Tag: commercial radio

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you hobnob : 1980 : Durham University Careers Advisory Service

“The Treasury,” said one.

“Banking,” responded another.

“The Civil Service,” replied another. It was my turn.

“Radio,” I said.

There was stunned silence. I felt all eyes turn toward me. Time seemed to pause while my colleagues processed their apparent incomprehension.

“What do you mean by ‘radio’?” eventually enquired the Economics professor in whose dark, dingy Old Elvet office our tutorial group was meeting.

I was somewhat taken aback. Who does not understand the word ‘radio’? Had he never read about Marconi? I grappled to maintain my decorum. I looked around at my fellow students dressed in three-piece suits or dress shirts or lavender cardigans with slacks over shiny black shoes. They appeared to have already been moulded into mini-me versions of their fathers (naturally there were no women). Their appearances were as dull and middle-aged as the careers they had said they desired. I was sporting my usual cheesecloth shirt, flared jeans and platform shoes, de rigueur 1970’s student-wear. Evidently, I inhabited a different dimension from my colleagues. Had Ann MacGregor twiddled the dials of her SAGE computer and sent me back a whole century to an era before radio had been invented? Where were Doug and Tony? I hoped they had not landed the other side of the street, inside Durham Prison.

“’Radio’ as in ‘broadcasting’,” I answered, struggling to control my patience, “where I want to produce programmes for a radio station.”

“Oh … kay,” said the tutor with the weariness of a grizzled academic attempting to explain monetarism to the village idiot. “So why are you here studying economics?”

“Because economics interests me,” I replied.

That was my second faux pas of the day. I looked around again and realised that my fellow students were not there primarily because of any enthusiasm for the subject. They were simply fulfilling their destiny, determined from the day they had been born into families who had then spent huge sums over two decades on their private education. For my colleagues, a job within the top echelons of government or commerce was not a career ambition. It was a birth right. It was simply the ‘payback’, the ‘return on investment’ expected as reward for the six-figure sum that Tarquin’s parents had spent to secure his social status. He and his former school chums felt entitled to their guaranteed shiny futures.

In the 1970’s there was no degree course in radio. No degree course in media. I was amongst Britain’s 94% of children who had attended state schools. Now I was amongst the 14% of the population to attend one of the country’s 45 universities. I had been forced to choose the academic subject in which I performed best at my school … and in which I was interested. With minimal career guidance, I had selected the university which I believed offered the best reputation. What nobody had advised me was that Durham was stuffed to the gills with toffs whose academic record at private schools had not proven exemplary enough to win them a place at Oxford or Cambridge. As someone who was certainly not ‘privileged’, had I wished to spend three years in a ‘Chariots of Fire’ theme park?

In my tutorial group, when one fellow student had spoken for the first time, I failed to understand a single word he had said. I assumed he must have been speaking some unidentifiable foreign language. Then I looked around and noticed my fellow students nodding in agreement as if they had understood him perfectly. I was confused. The next time he spoke, I struggled harder to comprehend his speech and managed to pick out the odd word in English. Only then did I realise that he habitually spoke in an upper-class accent so cut-glass as to prove almost incomprehensible to someone like me. Hand on heart, I am not exaggerating. I would have understood every word spoken by The Queen, but this young man’s speech was so stilted as to be easily mistaken for a parody of an upper-class twit.

I cannot recall a single conversation about economics with a fellow student on my course. Our academics never asked us to work in project groups. The toffs were being groomed to assume their rightful place as ‘captains’ of industry or government, for which there was no apparent necessity for them to converse with someone from the lower classes. It was evident to them from my accent, dress sense and demeanour that I resembled the servants or the ‘help’ their families employed at their mansions. I was similarly invisible to them, not having the ‘right stuff’ conferred by a private education, as had more than 90% of students at Durham. Worse, I betrayed no ambition to try and join their ‘club’. Unlike them, my parents had paid nothing toward my education, which made my chosen career very much my own affair.

I already subscribed to ‘Broadcast’ magazine and bought ‘The Guardian’ on Monday for its media job advertisements. Now it was time to visit the university’s Careers Advisory Service to locate suitable job vacancies. Its one-room office in a modern two-story building in Palmers Garth was filled with standalone shelf units of file holders, each collecting documents from one employer. I made an appointment to talk with an advisor but the earliest date was more than a month away. During the waiting period, I worked my way along every file on every shelf, searching for any employer within the media. What surprised me then was how few of the 4,000 Durham students seemed to require the facility. What I failed to understand was that most jobs for the upper classes were the outcome of who they knew or who their family socialised with, rather than requiring the bother of a formal application.

On the day of my appointment, I brought along my articles published in the student newspaper in a portfolio I had created from sheets of thick A3 black card stitched together. The advisor I met was an elderly woman with grey hair and John Lennon-style wire-frame glasses, like Granny from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’. Asked about my career choice, I replied it was ‘radio’.

“We cannot offer you any help if you choose to pursue a career in the media,” she said sternly, staring at me over the top of her spectacle frames. What? I felt outrage that I had waited more than a month for her so-called ‘advice’.

“But I started producing radio programmes seven years ago in London and …” I told her.

“I’m sorry, but getting a job in the media is all about the people you know,” she interrupted and then stood up to go.

I was abruptly left alone, not even having been offered the opportunity to show her my portfolio. Or explain to her the details of my prior radio experience. Or my election as editor of the student newspaper. Or my election as editor of the annual student handbook. Or my election as deputy president of the students’ union. Or my success arguing with the University for an unprecedented increase in the student union’s subscription income. Or my success turning around the student food shop from loss to profit. None of that seemed to matter. I was appalled by the ‘careers advice’ I had just been given. My long awaited ‘interview’ had lasted less than a minute.

Eight months later, I received a letter from the Careers Advisory Service. I presumed it must be a circular sent to former students to update its records. But no! It was a personal letter requesting my help to advise an undergraduate who desired a career in radio and asking me to show him around my workplace. My initial thought was to tear this letter into little pieces and throw it on the living room fire. How very dare they! … However, a few days later, my benevolence got the better of me and I realised I should help a student who might be in a similar situation to mine not so long ago, regardless of how much contempt I felt for the letter’s sender.

I now had a full-time job at Metro Radio, the commercial music radio station in Newcastle, which I had achieved by responding to an on-air announcement I had heard asking for candidates. The vacancy had not been advertised in either ‘Broadcast’ magazine or ‘The Guardian’. I resolved to contact the student and arrange to chat and show him around the station’s premises. Whether he went on to pursue a career in radio I never discovered.

By then, I had learnt precisely how ‘selective’ the university was about recruiting students. In 1978/9, I had been the student representative attending Durham University’s ‘Admissions & Matriculation Committee’ where statistical reports showed that some years certain of its colleges had accepted not a single student educated in a state school. These data were never published.

Four decades later, surely things must have changed? Er, maybe not. A 2022 headline in the Durham student newspaper screamed ‘Durham has lowest state school intake of any UK university’ and quoted student Keely Brown:

“… many [Durham University students from state schools] have no prior knowledge of what awaits them at university, let alone experiences of classism or discrimination and, alongside feelings of imposter syndrome, it can feel like Durham isn’t the place for them.”

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/it-aint-what-you-do-its-way-that-you.html]

The Best Man for the job : 2003 : Neil Stock, The Radio Authority

 When someone leaves their job, what are the chances that the ‘best man’ to replace them will be:

  •  the groom at whose wedding their predecessor was Best Man, AND
  •  a contemporary at the same university, AND
  •  a volunteer at the same student radio station?

Wielding my four mathematics GCE’s and a pound-shop calculator, I sat at my desk calculating the probability of such an alignment of coincidences for a job appointment within my workplace. If this had been an internet start-up of Cambridge science graduate nerds, no eyebrow would have been raised. But in a British government quango? My calculator produced a gibberish result from the very first calculation. But when I turned around its display, the characters appeared to spell out ‘NEPOTISM’. I switched to an Excel spreadsheet but it too crashed. Microsoft made contact, suggesting I lease processing time on its supercomputer to complete my calculation of a ‘1 in …..’ probability that would require several zillion zeros. I gave up.

After an unexplained rush to appoint me, The Radio Authority had left me alone, twiddling my thumbs at my desk for three months. There were no team meetings or supervisor get-togethers to attend, so nobody remarked upon my ongoing inactivity. Had my colleagues even browsed the ‘management’ section of a bookstore? Work tasks were assigned by way of someone with a supreme confidence in their own superiority marching up to your desk and barking orders, before turning around and marching away again. It began to feel as if I had been press-ganged into the Civil Service as deckhand on a ship of pen-pushing fools.

Finally, by month four, I was given a project by the manager who had appointed me, David Vick. The local commercial radio licence for West Lothian in Scotland had been advertised and my task was to write a paper to be presented at a Members’ Meeting, recommending to which applicant the licence should be awarded. No problem, I thought. A decade earlier, I had regularly spent a morning in the broadcast regulator’s library, reading multiple applications for a particular licence and then summarising them during the afternoon in an article of several thousand words for the weekly ‘Broadcast’ magazine. I was thinking that a more detailed paper might take me a week to write. Then Vick told me that I had … two months. Oh, and there was only one applicant.

I was offered no guidelines, no style sheet, no system to follow, no advice. Just “write a paper – you have two months.” I executed what I considered to have been a thorough job. I researched the local media market, the radio market, the applicant’s business plan, everything I could find. This was my first project. I wanted to impress my boss. There were days when Vick asked me why I was using the office printer so much, seemingly oblivious to the demands of evidential research. After six weeks, I gave him my draft document and asked him to mark it up so that I could understand which parts he wanted to keep or discard. He invited me into his office to discuss my work. Had I done well? Er, no. He went ballistic. He screamed and shouted at me.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Vick yelled. “This isn’t an Authority Paper. What do you think this is? Can’t you write?”

