WXB 102 started it all!!!

History

Nicknamed as "The Station That Dares To Be Different", DWXB-FM was the first all-New Wave music radio station in the Philippines. Broadcasting at 102.7 MHz (initially at 102.5 MHz) on the FM dial and from inside a house in Pasay City, Philippines, DWXB-FM, also referred to as WXB-102, acquired legendary status since it vanished from the airwaves on June 9, 1987. DWXB-FM captured the imaginations of Manila youth in the '80s, bringing New Wave music to the Philippine mainstream and inspiring regional rock artists such as The Dawn, The Identity Crisis, and Violent Playground, all of whom were championed by the station at a time when guitar-based OPM was ignored by the other local outlets with the exception of a weekly show on DZRJ-AM in the early '80s.

Prior to switching to New Wave, the DWXB-FM management flirted with disco in the late '70s and then adopted the American Top Forty format in 1982, dubbing itself Cute 102. By 1983, WXB 102 started including New Wave bands from the UK such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Devo, and Culture Club into the Top Forty mix, due to the influence of DJ Mark Fournier, known over his broadcasts as Magic. In 1984, New Wave began erupting in Manila's dance clubs thanks to the city's mobile discos, who often spun records imported from Europe, and the proliferation of New Wave music videos on Philippine TV. WXB 102 gradually evolved into a New Wave/disco radio station with the late Fournier; The Unbeatable, the alias of Dave Ryan; and Rico Severino, known as J.J.Michaels. WXB 102 briefly competed with another New Wave/disco radio station in Manila, DWBM-FM 105.1 MHz (dubbed as Power 105 FM), in 1985. But this was just the beginning.

Then the peak came. It was only in 1986 when the station went full-blown "new music" in format with the now-immortal line-up of The Morning Man or Inggo & his Request Round-Up at sign-on; Cool Carla; Julius Caesar; George Frederick, who was also the Program Director; Fat Albert & his program Rock Wave; and The Ghost. A pair of blocktime shows that caught the youth market by the neck back then were Radio Manila and Capital Radio, specializing in local underground punk like The Dead Ends and Urban Bandits and U.K. and U.S. imports that characterized a harsher or more avant-garde side to alternative music such as records from Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, and Half-Man Half-Biscuit. At this point, "The Station That Dares to be Different" became officially known as WXB 102.

Despite its relatively low power of less than 1 kilowatt, WXB 102 developed a huge following in places where its signal could be picked up, creating mainstream hits such as "State of the Nation" by Industry, "The Ghost in You" by The Psychedelic Furs, "Feels Like (Heaven)" by Fiction Factory, and "People Are People" by Depeche Mode.

In 1986, WXB 102 was the Philippines' most influential music station, its popularity putting pressure on regional labels to belatedly release the entire discographies of The Cure, Depeche Mode, Aztec Camera, and U2 and hard-to-find LPs from The Lotus Eaters, China Crisis, Orange Juice, and The Church. On the surface, their New Wave format could be compared to overseas stations like KROQ-FM and CFNY-FM, but WXB 102 probed the genre for deeper cuts and more obscure acts, giving massive exposure to little-known or forgotten New Wave artists from the UK such as The Pale Fountains, Care, Friends Again, Fiat Lux, Martin Ansell, and Private Lives. Unable to compete, Power 105 FM switched to mainstream pop.

WXB 102 in 1986

The competition between WXB 102 and Power 105 FM had perished by 1986, the latter shelving much of its New Wave music for pop. WXB 102, with the New Wave market to itself and surprising Top Ten ratings, concentrated on pleasing its followers and instead of trying to the masses. The station developed a certain sound - a combination of jangly, romantic pop (Jimmy Jimmy, The Lotus Eaters, Aztec Camera); ethereal, shimmering rock (Care, Echo & the Bunnymen, U2); Gothic dance (The Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Xmal Deutschland); synthesized European disco (Yaz, Depeche Mode, New Order); punk (The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys); and an array of spellbinding and undiscovered local talent (The Dawn, Introvoys, Deans December).

