Tag: local radio

New upstarts clobber complacent commercial radio industry two-decade market monopoly : 1973-2005 : Independent Local Radio, UK

 The UK commercial radio industry has grown dramatically since the first station launched in 1973. The history of the industry can usefully be divided into two chapters:

1.  1973 to 1990

At the beginning of this period, local commercial radio stations were opened only in the UK’s biggest cities and then, in the 1980’s, new stations were launched in smaller cities and in largely rural counties. The regime was characterised by the word ‘monopoly’, as only one commercial station was licensed in each location (London was the only exception, with two stations licensed with very different formats). Each station broadcast its programmes simultaneously on the AM and FM wavebands, enabling it to reach the maximum possible audience in its coverage area. Each station’s success depended upon its ability to attract listeners away from national and local BBC stations, and its ability to attract advertising to the new radio medium and away from competitors such as the local press and regional television.

Listening figures to local commercial stations were generally very high. They were new, exciting and offered something more local and less stuffy than BBC stations. Because each local station was a separate local company, run by a local Board and financed by local shareholders, each station cultivated its ‘localness’ to the maximum in order to attract listeners. London’s ‘Capital Radio’ was a prime example of the success such a strategy could have. Using the slogan ‘In Tune With London’, every day the station used its converted red double-decker bus to visit a different London location, handing out stickers and leaflets, as well as offering listeners the opportunity to meet presenters and request songs. These ‘personal contact’ strategies paid enormous dividends and generated substantial loyalty between listeners and their local station. By the 1980’s, they were supplemented by community outreach projects and charity fundraising marathons. ‘Capital Radio’ had a JobCentre branch and a flat share information service in its foyer [see blog], which became young Londoners’ first means of finding accommodation in the city.

By the end of the 1980’s, local commercial radio was a big success with listeners and had developed a loyal following across two generations of listeners, giving it substantial audience figures across a wide variety of ages. Up and down the country was a range of fiercely individualistic, quirky stations, each with their own name, each with their own ‘star’ presenters, and each adopting their own idiosyncratic music format. By now, each had woven itself into the fabric of its community and was as much a part of local life as the town’s football team or the local bakery chain.

The one aspect of local commercial radio that proved problematic was stations’ inability to surpass their 2% share of total UK advertising expenditure. This percentage stubbornly refused to grow, even during times of an advertising boom and radio became known within the advertising industry as the ‘2% medium’. It was viewed as an ‘extra’ to be added to media campaign plans in times of boom, but quickly struck off when the economy was not so good. As a result, advertising revenues fluctuated enormously during downturns in the economic cycle and one local station was even forced into liquidation.

Radio’s main problems in attracting national advertising were:

• Even all the stations added together did not cover the whole UK

• Because each station was independently owned, buying a campaign on all existing stations was a labour-intensive task

• Station advertising rates and packages varied hugely, more dependent upon stations’ ability to extract such prices from local advertisers than any standard cost per thousand

• Station formats varied as much as their names, so that some stations delivered considerably older or more female-orientated audiences than others.

Because national advertising was so problematic, the majority of advertising sold on local commercial stations was derived from local businesses. By the late 1980’s, local radio had proved its effectiveness at marketing local products to local listeners, and a bond had been forged between local business owners and the local sales teams of stations that was the economic lifeline of these broadcasters.

At the same time, by the late 1980’s, complacency started to infiltrate local radio that resulted directly from stations’ lack of competition for listeners and lack of competition for local advertisers. Stations started to work less hard than they used to in order to please both their audience and their local business community. The government’s regulator released stations from having to fulfil many of their community obligations. Instead of seeing that work as an intrinsic part of their loyalty-building strategy, stations such as ‘Capital Radio’ closed their Community Department overnight [see blog]. At the same time, stations had their eye on merging with nearby stations to increase profitability, or arranging stock market flotations to generate capital for acquisitions. Several stations diversified into all sorts of businesses from theatres to restaurants, seeing themselves as ‘entertainment’ rather than purely ‘radio’ companies. In the 1980’s, anything that involved making money seemed a good idea.

