Celebrating 40 years in 2025, The Phantom Dancer is a community radio treasure, produced at the studios of 2SER and beamed weekly around the country on the community radio network. We caught up with none other than THE Phantom Dancer himself, Greg Poppleton about his influences as a broadcaster and how, despite featuring music dating back by up to a century, The Phantom Dancer has consistently broken ground throughout it’s on-air history.

Greg Poppleton, for the uninitiated and in your own words, can you tell us just a little bit about the concept behind the Phantom Dancer, and what the program is?

The Phantom Dancer is a non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-1960s radio and TV. With its mix of live music broadcasts, actuality, old ads, and archival radio announcements, it’s a first hand social history of the mid-20th century, unfiltered by the contemporary lens and uncluttered by commentary. I let the old music radio shows speak for themselves. The listener can make of it as they please.

The Phantom Dancer is celebrating 40 years on-air this year. This may be hard to narrow down, but do you have any highlights on-air from the show’s history?

Phantom Dancer highlights for me are all the many moments I’ve quietly given the accepted music history spun for profit by corporates and their bought mainstream media lackeys a smack in the face. For a radio show filled with mid-20th century music radio, The Phantom Dancer, was an early adopter of new technology.

It was the first 2SER radio show (8 May 1995) that was wholly digitally edited and recorded onto CD, and it was the first 2SER radio show to publish a weekly playlist online and have its own webpage (2003). It’s played the earliest rap by hillbilly singer Carson Robinson, (1932) and early electronic music by Raymond Scott and others from the 1950s, as well as electric banjo, guitar and hammond organ from the early 1930s. It’s played the earliest r’n’b from 1936, earliest boogie from 1929, the earliest rock’n’roll from 1951, the earliest recorded C&W radio (1932), the earliest swing radio (1934), and the earliest recorded jazz radio (1928). It’s played the earliest extant live-to-air radio (a cylinder recording of morse code delivering sport results in 1916) and the earliest extant spoken word radio (The National Defence Day broadcast of 1924). It’s played 1930s-40s jazz from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Arab world, Japan, and pre-Mao China, throwing mainstream narratives on their head.

It’s played Australian jazz and swing from the 1930s-50s that gives you the evidence of your ears that the mainstream narrative of Australia being a cultural desert, before billionaire lauded prats came along in the 1960s, has always one great big lie.

The Phantom Dancer is a timepiece and a tribute to 1920s to 1960s radio, can you narrow down any specific radio presenters, Australian or from overseas, that are an influence on your style?

They’ve all had an influence on me and am embarrassed to say that while finding my feet in the early days, I fell into the trap now and again of trying to take on some of the persona of the announcers of the past because of the sense of occasion they create. Listening to so much mid-20th century radio, over 50 years, it’s inevitable to have absorbed elements of the timing of the early announcers.

My favourite announcers, the ones who stay in my mind the most, are some of the early voices from 1928 – 1932 who end sentences in unexpected places, the voices of untrained radio engineers slipping in station IDs, the rapid-fire monotone 10 second ad breaks from 1950s radio, the mellifluous Jean Paul King, who was my vocal coach’s father-in-law, and the 1940s all-night all-frantic one, Symphony Sid ‘where everything’s crazy on WJZ’. And they have all shown to me, that while fluidity and fluency are all well and good, mistakes are where the magic happens.

If you could travel in time to be a fly on the wall at any show, anywhere in time, what would it be and why?

Of all the great ballrooms and cafes, of all the great bands and singers that crackle over The Phantom Dancer airwaves, there’s only one broadcast, from Christmas 1954, where I’ve imagined being in that room, and this particular broadcast gives me a sinking feeling, somewhat disarranged and melancholically amused. Outside the foyer of the Northern Hotel, Billings, Montana, where this broadcast is going to air, it’s dark, freezing snowing.

I see porters and guests going about their business, reception staff standing ready behind a long oak-panelled counter, the clipped hotel concierge standing quietly at their lit station, guests in overcoats, stoles, fedoras, and netted hats lounging on tan chesterfields, newspapers folded out, touching up their make-up, smoking, waiting for taxis, or families, some dreary salesman colleague, or a shadowy assignation.

And there, pumping away, in a dim corner, away from reception, away from the lifts, with no-one paying too much attention, who no-one had come to see, next to the tinselled silver Christmas tree, green, blue, and red acorn lights blinking, behind the Nativity scene, sits Grace Caldwell at the hammond organ and Bill Pollard at the piano, with a KGHL NBC announcer, jollying along a half-hour, over-modulated ‘Keyboard Melodies’. Why?

The Phantom Dancer airs weekly on 2SER at midday Tuesday.