He stormed out of his office and marched down the corridor shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” at the top of his voice. It was left to me to presume that our meeting must have ended, without me having uttered a word.

I was shocked. And very confused. I believed that I could write … and write quite well. Vick had read my CV and knew my articles about the radio and music industries had been published in trade and consumer publications, some of which had employed me as sub-editor or editor. My job application here had even required me to submit a one-page essay entitled ‘The London Radio Scene’. During my job interview, Vick had not critiqued my supposed inability to write. Why would I have been appointed?

Later that day, Vick’s deputy marched up to my desk and requested a meeting. In their rehearsed good cop/bad cop roleplay, Vick apparently judged Neil Stock the best man to ‘offer’ to bang my report into the requisite, undefined shape and style of ‘Authority Papers’. I did not bother to argue. Stock was eminently qualified by having studied American Literature, having never worked in commercial radio and, to the best of my knowledge, having never published an article about the radio industry. Visually, he was Beaker to Vick’s Doctor Bunsen Honeydew. Stock’s frigid demeanour recalled the android Bishop in the movie ‘Aliens’ whose ‘humanity’ module might never have been activated.

Stock occupied a spacious office on the opposite side of the corridor that resembled one of those IKEA showrooms where everything looks too perfectly arranged to be real and the desk computer turns out to be fake. I sat facing him across a desk ring-fenced with multiple stationery pots filled with over-sharpened pencils of varying hardness and a row of staplers, holepunches, paperclips and elastic bands. Stock’s patronising spiel, instructing someone twice his age how to write, floated off into the ether above my head. My eyes were scanning the office carpet for evidence of vomit stains where my colleagues had alleged his predecessor had been found unconscious following an over-liquid lunch. After that incident, Stock’s Best Man had been shoehorned into a board-level job in a commercial radio group, a responsibility which had proven so successful that I had overheard Vick on the phone to the CEO trying to save his prodigy’s bacon.

One week later, Stock gave me back the document. It still had my name on the front but almost nothing within remained of my six weeks’ graft. Every single table, graph and map had been expelled. Every reference to a specific number (such as Census population data) had been rounded and referred to as ‘approximately’ or ‘about’. All evidential sources such as media and radio market data had been expunged. My sentences had been conjoined with ‘and’ or commas until each contained at least seventy words. Some paragraphs filled almost a whole A4 page. Subjective adjectives had been attached to references to individuals, tainting them with judgement as to whether they were in or out of favour with The Radio Authority. This was writing, Jim, but not as we journalists know it.

I asked Stock to remove my name from his revised document as it no longer resembled anything that I had written. He refused. I asked that his name be added to mine as joint author. He refused. We may have been sitting opposite each other at his desk, but each of us had landed there from different worlds. My quarter-century in journalism had been spent explaining facts. His few years in this civil service madhouse seemed to have been spent obscuring facts. If his university had offered a module titled ‘Using Words as A Weapon: How to Write Baffling Prose’, he would certainly have scored an ‘A’.

Naturally, Stock’s boss David Vick was happy with the result. It looked and read just like something he would have written himself. I was required to present the paper to a monthly Members’ Meeting, reading a pre-approved two-minute script from which I was forbidden to deviate. Neither was I allowed to use audio-visual aids in my presentation. Vick had instructed me not to contribute to the ensuing debate unless a specific, factual question was addressed to me directly. I saw absolutely no point to my presence at the meeting. It achieved only what the organisation’s officers had carved up beforehand. The licence was awarded to the sole applicant. My ‘work’ in The Radio Authority was merely to keep up its appearance of objectively regulating the radio industry.

Months later, an uncharacteristic silence broke out amongst my colleagues in our crowded office. We had already been told that our regulator was about to be merged into a new, bigger government organisation. What we had not learnt until then was that our new manager was to be … Neil Stock. There was stunned silence as the news sunk in.

This was the Neil Stock who, on arrival at work each day, would email his ‘team’ a ‘Pop Quiz’ question that required an emailed response within the hour. When I refused to play this childish game, he complained that I was not a team-player. But I had no interest in flaunting my encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music earned from having created radio station formats over several decades. Mike Read was not my hero.

This was the Neil Stock who refused to attend the quarterly team-building, afterwork social visits to a local pub or restaurant that our employer mandated. Management apparently thought it was insufficient that we already spent forty hours every week in each other’s company in one cramped office. During one such social evening, my colleagues expressed astonishment that I had not been made to take a UK geography test before my appointment, which had been required of them. It was as if knowing the county town of Rutland proved a perfect substitute for non-existent knowledge of the radio industry that a new employee would be regulating.

This was the Neil Stock who only popped into our office briefly if there was something specific that he wanted to address to one of us. Watercooler chat, small talk, even casual morning greetings or afternoon farewells were apparently foreign concepts. Enter his office at 4.30 and he would be enthusiastically sharpening his huge pencil collection on a desk uncluttered by a single folder or sheet of paper. Enter his office at 4.50 and he was already being whisked by train back to his IKEA showroom house and wife in Cambridgeshire.

This was the Neil Stock who chose not to inform his own underlings that he had been appointed their new manager. Neither did we learn it from our then manager, David Vick. The news reached us that fateful day as part of a general personnel update email from the new regulator Ofcom. Once again, our managers were demonstrating their non-communication skills.

Our office was not the only one rendered speechless by the news. A hush spread over the whole floor as our colleagues digested that Stock would not just be managing our team, but most of the 40-odd staff about to be transferred from The Radio Authority to Ofcom. What a meteoric rise through the ranks for someone so, er … inexperienced? In 2000, Stock had been judged the best man to replace his Best Man. By 2003, somebody somewhere considered Stock the best man to manage Britain’s commercial radio licensing system, a job that had not been advertised publicly.

We were left to presume that Vick must have decided to take retirement since it was plainly evident that his nineteenth-century style of management – writing everything longhand, never touching a computer keyboard, bellowing from his office at his two full-time administrative assistants whenever he needed to send/receive/print an email – would have proven awkwardly Luddite within the determinately twenty-first century Ofcom.

The pair’s Hawkins/Harker partnership was about to be dissolved. Meet the new boss …

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-best-man-for-job-2003-neil-stock.html]