For the first time in its history, the late 1980’s saw ‘Capital Radio’ suffering declining audiences and, like other local commercial stations, it had no idea what to do about the problem. It had only ever competed against the BBC for audiences and, only then, back in its very early days. Since then, it had always taken its audience for granted and simply presumed that listeners would never turn to any other station. All the local stations still enjoyed a monopoly over commercial radio advertising in their patch. It was something they felt they had a right to. The 1980’s economy was booming. Everyone was getting rich quick.

2.  1990 to now

The existing radio stations received their first major shock when the regulator suddenly licensed a range of ‘incremental’ stations in areas that already had existing local stations. This was the first time that the so-called ‘heritage’ stations had ever faced competition from newcomers. For example, in London, ‘Capital Radio’ lost audience straight away to ‘Melody Radio’ (targeting older people), ‘KISS FM’ (young people), ‘Jazz FM’ (wealthy middle-aged people) and ‘Choice FM’ (the Afro-Caribbean community). Suddenly, the audience that ‘Capital’ had taken for granted for so long was deserting it in droves for stations that sounded new, fresh, innovative and in touch with London, something that ‘Capital’ had done less and less of in recent years.

The second shock came when the regulator licensed three national commercial radio stations, a full thirty years after local commercial stations had been introduced. The industry had been arguing for years that it could never break through the 2% barrier (of all advertising spend) unless businesses and agencies were able to offer clients a proper ‘national’ opportunity to book a single campaign across the whole UK. New national commercial stations could offer such a deal and give the existing local radio stations a chance to share in radio’s enhanced visibility. As a compromise, the new stations were deliberately introduced in such a way so as not to impact local commercial radio audiences too greatly. The national ‘popular music’ station was to be confined to the poor-quality AM waveband, while only a minority-interest music station would be allowed the coveted national FM slot.

The third shock came when, having seen the success achieved by some of the specialist music stations that were part of the ‘incremental’ experiment, the regulator decided to roll out a programme of many more new local stations in more areas with existing ‘heritage’ stations. Thus, the 1990’s heralded the biggest and fastest expansion of radio stations the UK had ever seen, immediately after a period of relatively slow industry growth in the 1980’s. The shock of moving from a stagnant period of complacency to suddenly being immersed in a highly competitive situation where they had to fight for both listeners and advertisers proved a wake-up call for many local stations. What followed still has a considerable impact on the radio landscape of today. The radio industry underwent a fundamental re-structuring that included:

a.   The emergence of radio groups

A limited amount of consolidation had occurred during the 1980’s, largely based on regional geography, whereby groups were formed from the combination of several local stations in a region (i.e. Midlands Radio Group Ltd, Suffolk Group Radio Ltd). As early as 1985, GWR Radio Ltd started a series of acquisitions based on the simple motivation that ‘big is better’ and the trend continued throughout the 1990’s with stations bought and sold for greater and greater sums of money.

b.   The entry of media groups

Starting in 1990, large cross-media groups such as EMAP plc, Virgin Group Ltd and Chrysalis plc bought their way into the radio industry, acquiring a mix of heritage stations and newly launched stations. This substantially increased the sale prices of local stations.

c.   National advertising

The launch of the three national radio stations had the desired effect of attracting national advertisers and agency media buyers to radio for the first time. With local stations now consolidated into fewer groups, it became easier to buy campaigns through a single selling point to run on stations across a region or regions. Both the national and local stations benefited from the influx of national revenues.

d.   Cost cutting

In an industry where costs are mostly ‘fixed costs’ and revenues are almost infinitely ‘variable’, GWR Group pioneered the strategy of cutting costs to the bone at the many stations it acquired. According to GWR CEO Ralph Bernard: “It became very evident that if you don’t have size, you don’t have the ability to do things and you are forever trying to find the money to fix leaks, literally.” GWR’s policy of implementing economies of scale across its stations led to the centralisation of many tasks.

