Your wake-up call x 3

It is not easy to keep a partnership for 17 years, but radio royalties Chico and Delamar have gone that distance and are still at the top of their game. Add to that new generation DJ Gino and you have countless Twitter trending topics, two best-selling books, and arguably the most popular morning show on FM radio. What is it about them? Here are 10 things you should know about The Morning Rush DJs.

1 Chico and Delamar were the first ones to do an FM radio talk show in 1996. Delamar is actually the first Philippine female DJ host. 

“Girls were not allowed to talk for more than two minutes then,” Del recalls when she started as a newsreader on radio. “The shows had no personality before, it was just to introduce a song then play the commercials.” Chico was the main DJ in the morning, but there came a time that he and Del would overlap on-air and get into arguments about different topics. Chico recalls, “Initially ang claim to fame namin was, we were known as yung away nang away sa umaga. Why would anyone want to listen to people fighting? But apparently they found the fights entertaining.” Though they were not allowed to banter, they got away with it for around 11 months. “Had the bosses heard us before the advertisers gave feedback, they probably would’ve asked us to stop. But by the time they heard that we sort of broke the rules by making daldal, they already heard it as praise,” Chico explains. “And the bulk of our content was coming from the listeners, it was unheard of at that time.” That was the birth of The Morning Rush on RX 93.1.

2 Gino, Chico, and Del’s craziest fan stories:

Gino and the Mystery Girl

“I was doing the graveyard shift, and at around 3 a.m. this girl comes in. We’re the only two people there. ‘Hi, what’s your name?’ But she just sat there staring. ‘Can I play you anything?’ She just smiled. At the end of my shift I walked out of the booth. She followed me down the elevator going to the lobby. I was walking down the basement to my car, she was still following me! I just made a run for it. I felt like a fish inside an aquarium and she was in the aquarium with me.”

Chico and the Secret Caller

“I was still a solo jock doing the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. slot. There was always this kid who would call up and request the same song all the time. I found it odd kasi palagi siyang hush hush. Often he’d say, ‘I have to go, my lola is here.’ At times I would get concerned, thinking, is this an abused child? Why is he so afraid of adults like he’s not supposed to use the phone? After some months I didn’t hear from him, then I got a visitor with a letter. ‘Hi, I’m the uncle.’ I asked if the boy was with him and the uncle said, ‘Actually, he passed away.’ Apparently he had been seriously ill for most of his life, and when he died they saw a letter addressed to me. He explains in the letter, he’s about 12, he is really sick and not allowed to be on the phone. He was sort of asking for permission if he could be my guardian angel when he goes to heaven. I was freaked out. To be honest I don’t know if I believed in that but the few times I escaped (death) with a close call, I couldn’t help but think, ‘What if it’s him?’”

Del and the Ex-Nun

“She was a regular listener who had taken time to write a letter saying she was an ex-nun, and she would visit us in the studio. One day, I was with a friend in a mall, and going upstairs I saw her. ‘Oh, hi! How are you?’ After the conversation we walked along and went up another floor. As we were coming up, ‘Oh, hi. It’s you again!’ And this kept happening every floor. Aside from that, one time I guested on some show with a friend. I guess she watched it, she was so angry asking, ‘Who is that? You should just be with Chico! Who does he think he is?’ I told her you can pester me but you can’t threaten my friends or I’m gonna hurt you.”

3 Gino on getting haters as the newest addition to the then 15-year partnership of Chico and Del: “I could just sit there and shut up but I wouldn’t be doing my job.”

“I would get comments like, ‘What is he doing there?’ Ang ingay niya. Well, aren’t we supposed to talk on radio? For every one hater, you get a hundred people saying you’re doing a good job,” he shares. Gino came in as the substitute DJ when Del went on maternity leave. “They had the harshest critics. You had to be smart, funny, and even if you did a good job, they would still want them back. But I dunno, it felt natural with Chico.” They all burst into laughter. Chico and Gino developed a unique chemistry, with fans calling them Chichi and Gigi, and when Del came back to work, the three of them became “The Kikay Barkada.”

4 Del (unexpectedly) became a mom despite doctors telling her that her chances were slim. At 27, she had surgery to have an ovarian cyst removed. At 37, she got pregnant.

“Five years after my surgery, I went through another surgery and the doctor said every year my chances to have kids were just going down,” Del shares. “One day, I opened a bag of Cheetos and I tasted it and it felt like heaven opened. This was the most wonderful Cheetos I’d ever tasted! And then I remember a friend who got pregnant said everything tasted better. I had no reason to suspect that I was pregnant, aside from the sex I had had. Yes, it was with a boyfriend, but we were on a break!

“There was a lot of fear. I wasn’t married, I come from a religious family — I’m a pastor’s kid. What would people say? But I knew underneath I was happy. Scared but happy.” Today, Del fully enjoys her role as mother to Cooper, and is expecting baby number two this October. She dodges the question on marriage, to which Chico quips, “Ayan ang gusto kong tanong! Sana on-air tayo!”

5 Chico on being the most popular DJs, to being tagged as laos, to again rising to be the top DJ today: “We’ve gotten to the point of ‘Let’s stop trying to please everyone, let’s just do what we do.’ Being number one, that’s one game we don’t play.”

