Brave New Waves
Brave New Waves was a Canadian radio program which aired on CBC Stereo, later known as CBC Radio 2, from 1984 to 2007. Airing overnight five nights a week, the show profiled alternative and indie music and culture, including film, comics, literature and art. The show was once described by longtime host Brent Bambury as "explaining fringe culture to a comfortable mainstream audience," and by his successor Patti Schmidt as "invented with an idea of what John Peel's show was, but without ever having heard it."
History
The show was created after Augusta La Paix submitted a demo tape for a show on avant garde culture, featuring music by Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Klaus Nomi and Nina Hagen. In an early interview with The Globe and Mail, La Paix told the newspaper that she was only a recent convert to underground music, having previously been primarily a fan of country music.
Produced throughout its run at the CBC's studios in Montreal and originally hosted by La Paix, the show aired for the first time on February 6, 1984. The first song it ever played was Simple Minds' "Promised You a Miracle". In its first year, the show was briefly the subject of a police investigation into obscenity charges, when a CBC employee who disliked the show filed an anonymous complaint about an interview with underground performance artist Karen Finley, although the investigation was dropped by the police without charges.