e.   Local advertising

As stations became incorporated within larger and groups, national advertising became of more and more importance to their owners. The bedrock of local radio, local advertisers, soon became serviced by regional rather than local sales teams, until eventually they were serviced hardly at all from a national sales office. As a result, local advertising revenues became less and less important to groups that were growing bigger and bigger.

f.   London agencies

With the rise of youth brands in the marketplace, and the evident success of London youth station ‘KISS FM’ [see blog] in creating a commercial focus for a demographic that had never before been served by commercial radio, London advertising agencies suddenly wanted to buy campaigns on stations that delivered 15- to 34-year-olds. Faced with both local and national competition for audiences and revenues for the first time, local heritage stations suddenly started chasing a younger audience. As a result, the middle-aged audience that had been loyal to their local commercial stations for many years started to drift away (mainly to ‘BBC Radio Two’), alienated by stations playing too much dance and rap music.

g.   ‘BBC Radio One’

Although the turn of the 1990’s had been a scary time for local heritage stations as they suddenly faced competition in their own areas from competing commercial stations for the first time, they were all helped immeasurably by the BBC’s decision to change drastically the programming of its most popular station, ‘Radio One’. Until then, this station had a remarkably large audience of diverse ages that overshadowed local commercial stations in most regions of the country. As a direct result of the BBC’s bizarre volte-face, between 1992 and 1994 five million listeners left ‘Radio One’ and most sought refuge in local commercial radio. These latter stations’ audiences suddenly boomed and they became the most listened to in their markets, without having to change or do anything different. The BBC had unintentionally saved their backsides.

h.   Lack of investment

With audiences growing hugely because of the demise of ‘BBC Radio One’; with revenues booming because of the ability to sell national advertising on larger and larger groups of stations; and with stock market values of radio groups buoyed by the industry’s breakout from its former position as the ‘2% medium’, group owners were quick to redistribute their substantial profits to shareholders. After a relatively lean period in the 1980’s, ‘radio’ was suddenly riding on a ‘high’ in the financial community. Ignoring the fact that their product had only become popular as a haven of last resort for listeners fleeing ‘Radio One’, group owners invested almost none of their lucky profits back into the development, improvement or update of their product.

i.   Networked programmes

Instead, station owners sought ways to cut even further the fixed costs of their station operations. Led by GWR Group plc, groups persuaded the regulator to let them network some programmes from a central production studio, instead of each of their stations producing all of its own content. In a lengthy process of attrition, by bullying a regulatory agency that lacked any long-term strategic plan for the industry, group owners were allowed piece by piece to extract the ‘localness’ from their local stations. Local voices, local station names, local celebrities, local music, local content and local news all became sidetracked or dispensed with by many group-owned stations.

j.   The rise of brands

Led by EMAP plc, which championed the notion that nationally recognisable brands were preferable to local identities, many local radio stations were stripped of the very characteristics that had made them ‘local’ in the first place. In an attempt to make their product controlled, homogenous and universal, the largest radio groups invested considerable sums in state-of-the-art technology that enabled stations up and down the country to be playing exactly the same record at exactly the same time, appended at the end of the song by a jingle that said ‘Coventry’ or ‘Newcastle’ as appropriate, depending upon the station’s location.

k.   Format convergence

Although the listener is now offered a considerably wider choice of commercial radio stations in most local markets than was the case in the 1980’s, the industry is plagued with competitors who are all trying to move towards the same middle ground [see blog]. In yet another war of attrition that the regulator has lost again and again, many stations have stretched the definition of their prescribed programme formats to (and often beyond) their limits. This has created a situation where stations that are (by the regulator’s definition) meant to be complementary are in fact found to be competing for the same audience demographic and for the same advertisers in the very same market, by playing exactly the same music. This leads to substantial market ‘cannibalisation’ whereby competitors merely steal audience from each other, rather than attract listeners from the biggest competitor, the BBC.