Living on the frontline : 1985 : Dave Asher, 21 Aharonson Street, Tel Aviv

[Dave Asher, 1985]
“There’s a bomb!” someone shouted. “There’s a bomb!” 
I had just collected ‘NME’ from the newsagent that reserved it for me each week and had been lazily staring at a display of the new ‘designer’ stretch jeans in the windows of Gloria Vandebilt’s shop. All had been calm on the city’s main shopping street. Then suddenly it was chaos. People ran in all directions as if their lives depended upon it … which they did. Men, women and children screamed as they fled down side streets, their shopping bags flying behind them like parachutes. I was in amongst them, running at full pelt until I thought I was far enough away from the suspect device. How would I know? I didn’t. Did I hear an explosion? No. Was it really a bomb? I never knew.
On the walk home, I called in at the post office and joined a lengthy queue at the counter for overseas mail. Once I handed over my letter, the man behind the counter inspected it and adopted the withering look of an adult castigating a child … or a new immigrant.
“You cannot send this,” he said, visibly weighing up my ignorance. “We are at war.”
“Oh,” I said sheepishly, taking back my letter. “Okay. Thanks.”
Where I came from, you could send a letter anywhere in the world. I had spent much of my childhood doing just that, writing to radio stations as far away as China, Russia and Syria … and receiving replies. However, I was now learning that life is different during a time of war. I had written a fan letter to ‘Radio One’, an FM station in Beirut, Lebanon with English-speaking DJs who played the latest international hits, interspersed with familiar identification jingles stolen from ‘BBC Radio One’. Since radio transmissions ignore borders and war zones, I had become a committed listener in recent months. Now I had to return home with my unsent letter.
‘Home’ was temporarily a house at 21 Rehov Aharonson in Tel Aviv, where I was sleeping on the living room floor of the lower flat rented by fellow Brit Dave Asher. He was a well-known DJ in Israel from having presented the ‘Voice of Peace’ radio station’s breakfast show for several years. There were drawbacks to my accommodation. One morning I awoke to find ants nesting in my hair, while the nocturnal journeys of slugs from behind the adjacent bathroom sink gave me frequent ‘Alien’-type nightmares. But Dave had let me stay for free and I was grateful for his generosity. Weeks turned into months; how quick they pass.
Dave had a job as DJ at a city centre basement lesbian nightclub which he kept inviting me to attend. I did visit on one occasion, but was faced with the challenge of convincing two burly doormen that I wanted to enter a female-only club filled with scantily clad women because I said my male friend was working inside. Dave was also the DJ at a packed concert by American drag queen Divine in a huge former cinema, one of the most entertaining events I have attended. My crazy plan was to remain in Tel Aviv by finding a job in the record industry, for which Dave had helped me make contact with people he knew in the business. Pre-internet and pre-mobiles, this required a lengthy wait for replies to handwritten letters.
As summer was hot inside the flat, at the end of the day I would walk the short distance to the end of the street and sit on one of the public seats along the promenade. I could put my feet up on the sea wall, read the day’s ‘Jerusalem Post’ newspaper, watch the sun set over the Mediterranean and cool down in the onshore breeze. One day, a man seated near me asked if he could read my paper when I had finished with it. He spoke in Hebrew and I replied likewise.
By then, I had learnt enough of the language to hold a basic conversation. The frustration of not even understanding destinations displayed on the front of city buses had forced me to learn the Hebrew alphabet and numbers from a schoolbook. Every afternoon I developed my vocabulary by watching ‘Sesame Street’ (‘Rehov Sumsum’ in Hebrew) on television, where the first word I learnt was the ‘dustbin’ in which Grouch (Moishe Oofnik) lived.
I was suspicious of this man trying to strike up a conversation because, weeks earlier, I had been sunbathing alone on Tel Aviv beach when a man came and sat far too close to me on the sand and propositioned me for sex. He appeared to interpret my indignant refusal as merely ‘playing hard to get’ and continued to pester me, so I now avoided the beach and its potential for further unwanted attentions.
Thankfully this man on the promenade seemed different. Because our initial conversation had been in Hebrew, he found it hard to believe that I was not a recent immigrant to Israel struggling to learn my new language. After several rounds of questioning, he was eventually convinced that: I was not Jewish; I was British; I spoke English; and I was Christian. Only once these facts had been established did he have sufficient confidence to identify himself to me as a Christian Palestinian.
“Meet me here at the same time tomorrow,” he told me. “There is something I want to show you.”
Despite an incendiary device having recently exploded at the end of our street, thankfully with no casualties, I decided to risk meeting this man again the next day on the promenade. We walked to a walled compound a few hundred metres away where he spoke Arabic into the intercom, the gate opened and we walked through a garden into a house. He took me inside and knocked on what appeared to be a bedroom door. When it opened, it was immediately apparent that this was no normal small bedroom.
Bunk beds were butted up against each other on three walls of the room, leaving no space in their midst for other furniture. The small window had been covered so that the room was dark except for a single lightbulb on the ceiling. After my entrance, I was being stared at by six men, each sat on their bunk, their sweat thick in this non-air-conditioned room. My guide explained to them in Arabic why I was there, then he turned to address me.
“I wanted you to see how Palestinians have to live in Israel, the same land in which our families were born,” he told me. “Before dawn every day, we are employed outside to clean the beaches, sweep the streets and collect rubbish but, by the time the sun comes up and the crowds come out, we have to make ourselves invisible by returning to accommodation like this. As a fellow Christian, I wanted you to see how we are forced to live in our own homeland so that you can tell people what life is really like in Israel for those who are not Jews.”
A man arrived with a big bag of takeaway food which he started to dole out to each of the men in the room. I wondered to myself if I was to be included in their evening meal and how that could happen when there was no available space for a guest to sit. My guide quickly quashed that notion.
“The men will not eat their food in front of a stranger,” he explained. “We have to go now.”
It had only required a few minutes in that crowded room for the man to have made his point. He was understandably angry about his people’s situation. He told me that, having seen their conditions myself, I now had evidence to refute the disinformation that most of the world believed. We left the compound, he went his own way and I never saw him again.
After several months of messages, letters and calls from public phone boxes, I was finally offered a meeting with the head of an international record company’s Israeli subsidiary in his penthouse flat. There I explained that I had recently secured airplay on British radio for Israeli pop records through my knowledge of the UK radio industry. I believed I could do more like this to develop Israeli music’s presence overseas.
“You should go home,” he told me sternly. “Israel is not the place for you. There is a war going on. The economy is in bad shape. Things are terrible here. Go home and find yourself a job there.”
I departed Israel on the next available flight, disappointed by my failure to secure a job. I left behind an economy with an annual rate of inflation nearing 1,000% and a currency so devalued that it required a thick wad of banknotes just to buy a loaf of bread. Prices in shops had to be updated daily, written on post-it notes stuck along shelf edges. At checkouts, there were insufficient banknotes in tills to provide change, so customers were given the equivalent value in sweets and candies. Coins had become obsolete because they were worthless. I was carrying around several hundred banknotes stuffed down the front of my underpants because my wallet was now too small.
Back in Britain, within three years I had organised the release and promotion of an Israeli record that reached number 15 in the UK singles chart, accompanied by a ‘Top of the Pops’ television appearance. It became the biggest selling Israeli record in Britain since Esther and Abi Ofarim’s ‘Cinderella Rockefella’ in 1968, coincidentally my very first single purchase. Singer Ofra Haza became an international star, later recording songs for a Disney movie. Despite failing to find a job in Tel Aviv, I had managed to successfully pin music from Israel on the ‘world music’ map of the 1980’s.
It was Dave Asher who had first introduced me to Ofra Haza’s music in 1985. Two decades later, his job was presenting the breakfast show on a radio station … in Beirut!

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/living-on-frontline-1985-dave-asher-21.html]

The rubber stamp men … and women : 2002 : Members Meetings, The Radio Authority

 “Did you enjoy your day off yesterday?” a member of my team asked me one morning.

“Yesterday?” I enquired, slightly confused.

“Yes,” he continued. “You weren’t in your office all day so we guessed you had taken the day off.”

Ah! Now it began to make more sense.

“Unfortunately, I was not off yesterday,” I replied. “I was in meetings all day in the boardroom upstairs.”

That was true. It had been just one of a multitude of similar days when, from my arrival at eight until evening, I had bounced from one meeting to another, and then another. Had I even eaten lunch? We were launching a new London radio station, KISS FM, where I was the only member of the management team with prior commercial radio experience. My page-a-day diary was necessarily crammed with all sorts of meetings. In some I had to make presentations, some I had to chair and some I had to minute. For many months, there never seemed time to do real ‘work’ in my job because of all these meetings.

My initiation into the world of apparently endless meetings had happened a decade earlier. As sabbatical deputy president of a student union, my life was sacrificed to committees, sub-committees, executive committees and student councils, listening to and engaging with student activists who loved nothing more than to talk and talk. I had also been nominated as the student representative on umpteen university committees, in which twenty to thirty grey academics and administrators sat around a massive wooden boardroom table for hours, leafing through the half-ream of agenda papers before them in an effort to stay awake. Much of my life for one year comprised evenings spent punching holes in paperwork and filing it in huge ring binders for posterity.

Two decades later, starting my first job within a government ‘quango’, I anticipated that I would once again be drowned in meetings and sub-committees. I soon discovered that, at The Radio Authority, nothing happened … literally. I was crammed into an office the size of a modest living room with five colleagues sat at trestle tables around the perimeter, obliging each of us to face a wall or the only window. Filling the middle of the room was an overlarge high storage unit with map drawers that nobody seemed to use. This anti-social working arrangement could have been an approximation of the organisation’s management system.

The first day at a new job, you except to be left alone to familiarise yourself with your desktop computer and your new surroundings. However, you do not expect the one hundred subsequent days to repeat like Groundhog Day. For three whole months, I was given nothing to do. There seemed to be no day-to-day workflow system, no meetings, no distribution of tasks amongst members of my department. I could have come to work every day and idly stared at a blank computer screen. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing, or not doing, so I busied myself writing an economic analysis of ownership concentration levels in local radio markets. Before starting, I had asked the finance department if they had already written such a document. They looked at me like I was crazy. I was already wondering why the required start date for this post had proven so urgent.

Then, out of the blue, development director David Vick, who had interviewed me for the job, asked me to attend The Radio Authority’s next ‘Members Meeting’. Once a month, senior managers like him met formally with Members, six men and three women handpicked from ‘the great and the good’ by somebody somewhere as representatives of the ‘public’ whose taxes were funding this regulator. Having drawn my salary for three months but contributed zero so far, I was keen to impress somebody/anybody that I was capable. I read the meeting agenda and accompanying documents, including one written by a Radio Authority colleague recommending the award of a new local radio licence. I researched thoroughly the issues for discussion.

At the meeting in the boardroom, Radio Authority managers were lined up along one side of the oval table, with Members seated along the other. I was not intimidated. I had attended dozens of meetings like this elsewhere over the years. I sat at one end of the table and kept my counsel until the recommendation to award the local radio licence was discussed. Once my colleague had finished presenting his paper, I raised my hand. The Member appointed as chairman, Richard Hooper, was sat at the far end of the table and asked me to speak. There was a look of collective astonishment on the managers’ faces. But I held the belief that we were all in a genuine meeting … together. I simply had some factual information to contribute.

I had brought along my own analysis of government statistics that demonstrated a high level of poverty in the locality for which this local radio licence was about to be awarded. When compared with similar stations, I concluded there would be insufficient advertising revenues to support a standalone licensee within this relatively small and poor locality. I suggested that it made more economic sense to award the new licence to an existing neighbouring radio station that could then expand its coverage area, rather than offer it to a new business that appeared very likely to fail. The lay Members listened and understood my arguments, rejected my colleague’s recommendation to award the licence to a standalone applicant and accepted my alternative solution to reward a competing neighbouring applicant.

After the meeting ended, I felt pleased that I had made a valuable contribution on the first occasion I had been involved in any kind of discussion or meeting within the organisation. I was not feeling smug but I did enjoy the sense that my skills were finally being valued and had influenced decision-making. This sense of positivity lasted less than a minute. Barrelling down the corridor behind me was the manager who had invited me.

“What the hell did you think you were you doing in that meeting?” David Vick demanded.

“I was contributing to the decision-making with a factual analysis that was not in my colleague’s report,” I replied. This appeared to make him even angrier. I will omit the swear words:

“You were not asked to speak. You were not expected to speak. Nobody asked your opinion. Nobody wanted your opinion. That licence was nothing to do with you. Had I asked you to be involved in it? No. So what the hell did you think you were doing?”

Vick was very angry and not afraid to demonstrate it. I had thought I was proving my worth at work, while he seemed to be thinking the opposite.

“What I am going to tell Ralph?” he was shouting at me. “How on earth can I explain to Ralph what just happened?”

I knew immediately that he was referring to Ralph Bernard, chief executive of Britain’s largest commercial radio owner, GWR Group plc, that operated dozens of local licences across the country … awarded by The Radio Authority’s Members Meetings. The paper written by my colleague had recommended awarding this new licence to a local start-up in which GWR had agreed to take a minority shareholding. Over the years, I had witnessed this familiar story play out remarkably often: once a new local radio licensee failed financially, it would receive a buyout offer from its minority shareholder, usually a large radio group such as GWR. A decade earlier, I had watched minority shareholder EMAP plc take over KISS FM this way. The regulator did not like to be seen to be handing new local licences to the same handful of commercial radio groups … but that was the end result anyway.

