A radio station in Austria received a barrage of complaints after one of its DJs managed to barricade himself inside a studio in order to blast Wham!’s festive hit Last Christmas non-stop on air.
Addressing the morning listeners of Antenne Carinthia, presenter Joe Kohlhofer told the audience that he felt that the Christmas spirit was lacking in the southern Austrian state. To rouse the mood ay 8am, he felt the 30-year-old pop song, in which George Michael laments a St Stephen’s Day turnaround in his romantic dealings with the person to whom he gave his heart, played on loop would do the trick.
And so, Kohlhofer played the song 24 times in a row across the two-hour show.
Radio station bosses claim his stunt was not sanctioned, and that the DJ blocked the entrance to the studio so that no one else could get in during the show.
Kohlhofer took calls from increasingly furious listeners, and finally relented and finished his stunt when he got a call from his four-year-old daughter Leonie Michelle, asking him to stop playing the song. The radio station received hundreds of complaints on social media throughout the broadcast.
“I wanted to play it all day, but because I love my daughter so much I gave into her request,” the Wham! fanatic said.
Last Christmas has past form of dominating the radio airwaves in German-speaking countries; in 2012, a radio DJ in the Baden-Württemberg in Germany staged a similar Christmas coup, managing to play the song 14 times before he was taken off the air.
