KIIS Melbourne’s Ash London takes the panel: 'I’m being set up to win'

Before Ash London went on air at KIIS, she wrote radio commercials in the same Melbourne building. She wrote ads for other people’s shows and quietly hoped one day she’d have one of her own.

Today, Monday 26 October, she got it. KIIS Breakfast with Ash, Issie & Elliot launched on KIIS 1011, with London hosting alongside four-time AFL premiership player Isaac “Issie” Smith and stylist Elliot Garnaut. London is also panelling the show herself, which is a job she says still mostly goes to men in metro radio.

“I am so ready for this. I feel like I have been waiting for this show for a decade,” London tells Mediaweek.

“I’ve been working in radio for a really long time, and I started in this very building that KIIS is in in Melbourne. It was my first ever media job, and I wrote radio commercials, and I dreamed that one day I would have this job.”

READ MORE: Ash London, Isaac Smith and Elliot Garnaut lead KIIS Melbourne Breakfast

READ MORE: Can ARN's new Sydney breakfast trio of Chris, Amy & Jack plug its $38m hole?

The fourth option

The route back to that building went through New Zealand. Two years ago, London’s husband Adrian took a job running the youth stations at MediaWorks, and she moved with him.

“I went as his plus one, which happens in life. Sometimes one partner does their thing, and the other partner supports, and sometimes it’s the other way around.”

Then a maternity-leave cover came up, on a station she was never meant to work on.

“I was the fourth option. And Adrian did not want to put his wife in.”

So much for nepotism.

“And that’s when I was forced to learn to panel,” she says. She started on the breakfast show, then got her own drive show, called The Ash London Show.

“And I thought, if we’re going to call it The Ash London Show, then I kind of have to panel it. Like I can’t have someone else do that. That would be very strange.”

She had very little time to learn. “Like, I literally had two days to learn before I panelled a national drive show. And I sucked for, like, a couple of weeks.”

She stopped sucking. “Career-wise, that was the turning point for me. It’s like before I took control of my own show and after, and that really helps when I think about this opportunity: I have learnt a new skill I never thought I would learn, and I feel really comfortable doing it.”

All in the timing

ARN offered London the KIIS job a week after her birthday. She says the timing, like most of what came before it, worked out.

“A lot was happening in my life at the time. It reinforced the idea that I’m exactly where I need to be. I wouldn’t have been ready a year ago.”

Put another way, her move as a plus one turned out to be her training.

What panelling actually means

For anyone who has never been in a radio studio, panelling means running the desk yourself: the microphones, the music, the sound effects, and the phones. London explains it more simply.

“Well, first of all, you decide whose mics go on and off.”

Until New Zealand, other people did it for her. “I have always had amazing men I’ve grown close to who can read my mind when it comes to how I want to break the sound in the moment, but that comes with its own challenges. So now that I’m pressing the buttons and panelling and anchoring on my own, it kind of – it cuts out that middleman, and it means there’s just a level of immediacy and control that can only happen, I believe, if you are pushing the buttons.”

“I’m setting the pace of something. I’m turning the phones off and on. You know, it’s kind of like you’re composing a symphony, and it’s a total vibe. You’re the first person to speak in a break, and I’m the last person to speak, so you set the tone and the vibe, and I think that’s one of my superpowers: my ability to set a vibe.”

Why girls need to see it

London says this is why she wants to be on the desk herself.

“I think young women and young girls don’t know what’s possible until they see it done. So if we don’t have people doing it and modelling it, then it doesn’t seem like a viable option.”

When she looks at the line-ups across Metro Radio, she doesn’t see many women doing it. “I was just, like, shocked, and I still am shocked, that when we look at most of the Metro Breakfast and [Drive] shows, they’re majority-men lineups, and they’re anchored by men.”

Nobody ever told her she couldn’t panel. People just told her she didn’t need to.

“I’ve been doing radio for, like, my whole adult life, and it was always a skill that I thought, I’d like to do that, but, you know, well-meaning people told me you don’t need to. Other people can do that for you. And that wasn’t in a sense of, like, because you can’t. It was just, like, don’t make it hard for yourself. Enjoy yourself.”

“I didn’t have the confidence back then to kind of push back and go, no, this is something that I believe I can do.”

She sees it as a gap in the industry, not just in her own career. “In many ways it’s, like, the women are the stars of the show… But they’re still not the ones setting the tone, setting the vibe, running the breaks.”

It’s also about whether radio has a future. “I want radio to thrive into the future, into this digital age that we are well and truly in, and that’s only going to happen if fresh blood comes through, and we need female voices.”

Set up to win

London says she was particular about who she’d be working with.

“I’m doing it with two men that I genuinely love and respect, who are good people, who have integrity, who love women, and love working with a powerful woman, and are very used to that. So it really just feels like I’m being set up to win.”

Smith, a four-time premiership player and Norm Smith Medallist, has worked across radio, podcasts, and television since he retired from the AFL. Garnaut is a fashion stylist, commentator, and podcaster who has worked with some of Australia’s biggest entertainment names. Georgia Love reads the news.

ARN named Chris, Amy & Jack as its new KIIS breakfast team in Sydney after the Melbourne launch. KIIS Breakfast with Ash, Issie & Elliot airs 6 am to 10 am weekdays on KIIS 1011 and streams on the iHeart app. It covers music, sport, fashion, culture, and local conversation.

The kindness clause

London has a reputation for being nice, and she says that was deliberate.

“I just made a decision really early on in my career that I was going to get to where I needed to go through kindness.”

“And I’m tough, don’t get me wrong.”

She doesn’t need to be tough. The woman who once wrote ads in this building now decides when everyone else’s mic goes off, including the two men she loves and respects.