WXB 102 in 1987

While the New Wave era was already pronounced dead in America in 1987, the genre had not even yet peaked in Manila. Albums once unavailable were continuing to be licensed to Philippine labels, thanks to the tastemaking punch of WXB 102. However, 1987 would be its final year. The new Cory Aquino-led government began sequestering properties owned by her predecessor Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies, including the home studio that WXB FM beamed from. At this point, the DJs - including The Morning Man, George Frederick, Fat Albert, Julius Caesar, The Ghost, and Cool Carla - were working for free, spinning New Wave records from 6 a.m. to midnight. On June 9, 1987, despite attempts to keep it on the air, WXB 102, with DJ Allan K. on board, signed off after The Alarm's "Walk Forever By My Side."

Post-XB: New Dreams for Old

In November 1987, seeing that the absence of WXB 102 left a void on Manila radio that could be capitalized upon, NU 107 debuted at 107.5 MHz on the dial with a series of test broadcasts that resurrected 102 staples such as Wire Train, INXS, Echo & the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, The Pale Fountains, The Housemartins, The Waterboys and Icehouse in what was termed a "New Rock" format. It essentially picked up where WXB 102 left off, debuting late '80s New Wave acts like Black, Crowded House, and Johnny Hates Jazz. However, NU 107 wasn't considered as adventuresome as its predecessor. In late 1987, Power 105 FM had returned to its short-lived New Wave format from the mid-'80s. Power 105 FM, plunged further into the New Wave waters that WXB 102 once swam in. Just as WXB 102 did, it bravely paraded the most rare New Wave records they could find, carving a fanbase for virtually unknown artists such as Eyeless in Gaza, Fruits of Passion, The Explorers, The Room, and White China.

In 1988, Mickey the Clown from WXB 102 reappeared on DWBC-AM as Mick Flame and hosted a 102-styled show often featuring former WXB 102 DJs as guests.

Except for NU 107, which continued to tweak its format and became an alternative rock powerhouse in the '90s, none of it lasted as Manila entered another decade.

In the late 1990s, tribute sites to WXB 102 started appearing on the Internet from fans. Moreover, various radio shows began debuting in the Philippines that paid homage to the quirky and colorful music of the former FM station and its successors brought to an entire generation of teenagers in the country.

Rebirth

On 10 September 2005, lifelong fan and New Wave historian Michael Sutton, CEO of the independent label Sutton Records, revived WXB 102 in cyberspace, fulfilling a decades-old fantasy that had its online roots in the no-budget taped broadcasts he and Magic recorded for the original WXB 102 tribute site (maintained with Luis Reyes, Jr.) in 1998. With Seattle-based DJ Brent Sanders as engineer and Los Angeles-based DJ Klyde using his WXB102 Forever website for as the station's HQ, Sutton brought WXB 102 back on the air. Sutton proceeded to recruit some of WXB's original staff, including Mick Flame, The Morning Man, and Cool Carla, to record their first WXB shows in 18 years.

Listeners can now hear WXB 102 through webstreaming powered by Live365. In 2006, WXB 102 started playing the most recent songs from New Wave legends, current indie and alternative acts such as Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and The Killers, as well as reggae and ska.

On October 23, 2006, WXB 102 became the first online music station to have a countdown hosted by DJs in various countries.

On January 15, 2007, WXB 102 began broadcasting live for the first time since going off the air nearly 20 years before. WXB 102's legendary Program Director/DJ George Frederick returned to the airwaves along with The Ghost, Mick Flame, and Naughty Natty, one of the station's original volunteers. Two days later, Julius Caesar came back to the station, also broadcasting live from Manila. WXB 102 is the only Internet-based New Wave radio station with live DJs broadcasting daily.

On July 26, 2007, WXB 102 became the No. 1 highest-rated Internet radio station in the dancepunk/80s/new wave category on Live365.

