6Music’s Blind Spot
We love 6 Music Dads. They’ve got record collections, a tote bag from Rough Trade, and they go to loads of gigs. They’re doing much more to support the live music ecosystem than the vast majority of twenty-somethings. We love 6 Music Dads.
This is about BBC 6Music. A station that, somewhere along the way, locked itself into an idea of ‘alternative’ that is stale, narrow, and increasingly ridiculous.
For a station that calls itself ‘the home of alternative music’, BBC 6Music seems to be shit scared of heavy metal. Metal makes up at least half of the UK’s active guitar scene. You can’t walk through Camden without tripping over world-class metal gigs on every given night. Outbreak and Desertfest are pulling thousands of metalheads and hardcore kids to London, and Bloodstock and Download are pulling tens of thousands. And still - no regular airtime, sessions, or playlist rotation on 6Music.
Why? It’s not because their audience can’t handle it. These are grown-ups with taste - the kind of people who would absolutely get into Heriot or Pest Control if you actually gave them the exposure. They’ll play Mogwai without question, so it’s not a question of heaviness. Is distortion taboo unless it wears a turtleneck?
Bands like Employed To Serve deserve and need 6Music’s support. So do Sugar Horse, Zetra, and dozens more hard-touring, fully evolved bands who could easily graduate to the next level if anyone at the BBC actually gave a shit. The scene is pulling its weight. What’s missing is the platform. Metal isn’t dying, but it is being slowly suffocated.
6Music Dads didn’t appear by accident. They’re a curated listener profile, early fifties, white, middle-class. They love The Fall, but also LCD Soundsystem, and listen to The Bends on vinyl through a Sonos system whilst reading Mojo, thinking whistfully about The Word, and trying to stay “plugged in”. They aren’t the problem, and are in fact doing more for the live music ecosystem than half of Gen Z. The problem is that they are the gravitational centre of all of 6Music’s output, and their imagined taste determines what does and doesn’t make the playlist.
6Music uses the language of discovery, but this discovery is mostly of bands that sound like bands the target listener already likes: a seemingly endless crop of Britpop revivalists. This risk-averse desperation to find the next Arctic Monkeys doesn’t ask the deeper question: what is genuinely driving underground music right now?
Alternative essentially now means guitar music that’s safe enough for Radio 2 (with an occasional nod to art gallery TED talk hip-hop) and a conspicuous absence of metal, hardcore, punk and sludge.
If you only listened to BBC 6Music, you’d be forgiven for thinking the UK’s metal scene had quietly died somewhere around 2005. You wouldn’t have a clue that Knocked Loose had just played in front of 10,000 kids in both Manchester and London. There’s no platform for emotionally raw metal sessions or hardcore features on the station that claims to champion alternative culture. Not even curiosity, just a strange locked-door policy. Someone decided many years ago that metal was too brash, and too uncool for the playlist, and nobody has challenged it since.
The media silence around metal isn’t just annoying. It’s harmful.
Without support from radio play, the most hard-working bands will stall out, their fanbases will plateau, and the jump to the next tier becomes impossible. Svalbard are a perfect case in point: universally critically acclaimed, relentlessly hard-working, emotionally and politically articulate, but now no more, largely because the project wasn’t financially viable. Right now, this very minute, Employed To Serve are on the cusp of breaking through, having built the fanbase, the catalogue, and the live reputation, touring alongside Gojira. 6Music holds the megaphone, helping acts like Yard Act and Lambrini Girls rocket from cult to mainstage in under a year.
6Music already plays loud, abrasive music. They’re not allergic to noise, but certain types of noise have been placed under strict sanctions. Lambrini Girls and Employed To Serve are hardly miles apart in tone and intent. One leans punk, the other leans metal, both are intense, outspoken, and great live. Why does one get radio play, interviews, and sessions - and the other one gets ignored?
The distinction isn’t really about accessibility, it’s about aesthetic branding, and the music that gets through apparently has to sound like it could play in a Shoreditch café without scaring anyone away.
This is snobbery.
They’ll play deafening post-rock and deconstructed techno (not to mention hours of tedious spoken-word post-punk poetry) presumably because it’s coded as clever and artistic. Anger is allowed, but only if it’s ironic. Heavy guitars are acceptable, but only if they’re dressed up in tasteful reverb and remain somewhat restrained.
This is the censorship of entire subcultures.
BBC 6Music has the quiet power to shape culture, and the station’s endorsement helps catapult bands into household names within months, as long as they fit the brand. Metal, hardcore, sludge, and screamo are treated as if they shouldn’t exist, and this actively stunts the growth of a huge part of the UK’s underground. Svalbard, by every meaningful metric, should have broken through further, with incredible live shows, critical acclaim, and a clear voice in Serena Cherry fighting misogyny and despair through sound, but they were ignored by 6Music, who have the infrastructure and the airtime but the lack of will.
6Music doesn’t need to become Kerrang! FM, but they need to stop pretending metal and hardcore aren’t an integral part of the UK’s alternative culture, and freezing out artists who don’t fit their dated and narrow version of what’s cool, because their idea of cool is distinctly uncool, and has become a meme. They already make space for jazz, funk, soul, reggae, krautrock, folk, afrobeat, electronica, and ambient, all of which are fine, but metal with its enormous cultural weight and fiercely loyal live scene, gets nothing. There is no logic in this.
The 6Music Dads aren’t the problem. 6Music is. The station is still salvageable, but it needs to break out of its own algorithm and break the unspoken branding rules that lock them into art-school polish, and remain terrified of chugging riffs. If 6Music is truly the home of alternative music, then open the fucking door.
