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 Australia’s best-loved music video show, RAGE, celebrates 20 years on television in 2007, and there’s a quadruple disc CD set and DVD out now as keepsakes for anyone who has ever enjoyed it. CHRIS HARMS chats with series producer NARELLE GEE about the show’s lasting cultural legacy.
Given it’s the Rage 20th anniversary package, how many years have you actually been involved with Rage for? I’ve been here for ten. So half the life of the program. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of videos. From the sublime to the ridiculous. Do you get more videos every year, given that access to production is so much easier now? Yes, we get more and more and more every year as it becomes easier to make videos. More people have their own video cameras out there. We’ve always received a lot, but it’s almost becoming too much to handle, with the amount that comes in now. Lots more independents are getting up and sending stuff in. Does it get tougher to make decisions about programming because you are getting such a volume of material? The ABC has always had the policy of trying to give everyone a go, and at least one play for the material that comes in, but that’s simply not possible anymore. There’s just too much of it now! What do you think it is about Rage that sets it apart from other music video shows? As part of our 20 years of Rage special, we went out and asked people, “tell us what you think of Rage?”, “What do you love about it?”, “What do you hate about it?” A lot of people said, “it’s the original, it’s the best, you put all the focus on the music, you keep it simple. There’s no VJs, no hosts other than musicians on the show. Basically you keep it simple and put all the emphasis on the music”. So why release a CD set along with the DVDs to celebrate a music video show? Because if it’s a great song and it’s quite a simple performance video, we’ll still give it a good spot and want to support it, on the strength of the great song. The Rage Red Book catalogue, the video archive that you have… it’s the most coveted resource for people into music videos… It’s important to preserve cultural artefacts like this, and sometimes you have to fight to protect it. A lot of TV programs are lost in time because their material was recycled or thrown away. So we have been very careful to maintain that archive and keep all the videos. Is it a constant process of updating your archiving methods then? Yes, because every time the technology changes, you end up with 24, 000 videos on the wrong format. We always try to stay ahead of new technology with regard to what we do with the program. Rages serves an amazing purpose in that regard. Artists themselves come to us with a video they’ve lost and no one in the world has got it – “do you have it?” You would be surprised how many times that happens. So sometimes we end up giving material back to record companies, or to artists themselves who have lost their own material. In terms of collating the songs for the DVDs and the CDs, what sort of criteria did you use? We dived into 20 years of the Rage playlist and ended up with these long, long lists of things that were memorable. And then we tried to cull that down. That was quite a difficult process. Everyone was fighting. And we tried to pick things that stood out for different reasons, across a range of different genres and that got a lot of reaction from the Rage audiences at the time. There are some old-school gems on there! A friend I was talking to the other day said, “ I can get rid of a whole shelf of CDs, they’re all one CD!” In terms of your view of music videos, do you feel the medium can be judged on its own merits? There’s the Chris Cunninghams and Michel Gondrys that are fantastic and have done some amazing things, and then there is a few local ones popping up that are starting to develop a good reputations. There is some great stuff being made here. And New Zealand has some great music videos coming out of there as well. It’s when people come out with something new and different, just when you think you have seen it all before, “well I haven’t seen that!” Sometimes you see these independent works from obscure directors that go on to be megastars. The Spike Jonze’ and so on. What sort of stories have you heard about what Rage has meant to people over the years? For me the early ‘90s Hot 100s were like a primer for alternative music… We get a lot from people who have grown up in small country towns who haven’t had that much exposure to what they get to see on Rage. Some have said it helped them through difficult teenage years. People said it got them through the HSC, helped them survive times in their life… and saw them through many a party. We get a lot of that sort of feedback from people. As a long-term series producer, how does that make you feel, getting that sort of feedback? It’s great to know that people have a love of Rage. Everyone likes to give lots of feedback on our website guestbook. A lot of people just get on there and say, “I love you”. It’s great that people seem to have that affection for it. Tell me about the time the Iggy Pop Rage promo was considered being updated. We actually polled our audience on that to see if we should change it or not? They overwhelmingly voted to keep them, which shocked us. They are so outrageously out of date that they had been back in fashion a couple of times. People kept saying “They’re iconic, they’re terrible but you cant change them!” They’re burnt into everyone’s consciousness. Do you attend the guest programming shoots? Some of them. Rebecca Martin is producer and programmer on the show, so she runs around and does a lot of the guest programming shoots. Are there any particular memorable ones that you attended? Yes! Courtney Love was memorable, when she eventually showed up five hours late! That was great once we got the camera’s rolling. Devo were pretty amazing, they literally had lamp shades on their heads and were on treadmills doing all sorts of crazy stuff. That was pretty wild. Marilyn Manson was brilliant, and one of the best dressed ones I think. Andre 3000 from Outkast was great – we were waiting for him to show up for the interview, and we were waiting and he comes in carrying the couch. The guest programmer carrying their own couch in! Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters has always been great, and Tex Perkins, who is one of our most frequent guest programmers over the years. It’s not in-your-face sort of host interviewing like other music video shows… Yeah, the guest programmers actually like doing this because it’s not some interview saying, “so tell us about your new album”. They instead do something totally different, they can talk about what music affected them when they were a kid, what they loved and that’s always really quite revealing. The 20 Years Of Rage DVD and 4xCD set is out now through ABC/Warner. Rage screens (in perpetuity) late Friday and Saturday nights on ABC TV.
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