102 Music: The Next Generation

Just as WXB 102 challenged its competitors in the '80s by playing cutting-edge artists (Echo & the Bunnymen,R.E.M.,New Order, etc) that nobody had heard of yet, the station continues to champion adventurous independent acts and new music:

• Hollow Horse
• Agnes Ingarra
• The Pin-Up Girls
• Girl In Park
• Lily Allen
• Amy Winehouse
• The Editors

Current WXB 102 Staff

• George Frederick, DJ/Programme Director
• Cool Carla, DJ
• The Ghost, DJ
• The Morning Man, DJ
• Allan K., DJ
• Julius Caesar, DJ
• Mick Flame, DJ
• Tiny Tina, VJ
• Naughty Natty, DJ
• Janice Roasa, VJ
• Drumboy Joe, VJ
• Rommie Ramos, VJ
• Polo Kid Paolo, VJ
• DJ Hilary, DJ
• The Sandman, DJ
• DJ Klyde, DJ
• Michael Sutton, General Manager/Assistant Programme Director/Current Owner

XB Trivia

• Steve Kilbey of the Church, Will Sergeant of Echo & the Bunnymen, APB, and Tom Haran of the Expression have all recorded station IDs for WXB 102.
• WXB 102 was the first FM station simulcast on the AM band in the Philippines.
• The first 102 party was called "SHADOW CABINET of WXB 102."
• When George Frederick took over PD duties in 1986, he threw away the pop records from Madonna, Rod Stewart, and Michael Jackson, among others, that the station was still playing.
• "Enveloped Ideas" by the Filipino New Wave group The Dawn was voted as the greatest 102 song of all time by listeners in 2006.
• DJ Ben Hitler died from a heart attack in 2005.
• Although known as a New Wave radio station, WXB 102 wasn't afraid to bend the format by surprising fans with the non-punk likes of Richie Valens ("La Bamba"), Nancy Sinatra ("These Boots Are Made for Walkin'"), and Frank Sinatra ("My Way"). Cheech & Chong were also staples. It's a spirit that continues with the station's online revival.
• The first record played by George Frederick on WXB 102 was "Seven Seas" by Echo & the Bunnymen.
• The female voice in The Morning Man's Request Round-Up stinger was none other than his wife of 31 years, Sumitra.
• When Allan K. returned to WXB 102 in 2006 after 19 years, he opened his first show with a sample from his final goodbye on June 9, 1987.
• Mick Flame is short for Michael Flameno.
• The Morning Man brought the reggae to WXB 102, including Bob Marley, Aswad, Black Uhuru, and Laid Back.
• Contrary to myth, WXB 102 DJs worked with a playlist in 1986-1987. They were produced by programme director George Frederick.
• The OPM pop song "Pain" by Martin Nievera was once played on WXB 102 to fulfill KBP regulations for playing local Philippine music. When George Frederick celebrated his birthday on the air in 2006, owner Michael Sutton dedicated the song to him.
• Mark Fournier died in 2000. The resurrection of WXB 102 is dedicated to his memory.

Source: Wikipedia

History of New Wave in the Philippines

In the early up to mid-1980s, Pinoy Rock became the music of Filipino protesters. Gary Granada and the band Buklod had socially relevant lyrics for their songs. Aguilar's Bayan Ko (My Country) became an anthem during the 1986 EDSA Revolution. A subculture rejected this kind of socially aware lyrics. A Filipino brand of Punk Rock also began to flourish during this period, as led by bands like Betrayed, G.I. & the Idiots, The Jerks, Private Stock, Urban Bandits, WUDS, I.O.V., and The GOONS. Simultaneously, other brands of Pinoy Rock were starting to develop; for instance, Joey Ayala at ang Bagong Lumad (fronted by Joey Ayala) adopted an Ethnic sound, even using indigenous instruments like kubing and kudyapi while Cocojam combined it with Reggae.

the late Teddy Diaz, one of The Dawn's founding members.