“I have to phone Ralph now. This is going to be a very difficult conversation.” Vick was still shouting at me. “I hope you realise what you have done.”

I returned to my office, shaken but not upset. I had been invited to that meeting. I was asked to attend. What would have been the point if I had not contributed? When was a meeting not a meeting, according to my understanding of the definition of the word? Was I expected to sit there dumbly, merely observing bad decisions being made due to a lack of information or analysis? Apparently, the answer was yes.

Sat at my desk, I recalled my very first day in the job when David Vick had bizarrely instructed me: “Don’t talk to the people in your office about radio.”

I thought I must have misheard him and asked him to repeat it. No, what I had understood him to have said was totally correct. Vick went on:

“You know far more about radio than the other people in your office, so don’t talk to them about it.”

At the time, I was nonplussed. We were called The Radio Authority and we were responsible for regulating the commercial radio industry. How could I not talk about radio? Three months later, I was beginning to comprehend that I was employed in an organisation where being an ‘authority’ on the topic of radio was apparently not considered a virtue.

Later that fateful day, Vick called me to his office. He was calmer now but I was wary of saying anything that might stoke his rage again. He told me there were new rules that I would have to follow:

“When you are invited to attend another Members Meeting, I want you to submit a script to me in advance of what you are going to say. It must be precisely two minutes long. In the meeting, you must say exactly the words on that script that I approve and absolutely nothing else. You must not talk about any other subject in the meeting and the only reason to speak at all will be if somebody directly asks you a question. Have you got that?”

“Yes, I understand,” I said sheepishly. It was hard not to conclude that the angry man in front of me appeared to be utterly bonkers. I remained grateful that he had offered me a much-needed job, but I now understood that I was employed in a madhouse where the definitions of ‘meeting’ and ‘decision making’ appeared to be completely alien to my own experiences working in commercial businesses. I just hoped I could survive this nightmare.

Only one other person employed at The Radio Authority while I was there had prior experience in the commercial radio industry. It was alleged by my colleagues that he had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown after starting there and had been off work for months. Why was I not at all surprised?

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-rubber-stamp-men-and-women-2002.html]

Rich man, dead man, radio man, spy : 1995 : John Kluge & Natalie Slepova, Radio 7 Moscow

 

He was dead. He was definitely dead, his face turned blue from the extreme cold. His body was lying face-up on the street, at the top of a staircase that led from the subway station below. I was amongst hundreds of commuters that morning who were forced to crowd to one side of the exit to avoid tripping over his corpse. Nobody gasped. Nobody said anything. Nobody stared. Nobody stopped. We all remained focused on our daily journeys to work, trying not to contemplate the precarity of our own lives.

My commute to work was arduous. I had to take two subways and then an overcrowded bus. The subway was complex to navigate and I sometimes discovered I had travelled the wrong direction or alighted at the wrong stop. I always boarded the bus at its rear door without a ticket. Not because I could not afford to pay, but because I had no idea how or where to purchase a bus ticket. The job of the bus driver was simply to drive the bus, not to sell or check tickets. During several years making this journey, I worried constantly that a ticket inspector would board the bus and bundle me away forever for having broken some law. But it never happened.

I arrived at work to be informed that this was a special day. Later that morning, a coach pulled up outside our workplace. It was no ordinary coach. It was huge, the size you imagine a football team might need, and it had darkened windows. I was amongst a line of colleagues stood waiting in the cold, opposite the door of the vehicle. It opened and several men in sunglasses and dark suits emerged, marched around the vicinity and eventually radio-ed that our location appeared safe. They completely ignored us. There was yet more waiting.

Then the coach door opened a second time and a frail old man walked slowly down the steps. He was eighty years old and his name was John Kluge. He had been named number one on Forbes’ rich list in 1987, the richest man in America. The previous year, he had sold his local television stations for four billion dollars to Rupert Murdoch, who had relaunched them as his Fox TV network. Kluge had used part of the cash to acquire all sorts of businesses, one of which he had deigned to visit that day.

Some minutes later, I was surprised to see a young woman coming down the steps of the coach. Despite the cold, she was dressed as if she had just spent the morning in a Venice Beach café. The contrast in age with Kluge could not have been greater. Maybe this was his daughter, I thought. Maybe his grand-daughter? Surely not his girlfriend? His ‘companion’? Possibly a future fourth wife? I am not certain I ever understood her identity. Apart from the ‘men in black’ and the presumed coach driver, this bizarre couple were the only passengers we saw exit the huge vehicle.

In between the parked coach and our offices located in an oversized hut, our American manager Mike Lonneke was warmly greeting his billionaire employer, overlooked by a stone bust atop a column … of Lenin. Extreme communism came face-to-face with extreme capitalism that day … on the outskirts of Moscow. We were in a large, high-security park where, only years before, a powerful Soviet radio ‘jamming’ station had created deliberate interference to broadcasts by the Voice of America and BBC. Post-Perestroika, Kluge’s business, Metromedia International, had acquired a radio station located within the park named ‘Radio 7’. Lonneke led the team charged with turning around the business from the least listened of Moscow’s 30-odd stations to top of the ratings.

Within the line of personnel greeting Kluge that day was Russian citizen Natalie Slepova. Following Kluge’s purchase of the station, its entire staff had been sacked and replaced … except for Slepova. Apparently, Russia’s arcane laws prevented employers from sacking single mothers, so she had remained on the staff. She printed her own Radio 7 business card with her preferred job title. She came to the office when she wanted, such as an occasion like today. A job in Soviet Russia had seemed merely to confer entitlement to an income, rather than an onerous responsibility to perform tasks that would be evaluated. No Annual Reviews there.

My work in Moscow required almost no interaction with Slepova, so it came as a complete surprise when one day she invited me to lunch. It would have been rude (maybe fatal?) to refuse. I was told to meet at her apartment, rather than at the radio station. Most Russian city dwellers lived in horrible high-rise concrete apartment buildings that resembled Britain’s worst post-War council estates. I found her building near the Kremlin to be a mini-palace with high ceilings, enormously wide staircases and gigantic ornate doors sized for giants. Think regal Paris chic rather than Ronan Point. If her circumstances were intended to impress me, they certainly did. But how could a single mother afford to dwell in such opulence?

We ate at a reputedly excellent restaurant in a city centre shopping plaza. The food was predictably awful. Slepova asked me dozens of questions, but not casual enquiries about me and my work. She wanted to know details about how Metromedia was organised and its long-term objectives. The only accessories missing from this inquisition were the rope around my chair and the spotlight in my eyes. I offered her no information, not only out of reluctance, but more so because I was merely a distant foreign contractor to Metromedia who knew next to nothing about its strategy. Despite my years working for the corporation, I never had a contract, a job title or even a letter of agreement. Lunch over, Slepova barely acknowledged me from then on. Evidently, I had proven completely useless to her.

To compare Moscow in 1995 to the Wild West is do it an injustice. It was much more frightening than that. Several unexplained ‘incidents’ I witnessed involved the radio station. Shortly after my arrival in Moscow, its American advertising saleswoman had been dining with potential clients in a restaurant when masked men stormed in, shot dead everyone at an adjacent table and ran off. The next day, she resigned and booked the next available flight back to the States. The restaurant cleaned up and reopened for business as if nothing had happened. So much could be witnessed in Russia that was never reported.

It was evident to foreign observers that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had been demonstrating increasingly erratic behaviour during his foreign excursions. Reputedly an alcoholic, Yeltsin had refused to leave his plane at Shannon Airport to meet the Irish prime minister in 1994. Bill Clinton alleged that, on a visit to Washington in 1995, Russia’s president had been found on the street drunk, in his underwear, trying to hail a taxi to a pizza restaurant. Yeltsin had already suffered several heart attacks and a quintuple bypass operation, so it was perceived as credible that he might die on the job.

I was asked by Radio 7 manager Lonneke to create a procedure for the station’s DJs to follow, should they learn that Yeltsin had suddenly died. He was concerned that, should a presenter continue with the popular music format following the president’s death, it could provide the government with an excuse to cancel the American-owned station’s licence. I wrote a list of instructions for the DJs, scripted appropriate announcements to be read and purchased CDs of sombre Russian classical music. My document was translated into Russian, placed in a plastic wallet with the CDs and taped to the wall of the studio under a large sign: “If the president should die, open and follow this procedure.”

Within a matter of days, I arrived at work to find unusually that the overnight DJ was still present and was upset. Apparently, in the middle of the previous night when he had been the only person present in the building, several men wearing balaclavas had burst into the studio. They seemed to know exactly where to find the instructions I had written in case of Yeltsin’s death, had ripped the plastic wallet from the wall and made off with it. They had neither identified themselves nor explained their actions. It was a dramatic raid on our little radio station.

The walled and barb-wired park in which the station was located always had armed government security guards at its only entrance, to whom I was required daily to show my identify card and clearance document. How had the masked intruders entered the property? The guards could offer no rational explanation. How did the raiders know where the station’s unmarked building was within the park? How did they know exactly where to find the document in the radio studio? How did they even know that such a document existed?

It was apparent that, as a result of us having contemplated the possibility that Russia’s president might die in service, we had attracted the attention of forces much bigger than us. The evidence pointed to the worrying conclusion that the overnight raid could only been the outcome of a knowledgeable informant having observed intimate details about our radio station’s operations. We would never know for sure who that insider could have been.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/rich-man-dead-man-radio-man-spy-1995.html]

To win, somebody’s got to lose : 1989 : Martin Strivens, Centurion Press

 It has always been difficult for me to understand how white South Africans who built successful careers under the country’s apartheid regime can live with the guilt and shame. Does their sense of superiority extend to EVERYONE else? Do they harbour an intrinsic cruelty to others? Would they have been merciless playground bullies if they had attended school with ‘normal’ kids? Had the word ‘meritocracy’ been purged from South African dictionaries?