“We’ve always just hung in there, and we have found it to be a source of pride. Through the years, nag-iba na our chief rivals, and we’re kinda still here. We don’t know exactly how it happened. There was a time na nag-iba yung direction ng Philippine radio. Our way was passé. ‘Luma na yung style niyo,’ they’d say. Ang uso was edgy, very aggressive radio. And we weren’t part of that so we became yesterday’s news. Why do something we are not good at, or we are uncomfortable with? Why don’t we do what we do, what we know how to do well, just stick to that and bahala na how the public will judge us.” Just last year, they won Best Radio Show at the Yahoo OMG awards and the #trendingradio award at the Tatt Awards, plus numerous KBP Golden Dove Awards to boot.

“As long as we enjoy what we do, I feel that there will be a place for us. The moment we don’t enjoy it or people don’t enjoy it then, it would be time to go,” Del shares.

Chico adds, “We don’t think about, ano five more years, 10 more years. We leave things very open. We never thought we’d be where life took us, we never thought we would last this long.”

6 The Kikay Barkada in numbers:

370: Total number in pesos it would cost to buy their best-selling books The Best Of The Morning Rush Top 10 (Book 1 and Book 2).

8: Total number of alarm clocks combined it takes to wake them up. Chico has two (“both advanced”), Del has one, and Gino has five (“two phones, an alarm clock, our maid, and a laptop”).

68,800: Number of followers on The Morning Rush Twitter account @rxtmr.

70: Estimated percentage of time they spend talking (advertisements included) on the show. (That’s from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.)

3: Number of pots of coffee they usually finish within the show. “I bring the coffeemaker,” Del shares. Both Chico and Gino just started drinking coffee recently.

7 What it is like in the booth of The Morning Rush:

Most common issue of callers?

Del: “Love talaga.”

Chico: “Usually unrequited.”

Their advice?

Chico: “Deal with it. You can gloss over it but that’s really what it is.”

Longest fight without talking off-air?

Del: “Two weeks.”

Chico: “I don’t remember what it was about. Kahit gano pa kami nag-aaway, when it’s work, we work.”

Longest period of time their topic was trending on Twitter?

Gino: “Over 24 hours. Until next morning pumasok na kami, it was still trending. There was one whole month almost every day may trending topic.”

Topic you get most heated arguments in?

Del: “Kung sino yung pinaka-bitchy.”

Chico: “Anything that involves weight.”

Gino: “Or age.”

Del: “Or dating preference.”

They all burst into laughter for the nth time.

Who is the most multi-talented?

Chico: “Wala.”

Del: “Gino is a gamer, he sings.”

Chico: “I rap.”

8 What to do when you wake up not feeling happy? “You make fun of your misery,” Del says.

“There’s that stereotype of a clown who makes everybody laugh… it’s a little ironic. You make so many people happy and you come home and you’re miserable and you feel like, wow, that’s weird,” Chico shares with a more serious tone. Gino adds, “We make you happy but who makes us happy?” They all burst into laughter again. 

“Although we’re so different in age, in background, the difference is that we all have a dash of existential angst. And if you pair that with a very inquisitive mind, there’s no way to go but sadder and sadder! Which is actually what you need to entertain people! Because you can see life for what it is, it’s easy to make fun of things that are trivial or fleeting. When we start doing the show, it’s like a pause to all that questioning in your head. It’s like a jousting match trying to outwit each other or tag team and push one to the corner. It becomes a mental activity,” Del explains. Chico adds, “Some of our best shows ever, lahat kami walang tulog, puyat, malungkot, masungit!”

9 Fun facts Chico, Delamar, and Gino reveal for the first time:

Chico: “I was voted Disco King 1990 in my college organization in UP.”

Del: “For someone who doesn’t really know how to swim and is deathly afraid of the water, I have more than 110 dives under my belt.”

Gino: “I played a singing, dancing rose bush in a musical adaptation of Beauty and The Beast. Not the Disney version. I wore green tights and put on my own makeup for about two to three shows a day. I had a bushy, floral head piece.”

10 Chico, Del, and Gino admit that they don’t think they will ever leave radio.

“At the heart of it we are broadcasters. Once the radio bug bites you there really is no turning back. You may want to leave it every now and then because you want to know if you can hack it in some other field. But the truth is you will miss it,” Del shares. “Other than radio, we also like trying new things. We’ve released two books. Even if let’s say we had a chance to do TV, we would still do radio,” Chico says.

“I don’t know if we would ever want to leave radio because for us, it’s our anchor. I think what we did for radio, we would like to do somewhere else but we don’t know what that is exactly yet,” Del reveals.

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The “Rushers,” as their fans call themselves, are addicted to this trio. The magic they have is tough to explain, but Del says it is because they are all very sensitive towards each other. “We know where each one is coming from, because we all see the truth of what life is… which is a barren rock of misery,” Chico says as we all burst into laughter again. Listeners love them because they remind us every morning that we should never, ever take ourselves too seriously and that it is perfectly okay to laugh at ourselves. They are proof times three that nothing beats being true to who you are.

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E-mail me at askiamsuperbianca@yahoo.com or message me on Twitter @iamsuperbianca.