The most popular Pinoy Rock band in the Philippines in the '80s was arguably The Dawn, whose early songs were largely influenced by New Wave music, the dominant Alternative music genre in the Philippines during that period. The Dawn came to prominence in 1986, when its independently released single "Enveloped Ideas" became an instant favorite among listeners of DWXB-FM 102.7, a now-defunct FM radio station popular in the mid-'80s that heavily played New Wave music and other similar genres.

Many music journalists and enthusiasts, as well as musicians themselves, attribute the flourishing in the mid-'80s of New Wave- and Punk Rock-influenced bands to DWXB-FM, which began playing independently released singles of unsigned local bands. This helped many of the struggling bands in this era to achieve cult status. These bands included Deans December, Ethnic Faces, Identity Crisis, and Violent Playground, all of which were able to record and release their respective albums in the years that followed.

Other Pinoy Rock groups took their cue from these pioneers and started recording their own songs; and this proved beneficial to the Pinoy Rock scene, which brought back creativity and originality to the awareness of fledgling musicians. Among the lot, The Dawn, The Youth, Afterimage, and Introvoys proved to be the enduring and more successful. Each was able to sustain a relatively long career.

DWXB-FM went off the air on June 9, 1987. The new Cory Aquino-led government began sequestering properties owned by her predecessor Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies, including the home that DWXB-FM beamed from. DWXB-FM was revived as an online radio station on September 10, 2005, by Sutton Records, with the original DJs broadcasting from Manila.

Source: Wikipedia

What is New Wave?

The term New Wave itself is a source of much confusion. Originally, Seymour Stein, the head of Sire Records, needed a term by which he could market his newly signed bands, who had frequently played the club CBGB. Because radio consultants in the U.S. had advised their clients that punk rock was a fad (and because many stations that had embraced disco had been hurt by the backlash), Stein settled on the term "new wave". He felt that the music was the musical equivalent of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s. Like those film makers, his new artists (most notably Talking Heads) were anti-corporate, experimental, and a generation that had grown up as critical consumers of the art they now practiced. Thus, the term "new wave" was initially interchangeable with "punk".

Soon, however, listeners themselves began to differentiate these musicians from "true punks". The music journalist Charles Shaar Murray, in writing about the Boomtown Rats, has indicated that the term New Wave became an industry catch-all for musicians affiliated with the punk movement, but in some way different from it:

The Rats didn’t conform precisely to the notional orthodoxies of punk, but then neither did many other bands at the forefront of what those who were scared of the uncompromising term 'punk' later bowdlerised to New Wave. You weren’t allowed to have long hair! The Ramones did. Guitar solos verboten! The defence calls Television. Facial hair a capital offence! Two members of The Stranglers are in mortal danger. Age police on the prowl for wrinklies on the run! Cells await Ian Dury, Knox from The Vibrators and most of The Stranglers. Pedal steel guitars and country music too inextricably linked with Laurel Canyon coke-hippies and snooze-inducing Mellow Mafia singer/songwriterismo. Elvis Costello, you’re busted.

Music that followed the anarchic garage band ethos of the Sex Pistols was distinguished as "punk", while music that tended toward experimentation, lyrical complexity, or more polished production, was categorised as "New Wave". This came to include musicians who had come to prominence in the British pub rock scene of the mid-1970s, such as Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Eddie and the Hot Rods and Dr Feelgood; acts associated with the New York club CBGBs, such as Television, Patti Smith, and Blondie; and singer-songwriters who were noted for their barbed lyrical wit, such as Elvis Costello, Tom Robinson and Joe Jackson. Furthermore, many artists who would have originally been classified as punk were also termed New Wave. A 1977 Phonogram compilation album of the same name features US artists including the Dead Boys, the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Runaways.

Later still, "New Wave" came to imply a less noisy, more pop sound, and to include acts manufactured by record labels, while the term post-punk was coined to describe the darker, less pop-influenced groups, as Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Cure and The Psychedelic Furs. Although distinct, punk, New Wave, and post-punk all shared common ground: an energetic reaction to the supposedly overproduced, uninspired popular music of the 1970s.