Our Earth has finite resources. For each ‘winner’ within society, there has to be an equivalent ‘loser’. The much-vaunted term ‘wealth creator’ is an oxymoron. No billionaire is lauded by The Financial Times for their success as a ‘poverty creator,’ despite the accelerating transfer of resources from the poor to the rich having widened inequalities. In a South Africa where apartheid legislation rigged the education, social and legal system in their favour, each white colonial who succeeded must have purposefully condemned five black Africans to failure and lifelong poverty.

Nothing could have been further from my own experience growing up in Britain. When ten-year old Jacqueline Dixon came to school one day with a red dot painted on her forehead, our teacher Mr Hales invited her to the front of the classroom to explain to the rest of us what it signified. My school explored, explained and respected the cultural differences of the mixed bunch of kids it taught. I never witnessed anyone being abused or bullied there. I imagined that the grown-up outside world would be like that too. I was wrong.

When I joined London black music pirate radio station KISS FM in 1988, its only non-music policy was rejection of South Africa’s apartheid regime. I wholeheartedly supported this stance, having boycotted South African produce, transferred my account from Barclays Bank and protested at demonstrations since the 1970’s. The majority of KISS FM’s personnel were black, not by design but because the station had attracted the most knowledgeable personnel from London’s vibrant black music scene.

To obtain a legal broadcasting licence, it was necessary to name a person qualified in finance on the application form submitted to government. I was surprised to discover that the person selected for this role at KISS FM had attended school and university in South Africa between 1965 and 1974, then been employed for four years by a Johannesburg accountancy firm. I was baffled as to how this choice squared with the station’s anti-apartheid policy.

Apparently, a family friend of KISS FM’s co-founder was David Evans (now Lord Evans) who had launched a print business named Centurion Press in 1971. It was Evans who had recommended his company’s finance director Martin Strivens, now relocated to London. If the licence application were to prove successful, Evans, Strivens and Centurion Press would become KISS FM shareholders.

From Strivens’ initial visit to the KISS FM office in his smart suit, it was immediately apparent that he was not like the rest of us. His white South African accent, his shiny briefcase and his cold attitude did not seem to fit at all with the station’s ‘Radical Radio’ slogan. Visits from a succession of similarly suited men soon followed.

After KISS FM’s first licence application managed by radio DJ Dave Cash had failed, I volunteered to take on the task of co-ordinating and writing the second application for a London licence. The important financial aspects of our application proved particularly difficult because Strivens possessed no knowledge of radio broadcasting, no knowledge of black music and no understanding of London pirate radio’s two-decade history of creating a huge underground music scene. I found that I had to explain every little requirement of a radio station … and then justify it at length, often in written form.

I never sensed that Strivens respected me or my skills. I had already written successful funding applications to government. I had managed staff. My radio career had started in London pirate radio almost two decades earlier. I was the only member of KISS FM’s management to have worked in commercial radio. I was the only team member to have implemented a successful radio station turnaround strategy. I knew intimately all the elements required to build and run a commercial radio station, yet I found that each of these elements had to be argued interminably with Strivens. He was already insisting that essential components be cut from the budget, despite him not comprehending their purpose.

Additionally, my education in economics, accountancy and law meant that I understood and could challenge the budgets and spreadsheets that Strivens shared with me. Maybe he had been accustomed to presenting swathes of computer printouts to non-financial people who simply stared at the jumble of numbers and nodded their heads. I was different. I had worked with accounts for my family since I was in junior school. I had turned around a university bookshop and food store from loss to profit within a year. Yes, I was involved in KISS FM because I was a huge fan of black music and radio … but I had practised skills in running a business too.

During 1989, out of the blue, I was told to attend a meeting late one afternoon with Strivens in Centurion Press’s office at 52 George Street. This seemed highly unusual as he normally visited the KISS FM office in Finsbury Park to discuss the station’s budget. Entering a deep lobby from the street, Centurion’s offices were located to the left on the ground floor behind two sets of plate glass sliding doors. My discussions with Strivens comprised the usual dialogue of him demanding budget cuts and me having to explain how an item was essential for a functioning commercial radio station. Our talk dragged on past five o’clock and I saw Centurion’s staff leave.

After we finished, Strivens informed me that the KISS FM office had called his receptionist and asked me to call back. I thought this was unusual because, as far as I knew, nobody was aware I was at Centurion’s office. Using one of the desk phones, I called the office and enquired why I had been contacted. While I was in conversation, Strivens interrupted and said he had to rush off.

“How will I get out of your office?” I asked him.

“Go through the first set of sliding doors, then press the button to open the second set. It is all automatic.”

I thanked him. He rushed out and left me alone in the office suite. The KISS FM office could not understand why I had been left a message to call them. Nobody there had needed to contact me that afternoon. I hung up, somewhat baffled. Strivens had left. I packed up and left too. I exited through the first set of sliding doors which closed behind me. I pressed the next button in the ‘airlock’, as instructed. Nothing happened. I pressed again. Still nothing. I turned behind me. There was a button for the doors I had passed through. Nothing happened when I pressed it. I was now trapped in a small space between two sets of thick glass sliding doors.

Despite suffering mild claustrophobia, I was reassured by the fact that the two sets of sliding doors were plate glass, so I could clearly see the office behind me and I could view the rear of the building’s lobby in front of me. There was a tiny gap between each pair of doors, not enough to prise them open, but sufficient to supply air for me not to suffocate. The floor space was about four feet by four feet, too small to lay down in but I could sit on the floor and wait for someone in the lobby to see that I was trapped. Except that nobody ever appeared. It became dark.

It was seven o’clock the next morning when a cleaner arrived, shocked to see me locked inside the small space. Using her keys, she opened the outside door. I thanked her. I had been lucky the meeting had been on a weekday. Tired and cold, I caught the Underground home, had a wash, ate breakfast and headed back into London for a normal day’s work at the KISS FM office. I told nobody what had happened. Strivens never said a word to me about the incident, though I presumed the cleaner must have shared her shock with staff at Centurion. Our budget meetings continued for many months, though I was never asked to visit Centurion’s office again.

My relationship with Strivens failed to improve. The budgets were amended to pay the station’s senior managers (except me) considerably higher salaries, while my budgets for producing the station’s programmes were cut. At the end of 1989, I was thrilled that my licence application proved successful, beating dozens of competing groups with access to many more resources than us. But, for me personally, it was the beginning of the end. I was denied the bonus I had been promised. I was denied the shareholding in the station for which I had already negotiated a bank loan. I was even denied any initial pay, despite having been ordered to give up my other work commitments. Once my KISS FM salary started, it was half the amount paid to Strivens, despite the enormity of my role as programme director, managing the majority of station staff and the largest departmental budget.

Only months after its launch in 1990, KISS FM hit financial problems as a result of its sales and sponsorship directors having failed to come even close to meeting their targets. Everyone was ordered to attend a staff meeting at which redundancies and pay cuts were announced, mostly within my department. At the same time, extra staff were to be recruited within advertising sales. We learned that Strivens would forego a promised pay rise, him having already sacrificed his Porsche company car at Centurion Press for a Jeep at KISS FM. There was anger in the room at the notion that this was a ‘sacrifice’ when DJs had just been told their payments per show would be halved.

Within six months of its launch, KISS FM’s audience exceeded one million listeners per week, the objective I had written into the station’s budget as achievable by the end of Year One. Despite having been the only manager to surpass my target, I was summarily sacked. No bonus. No pay increase. No Jeep. No gratitude. The station’s co-founder purloined my job title. It was evident that this had been his plan all along. If I had failed to achieve my target, I would have been sacked. If I succeeded, he was ready to take the credit. Within weeks, he went on to libel me in The Independent national newspaper, blaming me for the station’s problems. I was on the dole.

Despite (because of?) the drastic cuts that had been implemented, KISS FM continued to under-perform financially. By 1992, media conglomerate EMAP plc had bought out sufficient shareholders, including Strivens, Evans and Centurion Press, to take control of the company. EMAP had previously held a minority stake in the station, the outcome of an introduction I had made back in 1989. Strivens resigned as finance director of KISS FM in 1993 and returned to Centurion Press, promoted to managing director.

Strivens’ LinkedIn profile states that he “played a major role in the successful launch of London radio station Kiss 100 FM.” Rather, he epitomised the dawning of the ‘roots versus suits’ antagonism that bedevilled the station in its transition from illegal pirate station to corporate youth brand. Perhaps unknowingly, Strivens heralded the end of KISS FM’s pirate radio ethos. He and fellow shareholders’ undeclared objective had always been to transform our little black music fan club into a pop music station to rival market leader Capital Radio. Loadsamoney!

Farewell ‘Radical Radio’.

[The story of the pirate station’s transformation is detailed in my KISS FM book]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/to-win-somebodys-got-to-lose-1989.html]

The 'Fahrenheit 451' of commercial radio history : 2003 : The Radio Authority

“Without a knowledge of your history, you cannot determine your destiny” Misty In Roots, ‘Live At The Counter-Eurovision 1979’

 I love history. I hated History. My Empire-made History GCE text book chronicled world history from the era Neanderthal Man emerged from Milton Keynes up to Britain’s singlehanded success winning the Second World War. Neither the book nor my teacher brought history to life, debated the outcomes or analysed lessons learned. Weekly homework was an essay merely paraphrasing one chapter of the book. Termly tests required regurgitation of these essays, a task I failed as I could not memorise names, dates and events by rote. After two tortuous years, we had just learned of Hannibal opening an elephant sanctuary and Britain’s offer to the Romans of work visas to build its roads and public baths … when I was finally allowed to drop History.

