2SER Presenter Profiles: Tim Ritchie (When the Levee Breaks)
From hosting on Double J as a teenager to being one of the key DJ’s in the nascent Australian club scene of the 80s and 90s, Tim Ritchie has a storied career in music, as well as a pioneer harnessing radio as a creative medium. Since joining as a host of When the Levee Breaks in 2022, Tim has taken 2SER listeners on a monthly deepdive into his love of alternative sounds from across time: punk, disco, jazz, blues, dub, reggae and beyond. We couldn’t resist asking Tim some questions about his philosophy of curation, the power of radio and also his recently discovered passion for photography…
Tim, you’ve been a monthly host of When the Levee breaks for well over a year now, can you tell us how that came about and how you came to join the 2ser family?
I’ve always loved radio, and radio that is super driven by formula. And so I’ve been to 2ser for decades. When Pete used to host Back II Funk, I was invited to do a future funk spot on a regular basis for the show. That was years ago. And Pete and I would chat and catch up in the days that passed. He and Erica asked if I would like to do a Levee show each month. We talked about musical and programming parameters (which was basically, show us what you’ve got), and I signed up.
One thing that you can hear on every episode is the breadth and richness of the musical knowledge on WTLB, but also that you can hone in on specific eras and make the connections. What’s the art in putting together a selection of music like that on Levee?
The thing about some people who love music is that they aren’t bound by genres or periods in music. I think that the Levee gives the perfect opportunity to go down musica rabbit holes, jump on a tangent, find a sound in a track from 2025 that triggers a memory from something from the 70s.
Only hosting once a month has me both excited as it always feels fresh, and it is a thing now built into how I listen to music. I’m at my PC each day doing editing on my photography, and I have my many decades collection digitised, and shuffling as I edit.
Something will come on and I’ll think it’s perfect for my next Levee. After about 10 tracks, I look at the list, see what genres and periods need representing, think of music connections, stories that can bridge or blend different styles, and by a week before the show, I have about twice the number of tracks that I need. Then the alchemy in the studio of what will work best first, then second etc until the last track for that show. It tests my musical knowledge to make a whole out musical jigsaw pieces that weren’t designed to make one sonic picture.
Many may not know this, but your passion for creativity also extends beyond music and the airwaves to another artform, namely photography! Can you tell us a bit about how that became a part of your life and what imagery inspires for that?
So when I turned 50, I’d been a diabetic for a few years but had trouble seeing the results I wanted from doing the 10000 steps a day schelp. I’d never ridden a bike as a kid (music and books were more my thing), but I thought I should try that. I got my teenage daughter to show me. That didn’t work because she couldn’t put into words how to do it. So I went to the back lane and practised pushing off, over and over again. Finally worked it out. The only time of the day I had energy was first thing as my ABC job had become more managerial than creative and it wore me out. I’d get up at 4am and put in some hours before work. Turns out, cycling isn’t too creative either, but Sydney’s hills were working for my health.
What could I do to make it creative? As a teen I took film photos, but gave up as my radio career took over. I started to take pics of pre-dawn and dawn shots with my phone. But phones then didn’t like low light, so I moved up into a proper digital camera. I found my mojo. I was taken back to the time I was a club DJ, and after everyone went home, I’d wander the dark streets of inner city and town. This got me excited to capture Sydney without people (like many radio people, I’m at my best when I’m alone). 15 years later and many thousands and thousands of pics later, I have found that I have an eye as well as an ear.
Check out my insta: Tim.Ritchie.Photography
Over your time on When the Levee Breaks so far, what have been some of your favourite and most memorable moments?
I don’t plan what I’m going to say, I’ve been talking on the radio a long time, so I shift into “Tim on air” mode. That’s where the fun can happen regarding what I say, but the part that thrills me the most is obviously the music. It’s the limitlessness of where music can take one. I can put an Ivor Cutler spoken word bit next to Makers of the Dead Travel fast, and it sounds like they were made for each other. Those chance happenings happen all the time. That’s what has me wanting to be there, to keep getting sound surprises and sharing them.
Your history with radio of course began far before When the levee Breaks, or 2ser for that matter. What do you think makes human music curation, specifically community radio, important and relevant in the age of streaming and tik tok?
2025 marked my 50th year in radio. And all those years have been involved in programming and presenting music for audiences. Different audiences who require different approaches, but the thing I hope to have done is break the usual rule of radio, and that is to surprise.
Radio 101 is said to be to give the audience what they expect. The challenge is to bring them to expect surprises, in that way, they want to be tickled about the ears, shown how to enjoy styles that they might have otherwise not intentionally listened to. Algorithms mimic humanity, but they are code written by someone who, in the abstract of knowing anything about actual musical tracks, tells the system that if you’ve liked A and B, then C will please you.
And it might well be that C is good, but the machine expects you to like C. The human approach to programming can be so different to code. It’s experience, humour, knowledge, naughtyness…. a whole bunch of stuff that code can’t do. And a human can miss the mark, but if you’ve done it long enough to trust risk taking, the listener won’t hear it as a risk (hopefully).
They’ll hear it as something that makes sense in hindsight, but they would not have heard coming.
Community radio is the last bastion of real music radio. You might listen to other stations, and they sound slick and unsurprising, but the humanity and passion that comes from the 2ser programmers is not found in code.
You can catch Tim Ritchie hosting When the Levee Breaks on the first Saturday of every month, 6-8pm (repeating Tuesdays at 2pm) on 2SER