l.   The decline of the music industry

Commercial radio in the UK, modelled on ‘BBC Radio One’, has always relied upon the universal popularity of ‘popular music’ to be the cornerstone of its programmes’ appeal. Until around 1990, almost everyone in the UK had a common notion of what a ‘pop hit’ was. But from the time that ‘Radio One’ refused to play the first ‘house music’ record that reached Number One in the singles chart, it was obvious that such communal experiences were on their way out. The subsequent rise of ‘dance’ music amongst young people polarised popular music and led to a substantially fractured music market. Now, the market for singles is all but dead, CD sales are at an all-time low, and the cult of ‘celebrity’ has replaced the cult of ‘pop stars’. Frankly, commercial radio stations have almost no idea any more what music they should play to attract listeners.

[Excerpt from ‘A Brief History Of United Kingdom Commercial Radio & A Strategy To Create Genuinely Local Radio‘, Grant Goddard, 2005, 33 pages]

[First blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/10/new-upstarts-clobber-complacent.html ]

The birth and near death of licensed black music radio in London : 2010 : Choice FM, London

 31 March 1990 was the memorable day when London‘s first licensed [South London community of interest] black music station, ‘Choice 96.9 FM’, arrived on-air. Until then, the availability of black music on legal radio had been limited to a handful of specialist music shows, even though about half of the singles sales chart was filled with black music. The decision by then regulator the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA] to license a London black music station was part of a huge government ‘carrot and stick’ campaign to rid the country of pirate radio. On the one hand, new draconian laws had been introduced that made it a criminal offence even to wear a pirate radio tee-shirt or display a pirate radio car sticker. On the other hand, the establishment knew that some kind of olive branch had to be offered to the pirate stations and their large, loyal listenership.

Many pirate stations, having voluntarily closed down in the hope of becoming legitimate, were incensed when the IBA instead selected Choice FM for the new South London FM license. Its backers had no previous experience in the London pirate radio business, but had previously published ‘Root’ magazine for the black community in the 1970’s. Although it was impossible for one station to fill the gap left by the many pirates, Choice FM tried very hard to create a format that combined soul and reggae music with news for South London’s black community, which was precisely what its licence required. The station attracted a growing listenership and it brought a significant new audience to commercial radio that had hitherto been ignored by established stations. With Choice FM, the regulator succeeded in fulfilling two aspects of public broadcasting policy: widening the choice of stations available to the public; and filling gaps in the market for content that only pirate radio had supplied until then.

In 2000, Choice FM won a further licence to cover North London with an additional transmitter. For the first time, the station was now properly audible across the whole capital and had access to more listeners and more potential advertising revenues. Its listening doubled and, at its peak in 2006, Choice FM achieved a 2.8% share, placing it ahead of ‘TalkSport’ and ‘BBC London’ in the capital. Choice FM had no direct competitor in London, although indirectly some of its music had always overlapped ‘KISS FM’. The station’s future looked rosy.

However, the Choice FM shareholders must have realised just how much their little South London station was worth, at a time when commercial radio licences were being acquired at inflated prices. Already, in 1995, Choice FM shareholders had won a second licence in Birmingham, but had then sold the station in 1998 for £6m to the Chrysalis plc group, who turned it into another local outlet for its network dance music station ‘Galaxy FM’. At a stroke, the black community in Birmingham had lost a station that the regulator had awarded to serve them. Black radio in Birmingham was dead. The die was cast.

The then regulator, the Radio Authority, had rubber-stamped this acquisition, stating that it would not operate against the public interest. The Authority requested some token assurances: at least one Afro-Caribbean member on the station’s board; an academy for training young people, especially from the black community, in radio skills; and market research about the impact of the format change on the black community. None of these made any difference to what came out the loudspeaker. Birmingham’s black community was sold down the river.