Before grammar school beat History out of me, I had developed my own random interest in the subject. We had few books in our home and my parents had a remarkably hands-off attitude to childrearing, so the local library substituted as my mentor as soon as I could walk. I would stagger along the 500-metre route home weighed down with dozens of fiction and non-fiction books, my borrowing limit enhanced hugely by additional tickets I had registered in the names of my younger brother, parents and grandparents. Junior school set no homework, my schoolfriends all lived a mile away and my parents left me home alone most weekends to build their dream house, so I read voraciously. Combining the librarians’ helpful suggestions with my own casual curiosity, I devoured The Narnia Chronicles by age eight, lost interest in finishing ‘The Lord of The Rings’ at age nine and was given nightmares by John Fowles’ novels at age ten.

Radio broadcasting had emerged as an early interest, stimulated by my parents’ love of ‘Big L’ on their car radio, so I collected any information I found about the industry, clipping news stories from newspapers and Pritt sticking them into scrapbooks. Much later, I combed second-hand book sellers and charity shops for books to add to my growing personal collection. As one of Amazon’s earliest international customers, I had to fax a scan of my credit card to order arcane radio books unseen in Britain. I kept two lists, one of radio books I owned and the other of book titles I wanted, updated by scanning British Books in Print catalogues in libraries. I felt there was much I could learn about radio from its history.

It was not until the 1980’s that I discovered the library of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) government quango, a little-known haven in its Brompton Road office. Its diligent librarian clipped every story about broadcasting from national and local newspapers and filed them by topic in folders. I spent weeks there, probably months in total, reading commercial radio licence applications and researching the history of commercial radio from its launch in 1973. Cuttings in the library’s ‘pirate radio’ folders proved an essential source for my narrative about the two-decade struggle by London pirate stations for legal status published later in my KISS FM book. Then, in 1991, the government split the IBA into separate regulators for television and radio. The library that had proven so invaluable suddenly vanished.

Years passed until I was reminded of the usefulness of this library when I was researching a report for the BBC Trust. Where was it now? I learnt that it had been stuffed into 1,100 boxes containing a million documents and been donated to Bournemouth University. However, 800 of those boxes remained archived in an off-site storage facility that could not be visited. The University sent me a 10MB file of its ‘IBA Archive’ that detailed its contents, but it had been compiled in Microsoft Access, not a software within reach of a cheapskate non-academic. Dead end. My cherished memories of reading thousands of documents in the air-conditioned comfort of the peaceful IBA library would never be repeated.

The government replaced the IBA with The Radio Authority for the regulation of commercial radio. In 2002, on my first day of employment there in a junior role, I was shown around all the offices of its floor within a Holborn tower block. At the end of the tour, I asked: “Where is the library?”

“Library?”, my guide laughed. “We don’t have a library.” I was nonplussed.

“But you receive hundreds of applications for radio licences,” I replied. “What happens to them?” A decade earlier, I had sat in the IBA library for days reading dozens of radio licence applications. Then I had written the application for London pirate station KISS FM that had won its licence. I knew from experience that applications could be as thick as phone directories and included detailed tables, spreadsheets, budgets, programme plans and market research. They were significant historical documents.

“Once we have read the applications and awarded a particular licence, we send them to an archive somewhere,” replied my guide. “If you want a particular document, you CAN request it. But it can take weeks or months to be delivered from the archive.” I was still reeling. I was thinking to myself: surely the basic day-to-day task of a media regulator is to ensure that a radio station acts upon the promises that it has made in its licence application. But if that document is not at hand, apparently not.

By the end of my first day of work, this conversation was just the first indication of baffling work practises I encountered at The Radio Authority. One year later, the organisation was preparing to be closed and merged into a new regulator named Ofcom. Each of the forty-odd staff was required to join an assigned group that was preparing the merger. I was told to attend meetings of an Ofcom sub-sub-subcommittee that I found had no responsibility for radio. My contribution was nil.

Then, unexpectedly, one of the managers approached me and assigned me a second task. The entire correspondence between commercial radio stations and the IBA, plus its successor The Radio Authority, was kept in a series of packed filing cabinets in the finance office, ordered by sequential chronological licence number. These were effectively the regulator’s master files. Nothing at the organisation was stored digitally. Everything was still on paper. 

What was my new task? I was ordered to look at the paperwork of every licenced radio station and destroy all documents that were not a legal or contractual requirement. Day-to-day correspondence in both directions would be discarded. I was told that Ofcom had requested the records of commercial radio licences be reduced from several overflowing filing cabinets to a single drawer. Everything not legally required had to be destroyed. (Afterwards I was uncertain if this had been a genuine Ofcom order or just a useful excuse to destroy evidence.)

I was conflicted. To this day, I fail to comprehend whether I was given this task because I had a better knowledge of radio history than my colleagues (only one other of whom had worked in a commercial radio station). Or was it an act of deliberate cruelty by a manager who had already screamed at me for having had the temerity to write and circulate documents that analysed the radio industry WITHOUT HAVING BEEN ORDERED TO? Was I being valued … or bullied?

I set to work over the following weeks, glancing at each report and item of correspondence filed during the thirty-year history of Britain’s 267 commercial radio stations. The only exception was KISS FM’s folder which I had been forbidden to handle. I had to discard more than ninety percent of this fascinating history. Other staff were similarly throwing out their own paper records, filling huge fabric sacks that lined both sides of the main corridor. At times the volume of rubbish was so great that it became difficult to navigate until the weekly pick-up. The scene resembled a movie thriller when the bad guys have been tipped about an imminent police raid and then rush hell for leather to destroy all their incriminating evidence. During those few months, we produced dozens of rubbish bags that were to be shredded and burnt.

I was sorely tempted to try and save some of these historical documents but, having signed some kind of Official Secrets Act on my first day of work, I realised I could be prosecuted if any of these discarded documents ever appeared in public. For consolation, I salvaged the contents of the stationery room which bizarrely had also been binned, hid it all under my desk and took home night-by-night sufficient paper, pens, notepads and folders to supply my household for the next decade. Many of The Radio Authority’s senior staff had chosen to retire rather than transfer to the new regulator, so we can only guess how many skeletons in their office closets were burned in the organisation’s bonfire of the vanities.

After decades having researched, read and created a personal library focused on the history of radio broadcasting, it remains difficult to reconcile this crazed episode in my career when I had to incinerate a significant part of that history. I love history. I hated being ordered to destroy so much irreplaceable history at The Radio Authority. Having worked in Germany and Cambodia, I know what horrors sometimes follow such book burnings. 

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-fahrenheit-451-of-commercial-radio.html]

One door opens, another is closed by someone posh : 2009 : John Myers, Digital Britain

 A posh voice opens doors. Not literally, unless you are royalty, but figuratively. Opportunities seem to fall out of the sky for those who speak in a recognised way that conveys their breeding and their assumed elevated status in British society. I have observed this as someone who has never considered myself posh, as someone who has never been perceived as posh, but as someone who was thrust unprepared into a world of posh people from the age of eleven. Until my first day at grammar school, I had mistakenly believed that ‘people were people’ (to quote Lou Rawls) and that ‘meritocracy’ was a fact rather than a fancy theory. My mum had believed it too, having just bought me a red ‘Harvard’ sweatshirt from Farnborough outdoor market for having passed the eleven-plus exam. I wore it to bed (in the style of Susan Saint James) for the next thirty years until it literally wore out .. but Harvard remained a fantasy.

My claim to have never had a posh, or posh-ish, voice could be challenged by someone who knew me at age four. I was shocked when I revisited a recording of my recital by heart at that age of ‘Winnie The Pooh’, made on a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder my father had bought second-hand from the pages of ‘Exchange & Mart’ magazine which he would pore over every week. I sounded frighteningly like a distant relative of the Queen and nothing at all like my parents. Maybe I was trying to emulate fellow toddlers at Gay Trees nursery school on Grand Avenue where owner Mrs Potten had insisted I play a reluctant shepherd in the annual Nativity play. In summer, she would lead us all onto the adjacent Recreation Ground to sit on the grass and watch the uncensored violence of her one-woman Punch & Judy show.

During the following seven years, I attended a state school on a council estate where my posh-ish voice must have been modified by a desire to integrate with my new set of peers whose ‘overspill’ families had been relocated there from South London suburbs bombed during the War. From then onwards, the only posh voice evident in our household was my mother habitually answering our phone with “Camberley double one three one”, inexplicably speaking as if she were Mrs Bouquet. Aside from this mannerism, I cannot remember meeting anyone who had a posh voice. It was not until I was aged seventeen that I visited the Ascot home of posh schoolfriend Kate Graves and asked why there was a bell button in every room, only to be told that it was used to call a servant from the scullery. Okay, I thought to myself, I must have passed into a parallel universe.

My first indication that posh people and radio were a match made in heaven arrived when I was sharing a landing with a Durham University final year music student who had heard me regularly rabbit away about my passion for radio. One day he startled me with the news that he had accepted his first job as a producer on BBC radio. I was gobsmacked. Why? Because he had never once shown an interest in radio or demonstrated any understanding of how radio programmes are produced. I was pleased for him … but I was baffled. He had not been hired as a trainee. He had been hired to produce radio programmes without apparently having what might be considered the relevant skills to do the job. Months later, I looked in ‘Radio Times’ and, sure enough, his name was listed as producer of major daytime programmes on BBC Radio Three.

Perhaps this event, which seemed insignificant at the time, had been sent to me as a sign. Perhaps the gods were telling me that I should heed their advice, that I must stop believing in ‘meritocracy’ and that I should find myself a career ambition other than radio. If that was the case, I stupidly ignored their heavenly intervention. As a result, I expended a huge amount of effort during the next three decades, making dozens of applications for BBC radio job vacancies, being interviewed for many of them, but always being rejected. On occasion, I knew the person whom the BBC appointed and I knew the brevity of their CV … but they did possess a posh voice.

