Before WPRB’s Chester Dubov re-purposed the “Totally Wired” show name for his punk broadcasts of the early 2010s, it was a late 80s/early 90s show focused on the British indie scene. The show was hosted by a series of student DJs including Hugh Hynes and Christian Perring, and for a time, made WPRB’s name synonymous with the sounds of bands like Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Adorable, Suede, and the Stone Roses. In 1991, Christian Perring was lucky enough to interview Miki Berenyi of Lush live on the air. Click here to download the recording of that interview, or stream it using the player below.
Few on-air promos enjoy the kind of reputation this pair of early 90s WPRB recordings promoting the station’s “Hypnotized Cheese” t-shirts do. Apart from being one of the most popular shirts ever produced by the station (in its day, the Hypnotized Cheese guy could be frequently spotted in the crowd on any given night at Maxwell’s or the Khyber Pass), the on-air spots used to hawk them were almost as ubiquitous as the shirts themselves. (Listeners would routinely call and request them. Jon Solomon claims to have received one such request within the last year!)
To properly honor the legacy of WPRB’s Hypnotized Cheese mascot (who also appeared on the cover of a printed program guide which you can check out in our upcoming exhibit of station history at Princeton University’s Mudd Library), here are the two original promos. These spots were voiced, written, and produced by Matthew Robb (Myron), John Clements (Robin Leach impersonator), and Hugh Hynes (production).
Hypnotized Cheese Promo #1
Hypnotized Cheese Promo #2
Bonus: Here are scans of the original scripts and production notes for each.
A limited-run, 20th anniversary edition of the Hypnotized Cheese t-shirt was produced as a special fundraising item back in 2012. It sold out rapidly, proving the design’s enduring appeal. Will there be a third edition? Time will tell…
In the meantime, here’s the video for Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me”, which served as background music in Promo #1 and was, by all accounts, one of the biggest WPRB hits of the era.
Here’s WPRB’s Dan Gabbe (with production wizardry and pre-take snarkiness from Hugh Hynes) promoting a 1993 edition of Spotlight. As previously noted, Spotlight was a weekly show that allowed programmers to devote an hour to a favorite band, record label, or scene. Dan was from Columbus Ohio, and his arrival at WPRB ignited a staff-wide obsession with bands like Gaunt, V-3, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, and the New Bomb Turks (all of whom recorded for the Ohio-based Anyway and/or Datapanik labels.) Given his credentials, a thusly-focused edition of the show was inevitable.
