It all started with a smoke break: two Cape Town guys standing on a balcony. One guy – a radio news anchor – mentions his idea to start a podcast; the other – a sound engineer – says he’ll pitch in. And before they knew it Radio Spookasem was off the ground.
By Cassy van Eeden
The local rock and indie music scene is suffering, and as
radio professionals, Graeme Raubenheimer and Francois Nel know this all too
well. “You see a lot of the big guys fall,” says Nel, “so we need more people
just pushing so that there is something to support.”
“[Radio Spookasem
is] pretty much a platform for us to showcase less-established bands,” says Nel
in the second edition of season 2. “[It]
is about the little guy and the bands that are trying to find their way in the
local music scene,” Raubenheimer adds.
What makes Radio
Spookasem work, is that it’s all balanced. The content itself is the
perfect blend of local and international, music and talk, opinion and fact.
Similarly, the guys behind it are ever humble but with just enough cockiness
mixed in to make you believe in their product.
Sprinkled in between the ‘little guys’ are features with
“big names”, as they like to call them, such as Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Rob van
Vuuren, Johnny Clegg and (by far their favourite) Riaan Cruywagen.
This recipe seems to be working.
Right from their very first episode, in September last year,
the guys drummed up a solid following. And their numbers continue to grow. Strikingly,
regardless of how self-confident the two may seem, they have both been
surprised at the amount of support they are getting. “So far the response is
really cool and it’s keeping us driving,” says Nel.
Back to that smoke break. Raubenheimer and Nel are chatting
outside the local Cape Town radio station that they work for. Raubenheimer
mentions desperately wanting to start a podcast. “Literally, I was going to do
it in my kitchen,” he says. Nel jumps in: “And I was like, ‘but dude like I’m a
sound engineer, I can hook us up some mics … and it’ll sound cool, don’t worry
I’ll do everything from the audio point of view.” And then it became a
family affair.
Everything from the name to the people that make it happen, Radio Spookasem is more than just a
partnership between two guys. A while back, Raubenheimer and his brother Rob
joked that they wanted to do an Afrikaans over-dub of Ghost Adventures and that they would call themselves Spookasem
Productions. “It’s an inside joke,” laughs Raubenheimer.
The Spookasem
family consists of Raubenheimer’s brother doing the Gig Guide; their girlfriends helping with audio and social media; their mate Alex van Niekerk, who “designs all
our pictures”; and Andrew MacFarlane who “writes random lines”, says Nel. Finally,
there’s Raubenheimer’s journo buddy, Daniel Nene, who is responsible for most
of the voiceovers.
With superior sound quality, exciting line-ups and clever
punch lines, the troop may make podcasting look easy, but it’s not. “Not on our
kind of level,” says Nel. Each edition takes about a week and a half to produce
from start to finish. “A lot of time does go in and we work many hours,” he
adds. But both guys agree that despite the long hours, it’s all worth it.
They hope to one day make money out of the podcast too. “We
want to be self-sufficient,” says Nel. Raubenheimer interrupts, “so that we can
cover our own costs at the end of the day”. Right now they’re doing it for the
love of alternative music.
A new edition of Radio
Spookasem goes live every second Thursday. You can listen to and download the
podcast via YouTube or SoundCloud.
For more information,
visit their page on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.