Thebe Mabanga in your ear
The first time I encountered Highveld Stereo (94.7fm in Johannesburg) was in 1995 when, as a first-year student, I had just moved into a hotel that offered the adult contemporary station as its in-house broadcasting service.
Back then the station would have been a thriving operation servicing the geriatrics of Florida. Its playlist must have consisted of not more than 30 songs at a time, 20 of them on ultra-high rotation. So in the month that I was stuck with Highveld, I grew to sing along to Diana Ross and Julio Iglesias’s When You Tell Me That You Love Me and a handful of other tunes that became part of a routine?that included consuming a junk food diet, stumbling into female toilets looking for a lecture hall and … books, of course books.
It has been five years since R320-million changed hands when Primedia acquired Highveld from the SABC and a lot has changed at the station. The new management team, led by Stan Katz, refocused the station’s AC format and in the words of former broadcaster Neill Johnson “blew their 50-plus audience” to remain with a hip station for young adults and the middle aged.
These days a highly diversified playlist with a much lower proportion of high-rotation songs makes for easy listening.
The music is unpredictable to a point where in an hour you are very much likely to catch a classic that will leave you buzzing for half a day and be sustained by a selection that is a balance between the most recent crossover hits and chart toppers from the time when the upper end of its 25- to 49-year-old listenership bracket was at the lower end.
The best reflection of how Highveld’s tastes have shifted over the years is its recent Top 100. Voted for by the listeners, it features five entries by sexy country star Shania Twain. This is probably largely due to smitten male fans.
Highveld’s approach is to create a solid sound and fit the personalities around the sound. One of their most interesting recruiting gambles in recent years was the decision to hire Bob Mabena as a mid-morning presenter. This was viewed in a similar light to 5fm’s decision to bring in Tich Mataz and with him, black listeners.? Whether the gamble has paid off remains debatable, but the station has an interesting cosmopolitan mix among its listeners. Mabena has since moved back to terra firma by joining Kaya Fm, but in presenters like Tov Kane, Tony Blewitt and Alyce Chavunduka the station has talented drawcards.
One presenter that the station will pay a lot to hold on to is that larger than life celebrity by default, Gauteng’s beer-guzzling master of gutter humour and word-watcher on SABC2’s A Word or Two.
When SA City Life magazine tried to put him on their cover, they had to commission a special, folding cover. OK, so they didn’t really, but like him or hate him, you have probably heard of Jeremy Mansfield. He is the man who, when talk show host Felicia Mabuza-Suttle moved her show to e.tv and renamed it Felicia on e, went one better and called it “Felicia on ecstasy”.
An odd feature about the Highveld image is its billboard gracing the northern Jo’burg skyline. It features two shimmering red pick-up trucks with the catchy pay-off line “Fine young Cannibals”. The strange thing about it is that it epitomises humour that is confined to Mansfield’s breakfast show.?
ENDS