly got enough to get the audience.”

Block hopes to attract about 150,000 listeners on average per day. He wants a 5 per cent market share by the end of year one.

“People listen to more than one radio station every day and we’re hoping that they’ll spend a bit of time with us.”

It will operate a playlist of up to 5,000 tunes, which is much larger than most stations offer. “We’ll have everything from the Rolling Stones to Take That and from Michael Buble to Coldplay,” he says, before correcting himself on Take That. “No, change that. I didn’t mean them, um, make it Tom Jones.

“It really is very wide. We will not be repeating the music. We found that repetition in music is a killer [not literally] with older listeners.”

Block’s own music tastes range from opera to pop and rock music. “I have very wide tastes ... you really wouldn’t be able to satisfy me as a listener.”

The 58-year-old admits to still listening to music on CDs. He has two iPods that he’s never used.

He admits to having taken some influences from BBC’s Radio Four and Radio Five Live. “But that’s where the analogy ends ... everything we have done has been in an Irish context.”

Given the glum economic backdrop, not to mention an already cluttered FM dial, 4fm’s timing could have been better but Block insists that its backers – which include The Irish Times, Cork-based media group Thomas Crosbie Holdings and the Dermot Hanrahan-led Vienna Investments – are fully committed.

“This is a long-term play,” he says. “It’s about building an audience. Revenues follow ratings ... that’s the name of the game.”

Block concedes that advertising revenue “is going to be slow for the first while”. There’s been a “lot of interest” in programme sponsorship but “no takers” as yet. 4fm won’t have any listenership figures to trade off until August.

He’s confident the station will meet its financial targets, which he says were modest to begin with. 4fm is targeting revenues of €2.2 million (on a par with Lite FM’s first 12 months on air) in year one, rising to €4.9 million in its third year.

“We forecast it would be the back end of year four before breakeven,” he explains. “It’s fair to say that could be at least another six months away given the [economic] environment.”

Block is a glass-half-full type and feels there’s a silver lining to our current economic woes. “People are fed up with all the doom and gloom,” he says. “There’s a great opportunity for what we’re trying to do, which is entertain them.”

Born in Ipswich in the east of England, he moved here with his family in the 1960s. His mother was a Dub, his dad a London Cockney who Block says could sell anything that moved.

Not quite a Del Boy type but you get the idea. He had a market stall. “He was an absolute born salesman,” says Block. “But he never got advertising. He used to say you’re not selling anything real.”

Block senior set up a jewellery business on moving here. After taking modern languages in college, junior joined the family business as a designer.

When his father retired in 1980, Block found himself at a “loose end”. He tried his hand as a DJ in nightclubs and tried to break into the then burgeoning world of pirate radio – commercial radio was still almost a decade away in Ireland.

“Guys told me I was too British,” he recalls, in a soft but distinct English accent, including Chris Carey, the then high priest of pirate radio here.

Robbie Robinson, a founder of Sunshine Radio, had other ideas. “He said ‘will you come round to my office and read out the front page of The Irish Times’,” Block recalls. It was 1980 and Block was given the midnight to 6am shift. “I spent six months reading news on air to two cattle and a sheep,” he says with a chuckle.

He subsequently went to Radio Nova, which was founded by Carey and was probably the most high-profile of all the pirate radio stations of that age.

“I learnt the business from the bottom up there,” he says. “I was reading news; presenting; I sold ads; I wrote my own scripts; I did voiceovers. I learnt the whole lot from there ... it was phenomenal training.

“A lot of the guys today wouldn’t get to do all that because radio stations are now much more structured.”

He left Nova in the middle of the 1980s to get involved in another pirate, Q102. That closed in December, 1988 as the industry geared up for commercial radio.

Block was part of the Capital Radio (now FM104) group that won the licence to operate a local radio station in Dublin. “We had 40 per cent of under-35s in Dublin in the first six months,” he says with pride.

Initially a big success, its lunch was eaten by a certain Denis O’Brien and 98FM and the station went through two makeovers before finding its feet again.

Block left in 1993 and set up his own marketing company, which numbered Dunnes Stores among its clients. He also worked as a radio consultant and indulged his love of cricket before being drawn back to radio. “I really wanted to get back into the business.”

In 1999, Block put together a consortium for Lite FM and won the over-35s licence for Dublin. A decade on and he’s once again on the comeback trail, this time with 4fm.

“We haven’t reinvented the wheel. What we’ve tried to do is go back to traditional radio values and being them into the 21st century.

“I’ve been passionate about this from the start ... you have to be incredibly positive. I don’t underestimate the challenge in any way but we’re up for it.”

ON THE RECORD

Name: Martin Block

Position: Chief executive, 4fm

Age: 58

Lives: Milltown, Dublin

Family: Three sons aged between 28 and 33.

Hobbies: Cricket and reading

Something you might expect: He's chairman of Leinster Cricket Club in Rathmines and still togs out. "I played nine games last season." He's also an ICC- accredited umpire eligible to take charge of matches involving European teams below test level except Ireland and Scotland, who have full one-day status.

Something that might surprise: "I do a reasonable Sinatra impression in karaoke."