Fast forward to 2009. I was crossing London’s Shaftesbury Avenue in the company of John Myers, for whom I was writing a report for the British government’s Digital Britain initiative. Having finished a work meeting together in a nearby café, I was about to catch an Underground train home, whilst John was heading to his chauffeur-driven car. As we stood on the kerb, waiting for the traffic lights to change, John said something casually to me that started with the words: “Posh boys like you …”.

I immediately laughed out loud. Without thinking, my reflex action was to declare to John: “I’m not posh”. The words fell out of my mouth immediately without considering any potential consequences.

“Really?” said John.

“Yes,” I said. “I was born in a council house and went to school on a council estate. I am definitely not posh.”

“Oh,” responded John … and then we moved on to discussing other topics.

On my way home, I reflected on why John might have thought I was posh. He had a broad Lancashire accent and could never himself have been described as posh. He had worked his way up the radio industry from a start as programme assistant in BBC local radio in 1980, ending as chief executive of Guardian Media Group Radio in 2008. I could only guess that most of the people John was meeting at his present level of work were undeniably posh. He had been commissioned by the government, its ministers and its civil servants to produce a significant report on the regulation of the commercial radio industry in the digital age. Almost every one of his contacts for this work must have been posh. Perhaps, to him, I appeared to be just another of these posh ‘boys’.

Whatever the reason for his off-the-cuff comment, I sensed during the weeks and months that followed, that John’s attitude to me altered perceptibly. He continued to hold daily conversations with me by phone, email or in-person, as was necessary for me to ghost-write his report. In parallel, he had regular conversations and meetings with senior people in the radio industry, government and the Civil Service. But I was never invited to meet any of these people, even though it would have proven a lot more productive for me to have taken notes at these meetings rather than having to wait for John to relay me their content and outcomes. John convened and met regularly with a ‘committee’ of seven senior people and with a separate ‘consultation group’, both of which are listed at the end of the written report. I was credited merely with ‘research and support’, despite having transformed John’s handful of pages into a coherent 104-page document.

As a result of the report, John was invited by the radio industry to give the keynote speech at the 2009 Radio Festival event. As with the report, John sent me his drafted notes in advance, which I converted into a speech and an accompanying presentation. He did not invite me to attend the event. One morning, I woke to hear the bedside radio on BBC Radio Four broadcasting a live interview with John concerning the report. Once the written work had been completed, John did not keep me informed of the publicity it was receiving or its impact on government policy.

I was disappointed. John had needed my skills to research and write what came to be known as ‘The Myers Report’. However, after our ‘posh’ conversation, he had been careful to keep me away from the radio industry people who might prove useful contacts for me to find a job in radio, but who might see that it was really me writing the report rather than John himself. I understood how difficult it must be for a significant document bearing your name to be ghosted by someone else who had never been chief executive of a radio business, as he had, and by someone who was not even posh like his peers. 

I consider John an example of how ‘posh’ not only commands respect amongst similarly posh people, but equally from people who are not at all posh. Posh equals clever. Posh equals superior. Posh equals special. Posh equals the ability to make people of every class believe you deserve to be treated as someone who can rule, can manage, can order, can tell the rest of us what we do. Whatever comes out of a posh person’s mouth is believed and, even if evidently untruthful, is retained as ‘gospel’. Posh people maintain their superiority only because the rest of us let them, encourage them and look up to them in the master/servant, upstairs/downstairs deference we have implicitly imbibed since childhood. Posh is superpower.

I had worked with John only as a result of sending him an e-mail attached to an analysis paper for MA studies that I had written earlier about the same regulatory aspect of radio for which his report had been commissioned. He had offered me a £10,000 fee to provide research support. Very quickly, my responsibilities went much further and led to five months full-time work on this report, during which time I had to reject offers of other freelance work. I shared my concerns with John that my work with him had deprived me of income and he promised that, although I was underpaid for this commission, he believed it would lead to further reports on which the two of us could continue to work together. He recognised that we had complementary skills and we worked well together.

The first negative signal arrived when I invoiced John for my fee once the report had been published by the government. I was registered with HMRC for VAT (sales tax) and was legally required to add an additional 17.5% to my invoice. John responded that he was not registered for VAT and therefore could not reclaim any VAT he might pay to me. As a result, he did not want to pay the VAT on my invoice. This response confused me. I had no knowledge of the amount he had been paid by the government to write the report that I had just ghosted for him. I was certain it must be at least ten times the fee he was paying me. He was disputing a payment of £1,750 that was required by tax law, when he had probably earnt one hundred times that sum for the same work. I persisted but he refused steadfastly to pay the VAT of my invoice. I was not at all happy.

In 2010, I read in the news that John had been commissioned by the BBC to write a report about its radio services. This was exactly the kind of further work that John had promised me and which I was hoping to be considerably more lucrative for my contributions. I met him at a café near Broadcasting House to discuss this next project. Initially, he wanted to know about the online blog I had been publishing since 2008.

“How much are you paid for your blog?” John asked me, betraying his lack of understanding of online social media platforms.

I had to explain that a blog pays nothing but its author hopes that their online presence would lead to connections, work and income in the long run. It was a marketing exercise, but intrinsically unprofitable. He still seemed enthusiastic.

“How did you get your book published about DAB?” John asked.

My anthology of blog pieces about DAB radio had just been self-published as a book, so I offered him a free copy and explained the basics of creating a book for sale online and in bookshops. He seemed intrigued by the potential. Finally, our discussion moved on to the BBC report which John had been commissioned to write. My expectations were high. I was excited by the prospect of much needed work.

“You will not be involved in this report,” John said suddenly. “But I hope there will be something we can work on together in future.”

I was in shock. So much shock that I cannot recall the remainder of the meeting. I left feeling disappointed, deflated but mostly … betrayed. I had had to reject work the previous year because of the intensity of work on our last report. I had been paid a pittance. I had been promised work that now had not materialised. Because of the minor contribution with which I had been credited in the last report, I had received no unsolicited approaches to write similar reports. My work had been unacknowledged, unrewarded and now I felt I had been side-lined altogether.

I never received further offers of work from John Myers. But he started publishing his own blog about radio, much like mine. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery … but it does not pay the bills. Eventually I noticed that, in his blog, John was citing analyses of radio data that I had done and published in my blog, but he was neither crediting me nor linking to the source. As a result, I stopped publishing further blog entries after August 2011. It seemed pointless offering John further examples of my skills in analysis for him to claim the credit and make money.

In 2011, John Myers was appointed chief executive of The Radio Academy. In 2012 he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Cumbria. He published his own book about radio the same year but did not send me a copy.

At a Tribunal in 2015, John Myers was found guilty of tax evasion on earnings of £6.3m in 2005/6, for which he had paid only £130,000 in tax.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/02/one-door-opens-another-is-closed-by.html]

UK listening growth demonstrates radio's strengths in a multi-tasking world

The latest RAJAR ratings data for Q2 2011 demonstrate the continuing strength of the radio medium in recession Britain. Maybe if your TV or mobile subscriptions are having to be pruned, you turn to radio instead. In times of austerity, one of radio’s greatest attributes is that it appears to consumers to be available ‘free’ at the point-of-use.

‘All radio’ listening (1,076m hours per week) is at its highest since 2003. Adult weekly reach is 91.7%. Each listener spends an average 22.6 hours per week with ‘radio.’ These are impressive numbers. In this respect, it is important to remind ourselves that the RAJAR definition of ‘radio’ excludes:
• ‘listen again’ consumption of broadcast radio (online catch-ups of ‘The Archers’, for example)
• all podcasts
• listening to pure online radio stations
• listening to online music streaming services or personalised online radio (Last.fm, Spotify, etc).

If these additional ‘radio’ consumption sources could somehow be added to the RAJAR data, it looks likely that, using a wider definition, ‘radio’ would be performing at an all-time high. This is not at all surprising in our time-precious, multi-tasking world. Radio proves the perfect aural accompaniment to online social activities, whereas it is nigh impossible to watch television or read a newspaper at the same time as you browse the internet. Radio is a secondary medium – it never monopolises your time.

Commercial radio has benefited from this uplift in total radio listening. Total hours listened to commercial radio (470m per week) have risen from what is beginning to look like a nadir in early 2010.

During the last two quarters, commercial radio’s adult weekly reach has jumped above the 65% threshold (65.5% in Q2 2011) that had not been breached since 2003.

In absolute terms, commercial radio’s adult weekly reach has almost caught up with the UK population growth experienced since 1999, rising to 34m in Q2 2011, marginally below its all-time high the previous quarter.

The remaining stumbling block for commercial radio is that its average hours consumed per listener remain stubbornly low (13.8 in Q2 2011). As noted previously, young people are spending less time with radio [see blog]. Commercial radio’s audence is considerably more youth-orientated than BBC radio, which is why the average length of time for all adults listening to commercial radio remains in the doldrums.

With all this good news for the commercial radio sector, you might imagine that its share of total radio listening had started gaining in leaps and bounds at the expense of the BBC. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The BBC has benefited just as much as commercial radio has from the overall increases in radio listening. As a result, everyone’s volumes are ‘up’ and the share of commercial radio versus BBC radio has remained relatively constant. In Q2 2011, commercial radio’s 43.7% share was certainly an improvement on the situation in 2008, when it had looked as if the 40% barrier might be plumbed for the first time.

In fact, the BBC’s sustained strength in radio is becoming increasingly understated as more and more ‘radio’ listening is attributable to ‘listen again’ on-demand usage and podcasts. The BBC dominates the content available on both these platforms, whilst commercial radio’s offerings remain relatively sparse. At present, neither platform is measured within RAJAR. If they were, commercial radio’s share would undoubtedly be diminished further.

At present, this status quo (using RAJAR’s anachronistic definition of ‘radio’ as purely live and broadcast) suits both parties. The BBC does not wish to be seen to be even more dominant than it already is (54.0% of radio listening in Q2 2011). Commercial radio does not wish to be seen to be weaker than it already is (43.7%) in comparison to the BBC.

