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Kevin Kwong

TIRED of DJs? Well, Commercial Radio has the answer: from the end of this month its 24-hour music station Quote 864 won't have any.

  The replacement for the short-lived ''channel'' AM Alive will just play music, of different languages - English, Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin. The only break will be for adverts. News is definitely out as well.

  Quote 864, named after the AM frequency, will complete its 24-hour broadcasting time by taking over the afternoon slot AM Alive previously shared with CRI.

  Instead of having DJs broadcasting live in studios, Quote 864 will play pre-recorded tapes, each lasting 20 minutes, of non-stop music with similar mood and rhythm round-the-clock.

  ''For a long time, music has been compromised by DJs babbling on about not very much,'' said Matt Hackett, CR whiz kid and mastermind behind this new project.

  ''In the last two years, we have been paving the way for this [change], giving new blood into the station and trying to provide a really good music service.''   And pave the way they did when 12 of the 16 journalists in CR's English news department were laid off last year in order to move AM Alive closer to a music-oriented format.

  And it looks like the metamorphosis, which included buying new studio equipment costing ''millions of dollars'', has finally been completed.

  The new music presentation is somewhat similar to the Star on 45 stuff which plagued the airwaves in the early 80s when different songs were mashed and mixed into one single track.

  The difference here is that these 20-minute tapes are not cover versions and contain the voices of the original artists. So for instance, within the same track you can hear bits of the past and present hits of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Sandy Lam one after the other.

  And throughout the day, six operators will run these tapes which will not be played again for at least another three months.

  But doesn't this mean the station can cut even more staff?   Certainly not, according to the 23-year-old business development manager.

  ''We have actually hired more people to do this format. It is more manpower intensive because of the way the music is put together. The music is not played live but pre-recorded on tapes,'' said Hackett.

  ''We want to provide a wide range of music so we have a group of music designers who spend their hours on researching and editing the music into these 20-minute tapes.''   Joseph Chan Fai-hung, former DJ and music director for CRII, who has taken on the laborious task of editing the 20-minute music tapes, said the workload of a music designer was far greater than that of a DJ.

  ''We are trying to emphasise the blending of music. We have to consider how listeners would feel and how they would react to this format. A lot of our time is spent choosing and mixing the music and making sure it runs smoothly,'' he said.

  Another ''music designer'', club and radio DJ Mark Jakes, said they can mix any music - old or new, Chinese or English - together as long as it fits and flows with the mood and rhythm and that it is important to keep the standard of music high.

  ''We also try not to spoil the original songs because most of the time the beginning and end of the song is edited out. But what remains is the best part of the song anyway and that is what listeners enjoy listening to anyway,'' he said.

  ''What we want is to play good music and we don't have the responsibility to promote any individual artists, we are here to promote the music.'' That does not mean that no one will tell the listener who the artists are.

  With a slogan like ''Only Music Spoken Here'', the only words which will be spoken are those of advertisers who will have their slot in between the pre-recorded tapes.

  All programmes, including those independent from Commercial Radio, featured in AM Alive that do not fit into the new format will have to go. And that includes the popular programme Halo Halo for the Filipino community.

  Hackett said that this was an across the board change and that other programmes like Sunday USA and sport reports would have to be scrapped.

  ''We are creating something that will appeal to more people and everyone. We would like to get away from segregation, to have a programme just for the Filipinos, Japanese or Koreans. We want a programme everyone can listen to,'' he said.



And fade out the DJs