It’s been a few months since Ben Harvey and Liam Stapleton shocked fans with the announcement of their departure from Triple J, and now, in a new interview, they’ve given their reasoning as to why.
In an interview with news.com.au, Harvey said that the duo left because they were beginning to feel a little to comfortable for their liking.
“Three years at Triple J was a good amount of time,” Harvey said.
“After the three years we kind of felt like we’d ticked all the boxes. At Triple J we definitely got very comfortable. If you’re too comfortable that can be a bit of a worry because you start to cruise, and we didn’t want to cruise.”
However, Stapleton also said that it wasn’t as simple as it seemed, and there were pros and cons to either staying or leaving.
“(Triple J) definitely wanted us to stay, which was nice,” he said.
“There were positives and negatives for both. It really could have gone either way. But since we’ve made the call we haven’t looked back once and thought, ‘Oh damn, we made the wrong call’.”
Of course, the duo are now at Nova Adelaide, which they said was always a goal of theirs for two reasons – to be in the competitive realm of commercial radio and to be back home.
“If you want a long-term career in the game, sooner or later you’re going to have to learn how to do commercial radio and be good at it,” Stapleton said.
“In community radio, ratings don’t matter. At Triple J, they try to say it matters but no one really cares.”
“I think we were ready, we want to be on the scoreboard and really get a bit more competitive about things.”
“It’s not every day you get an offer like this, doing breakfast on the station you listened to growing up in the town you grew up in,” Stapleton continued.
“We loved Sydney but it takes a bit of getting used to. “It’s just a lot easier living where you grew up.
“You walk out of the Nova 91.9 building and you just see someone you know on the street, not because they’re camping out to meet us or anything.”
“Every day I walk home I literally see someone I know. It’s good to be home.”
As of last week, Sally Coleman and Erica Mallett took the reins at breakfast on Triple J, being the first all-female duo to do so.