And who pays for RAJAR? The BBC and commercial radio. So we are stuck with an old fashioned metric that does not measure radio consumption in the 21st century sense of what we now call ‘radio,’ but which keeps both its paymasters happy … particularly as neither the BBC nor commercial radio would currently wish to demonstrate publicly the increasing popularity of online ‘radio’ consumption – which remains the biggest long-term external threat to them both.

Radio Invicta: the genesis of black music radio in London …. still unfulfilled

I only knew Roger Tate through listening to his programmes on the radio. He was a DJ on Radio Invicta, London’s first soul music radio station, launched in 1970. Invicta was a pirate radio station. Back then, there were no legal radio stations in the UK other than the BBC.

The notion of a campaign for a soul music radio station for London had been a little premature, given that no kind of commercial radio had yet existed in Britain. But that is exactly what Radio Invicta did. As Roger Tate explained on-air in 1974:

“Who are Radio Invicta? You may well be asking. Well, we’re an all-soul music radio station. We’re more of a campaign than a radio station, I suppose. We believe in featuring more good soul music on the radio.”

By 1982, Black Echoes music paper reported that Radio Invicta was attracting 26,000 listeners each weekend for its broadcasts. By 1983, Radio Invicta had collected a petition of 20,000 signatures in support of its campaign for a legal radio licence. There was sufficient space on the FM band for London to have dozens more radio stations. By then, local commercial radio had existed in the UK for a decade. But nobody in power wanted to receive the station’s petition and Invicta’s Mike Strawson commented:

“I have tried to speak to the Home Office about it, but it shuts the door.”

Radio Invicta eventually closed for good on 15 July 1984, the date that the new Telecommunications Act had dramatically increased the penalties for getting caught doing pirate radio to a £2,000 fine and/or three months in jail. By then, Capital Radio had enjoyed its licence as London’s only commercial radio music station for eleven years. Its monopoly reign was still to run for a further six years.

It might have seemed in 1984 that Radio Invicta’s fourteen-year struggle to play soul music on the radio in London had come to absolutely nothing. The Invicta team went their separate ways after the pirate station’s closure. Roger Tate continued his career as a successful technology journalist. After his death in 2001, aged only 47, one of his friends, Trevor Brook, spoke of Tate’s determination to play soul music on the radio in the face of opposition from the government and the radio ‘establishment.’ His eulogy at the funeral of his friend ‘Bob Tomalski’ included these comments:

“The government told the story that there were no frequencies available. Now Bob was not stupid. He had enough technical knowledge to know that this was simply not true. So, either government officials were too dim to realise the truth of the situation … or they were just lying. Nowadays, we have 300 independent transmitters operating in those same wavebands, so you can probably work out which it was. Anyway, in Britain, the result was that any proper public debate about the possible merits of more radio listening choice was sabotaged by this perpetual claim that it was impossible anyway.

So, we had pirates. Other countries which had not liberalised the airwaves had pirates as well, but some of them took the refreshingly realistic approach that no harm was being caused, and they permitted unlicensed operations to continue until they got round to regularising the situation. Ambulances still reached their destinations and no aeroplanes fell out of the sky. Not so in this country though. The enforcement services here were too well funded and the established orthodoxy too well entrenched. That ‘frequency cupboard’ was going to be kept well and truly locked!

Bob had thrown himself into running a regular soul station, Radio Invicta. He built a studio, tore it apart and built a better one. He eventually sectioned off part of the flat as a separate soundproofed area. He built transmitters – and got them working. But Bob was nothing if not multi-skilled, and he excelled in producing the programmes themselves. Using nothing more impressive than an old four track reel to reel tape recorder, Bob would create highly polished jingles and station identifications. ‘Roger Tate, super soul DJ.’ Other stations, both official and unofficial, listened to what Bob and his colleagues did and their ideas were copied or imitated.

Faced with the authorities, Bob was remarkable, because he was absolutely fearless. He was certain they were in the wrong and, given enough time, were going to lose the battle. It was a war of attrition and only perpetual piracy was ever going to bring about change. And he was quite right about that. The government kept winning the battle in the courts but began to lose the moral one. Eventually the law was changed.

Do we have free radio now? In the sense that anybody can decide to start up a new magazine, find the finance and get on with it, no, we don’t have that for radio. The process is bound up with a long winded regulation and approval process involving a statutory body which has had its fingers burnt in the past by the odd bankruptcy and the odd scandal. So they play safe and issue more licences to those who already have stations. The consequence is that originality and creativity get crushed into blandness and mediocrity. My own teenagers constantly flip between stations in the car, but they don’t care enough about any of them to listen indoors. Fresh people don’t get to control stations. Behind boardroom doors, they might think it privately, but in what other industry would the chairman of the largest conglomerate in the market dare to say publicly that even the present regime was too open and, I quote, ‘was out of date and was letting inexperienced players into the market’? That is a disgraceful statement. Where would television, theatre, comedy, the arts, and so on be, if new and, by definition, inexperienced people didn’t get lots of exposure? The industry is stale, complacent and rotten. Bob, there are more battles out there and we needed you here.”

Ten years later, these words are just as pertinent. It is hard to believe that a bunch of enthusiastic soul music fans who wanted to play their favourite music to their mates could have posed such a threat to the established order. But the history of radio broadcasting in the UK has demonstrated repeatedly that ‘the great and the good’ consider the medium far too important to let control fall out of their hands. Their arguments, however ridiculous, were taken completely seriously because they were the establishment.

Peter Baldwin, deputy director of radio at the Independent Broadcasting Authority, said in 1985: “We wouldn’t want to be dealing with two current local stations [in one area]. If it’s Radio Yeovil [operating as the only commercial station in Yeovil], well, that’s okay … But we couldn’t subscribe to competition [for existing local commercial pop music station Swansea Sound] from Radio Swansea, unless it was in Welsh or concentrated on jazz – and there probably wouldn’t be sufficient demand for that kind of service.”

James Gordon (now Lord Gordon), then managing director of Radio Clyde, wrote in The Independent newspaper in 1989: “It has to be asked whether there is really evidence of pent-up demand from listeners for more localised neighbourhood stations … Eight to ten London-wide stations would be enough to cater for most tastes.”

David Mellor MP told the House of Commons in 1984: “The government do not believe that it would be sensible or fair to issue pirate broadcasters with licences to broadcast. To do so, on the basis suggested by the pirate broadcasters, would be progressively to undermine the broadcasting structure that has evolved over the years.”

However, within five years, the government did indeed license a pirate radio station to broadcast in London. Once Invicta had disappeared in 1984, it was superseded by newer, more commercially minded, more entrepreneurial pirate radio stations – JFM, LWR, Horizon – that played black music for Londoners. In 1985, a new pirate station called KISS FM started, quite hesitantly at first. Its reign as a London pirate proved to be much shorter than Invicta’s but, by the time KISS closed in 1988, it was probably already better known than Invicta.

KISS FM went on to win a London radio licence in 1989 and re-launched legally in 1990. It carried with it the debt of a twenty-year history of black music pirate radio in London started by Radio Invicta and then pushed forward by hundreds of DJs who had worked on dozens of London black music stations. KISS FM would never have existed or won its licence without those pirate pioneers.

Sadly, the importance of KISS FM’s licence as the outcome of a twenty-year campaign seemed to be quickly forgotten by its owners and shareholders. The lure of big bucks quickly replaced pirate ideology during a period of history when ‘get rich quick’ was peddled by government as the legitimate prevailing economic philosophy. KISS FM lost the plot rapidly and soon became no more than a money-making machine for a faceless multimedia corporation.

Right now, there remains as big a gap between pirate radio and the licensed radio broadcasters as existed twenty years ago or even forty years ago. London’s supposedly ‘black music’ stations, KISS FM and Choice FM, now sound too much of the time like parodies of what they could be. Whereas, pirate radio in London still sounds remarkably alive, unconventional and creative. More importantly, only the pirates play the ‘tunes’ that many of us like to hear.

The issue of how black music was ignored by legal radio in London, and then betrayed by newly licensed black music radio stations, is on my mind because of my new book ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business.’ It documents a small part of the history of black music pirate radio in London, and it charts the transformation of KISS FM from a rag tag group of black music fanatics into a corporate horror story. I was on the inside of that metamorphosis and it was an experience that, even twenty years later, remains a sad and terrible time to recall.

In 1974, Roger Tate had wanted more black music to be heard on the radio in London. Ostensibly, that objective has been achieved. But the black music I hear played on white-owned stations in London (there is no black-owned station) is a kind of vanilla K-Tel ‘black music’ that is inoffensive and unchallenging.

If Croydon is the dubstep capital of the world, how come there is no FM radio station playing dubstep in Croydon, or even in London? How come I never hear reggae on the radio when London is one of the world cities for reggae? How come I had to turn to speech station BBC Radio Four to hear anything about the death of Gil Scott-Heron in May? Why is that Jean Adebambo’s suicide went completely unremarked by radio two years ago?

Legitimate radio in London seems just as scared of contemporary cutting-edge black music as it was in the 1970s when Roger Tate was trying to fill the gaping hole with Radio Invicta. Nothing has really changed. Except now there exists the internet to fill that gaping hole. And FM pirate radio in London continues to satisfy demands from an audience that legitimate radio has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t give a shit about. Is it any surprise that young people are deserting broadcast radio?

Forty years ago, I listened to Roger Tate and London pirates like Radio Invicta because they played the music I wanted to hear. Forty years later, I find it absolutely ridiculous that I am still listening to a new generation of London pirates because they still play the music I want to hear. As Trevor Brook suggested at Roger’s funeral, our radio system is so consumed by “blandness and mediocrity” that “the industry is stale, complacent and rotten.”

Roger Tate R.I.P. You may be gone, but you and your campaign at Radio Invicta are as necessary as ever today. Sad but true.