[BLOG] Panic in the tent: Rob Stenders cuts off a number 1 hit from 2004 during his hours of the Top 2000. After 60 seconds it was “enough” according to the Almere deejay, with a shout from the Top 2000 café, a hate of hate tweets and news articles as a result. Is it a shame or a nice way to put your annual listening figure enhancer in the spotlight?
I have known Rob for about 25 years. When I was a small, puffy little man in the mid-90s, I was allowed to work at the Tros, and soon I was confronted with “the terror of all channels, Rob Stenders.” Together with him I presented the Interactive Cyber Top 50 on Friday afternoon at 3FM. Naturally looked up to him enormously and farted seven shit colors.
One afternoon Rob had decided that it would be nicer not to run the 50 hits that were voted on over the internet from 50 to 1, but to let a bingo machine determine which track was played and when. A nice idea in itself, but “the broadcaster” thought that I should start with number 25 during the second part of the hit list at 4 pm, so I did it well. Stenders was furious and called me a traitor.
Over the years I have nevertheless owed Rob a lot. He picked me up at the 3FM music editorial team, helped me get a horizontal night show and when I was able to leave at the Tros, among other things because of all the “flattering with the other side” he adopted me for his new morning show Stenders Vroeg, as a producer / sidekick.
So you can say that I know a bit about how Rob works. He is simply averse to every radio rule. Order him to play 80s music and he starts with Paul Elstak. Tell him that it works better if you say something after the first record of the hour, then he runs three nonstop one after the other.
It has brought him far, this obstinacy. Still to be heard 4 days a week at a prominent time at the number 1 station in the Netherlands. But during a hit list, certainly such a huge spectacle as the Top 2000, you are 100% in the service of the listener. If I had done this during one of the many radio charts at Radio Veronica and certainly during the Top 1000 All-Time Times in December, I would have been at least suspended or even worse. In fact: had Rick van Velthuysen done this last night on NPO Radio 2, he would have had to come up on the mat. Why does Rob always get away with it, this form of anti-radio?
Because Rob is Rob, station managers say. Certainly now that his friend and former boss at BNN / Vara Peter de Vries has become chief of the shop, he can break even more pots than before. Nevertheless, I am arguing for a Rob Stenders free Top 2000 this coming edition. Release that man if it is obvious that this is just not in his DNA, good presentation of a hit list. He just wants to freak during the day with Hard To Find classics, under the heading “you ask, we play”.
An authority problem is not strange to Stenders, something that will undoubtedly have its origins in his youth. You can’t get that out anyway and that is also the reason that Rob will never function properly under De Mol’s umbrella. Let him sit where he is and send him in December with his friend Fred and maid Carolien on a trip to a record fair in Memphis, Tennessee. There must still be some B-sides to be found with which you can easily open on a cold Wednesday afternoon in January. Or you have to instruct Rob to cut down the numbers beforehand that he hates, then he’ll play them all from start to finish. That is how it works with an adolescent brain, even when it is a child’s birthday.
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