Tom Petty (probably in jest) has taken credit for "inventing" New Wave. He has been quoted as saying that journalists struggled to define his band, The Heartbreakers, recognising they were not punk rock, but still wanting to identify them with Elvis Costello and the Sex Pistols. He also suggests — again, probably half-jokingly — that the song "When the Time Comes" from the You’re Gonna Get It! album (1978) "might have started New Wave. Maybe that was the one."

Definition of New Wave in the United States

Within the United States, the term has since become applied indiscriminately to any band, with attitude, that did not embrace the simplistic, loud-fast playing style, whether that meant that their sound was Disco-inspired, Funk, Reggae, Ska, or Experimental. Thus, The Police, the B-52s, Soft Cell, and Human League are equally considered New Wave, even though certain keyboard-led bands of the early 1980s, such as Devo, Duran Duran and Depeche Mode are considered the most iconic bands of the genre. For many of these bands further less ambiguous labels exist, such as New Romantic, synthpop or power pop.

When MTV started broadcasting in 1981, the music encompassed by this broader definition of New Wave got a boost as many music videos were of this genre. Many of the artists had been innovators in the use of videos to promote themselves in the years prior to MTV by showing them primarily in clubs. The first video aired on MTV was the song Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles, a New Wave classic.

Other bands or performers who were part of the early 1980s New Wave music scene were "pop stars" in England, but failed to find an audience on American FM radio stations. MTV helped introduce New Wave music to America since the bands had already made a video for their British and other European fans. As a result the early MTV years became known as the "Second British invasion".

New Wave revivals

In the early 1990s, the British music weekly NME grouped together a number of guitar-based bands under the unwieldy banner New Wave of New Wave. These groups, including S*M*A*S*H, These Animal Men, Elastica and Echobelly, drew on the aesthetics of 1970s New Wave, including spiky guitars, tight-fitting suits and skinny ties.

In the late 1990s, the Omaha, Nebraska-based band The Faint drew heavily upon New Wave to create its debut album Media, released on Saddle Creek Records in 1998. In the first decade of the 21st century, the electroclash scene in Brooklyn and London (at clubs like Nag Nag Nag and Beyond Club) revived the synth-pop aesthetic for kids born in the 1980s. Many other indie rock bands re-popularized New Wave sounds as part of the post-punk revival movement with varying success, most popularly the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, The Bravery and New Orleans' Mute Math. Other bands who have brought back New Wave music in the new decade have been The Epoxies , The Start , The Sounds as well as the re-union of Squeeze.

New Wave fashion

New Wave fashions were a conscious reaction to the hippie styles of the 1960s, which had spilled over into the mainstream by the late 1970s. Thus, flares and long hair for men were replaced by more body-conscious clothing and shorter, often spiky, hairstyles. The tight-fitting suits and thin ties worn by Blondie on the cover of their album Parallel Lines , long sleeve black and white striped shirts, and tight fitting "pipe" jeans, epitomise the New Wave look, which harks back to the rock and roll styles of the pre-hippie era.

Another aspect was a desire to embrace contemporary synthetic materials as a protest and celebration of plastic. This involved the use of spandex, bright colors (such as fluorescents), and mass-produced, tawdry jewelry and ornaments, typified by the dayglo aesthetic of the band X-Ray Spex. As a fashion movement, then, New Wave was both a post-modern belief in creative pastiche and a continuation of Pop Art’s satire and fascination with manufacturing. An important offshoot of new wave fashion was the New Romantic movement, which emphasized androgyny and extensive use of synthetic-looking cosmetics for both genders.

New Wave revivalists are currently very popular in New York, Boston and LA (centering around nightclubs like New York’s Misshapes, Boston's Manray nightclub, and featured in art and fashion magazines like Visionaire). The style has also recently been a major influence in high fashion, for example in the most recent collections of designers like Scott Gerst and Hedi Slimane (ex creative director of Dior Homme.)

Source: Wikipedia