Changes in UK media ownership rules were on the horizon that would soon allow commercial radio groups to own many more stations within a local market. As a result, in 2001, the UK’s then largest radio group, Capital Radio plc, acquired 19% of Choice FM’s London station for £3.3m with an option to acquire the rest. In 2003, it bought the remaining 81% for £11.7m in shares, valuing the London station at £14.4m. The Choice FM shareholders had cashed in their chips over a five-year period and had generated £21m from three radio licences. What would happen to Choice FM London now?

Graham Bryce, managing director of Capital Radio’s London rock station ‘Xfm’ (which Capital had acquired in 1998 for £12.6m), said then:

“Our vision is to build Choice into London’s leading urban music station, becoming the number one choice for young urban Londoners. Longer term, we intend to fully exploit the use of digital technology to build Choice nationally into the UK’s leading urban music station and the number one urban music brand.”

Capital Radio and subsequent owners seemed to want to turn Choice FM into a station that competed directly with KISS FM (owned by rival EMAP plc). But they never seemed to understand that KISS FM was now a ‘dance/pop’ station, whereas Choice FM had always been firmly rooted in the black music tradition of soul, reggae and R&B. Such semantics seemed to be lost on Choice FM’s new owners and on the regulator, but certainly not on Choice FM’s listeners, who had no interest in Kylie Minogue songs.

In 2004, Capital Radio moved Choice FM out of its South London base and into its London headquarters in Leicester Square. The station’s final link with the black community of South London it had been licensed to serve was discarded. In 2005, Capital Radio merged with another radio group, GWR plc, to form GCap Media plc. In March 2008, [offshore] Global Radio Ltd bought GCap Media for £375m. In July 2008, Choice FM managing director Ivor Etienne was suddenly made redundant. One of the station’s former founder shareholders commented:

“I’m disappointed that the new management decided to relieve Ivor Etienne so quickly. My concern is that I hope they will be able to keep the station to serve the community that it was originally licensed for.”

However, from this point forwards, it was obvious that new owner Global Radio had no interest in developing Choice FM as one of its key radio brands. In the most recent quarter, the station’s share of listening fell to an all-time low of 1.1% (since its audience has been measured Londonwide). Sadly, the station is now a shadow of its former self, even though it holds the only black music commercial radio licence in London (BBC digital black music station ‘1Xtra’ has failed to dent the London market, with only a 0.3% share).

This week, news emerged from Choice FM that its reggae programmes, which have been broadcast during weekday evenings since the station opened, will be rescheduled to the middle of the night (literally). One of the UK’s foremost reggae DJ‘s, Daddy Ernie, who has presented on Choice FM since its first day, will be relegated to the graveyard hours when nobody is listening. From 2003, after the Capital Radio takeover, reggae songs have been banished from the 0700 to 1900 daytime shows on Choice FM. Now the specialist shows will be removed from evenings, despite London being a world centre for reggae and having more reggae music shops than Jamaica.

Station owner Global Radio responded to criticism of these changes in ‘The Voice’ newspaper: “Choice [FM] has introduced a summer schedule which sees various changes to the station including the movement of some of our specialist shows.”

Once again, the regulator will roll over obligingly and rubber-stamp these changes. For Global Radio, the endgame must be to transform the standalone Choice FM station into a London outlet for its Galaxy FM network. At present, London-based advertisers and agencies can only listen to Galaxy on DAB or via the internet. A London Galaxy station on FM would bring in more revenue for the brand as a result of more listening hours and its higher profile in the advertising community. It would also provide a direct competitor to KISS FM London (ironic, because Galaxy FM had been launched in 1990 by an established commercial radio group as an out-of-London imitation of successful, London-only KISS FM). Global Radio’s argument to persuade the regulator will probably be that Choice FM’s audience has fallen to uneconomic levels. And whose fault was that?

Already, Global Radio’s website tells us that “Choice FM is also included as part of the Galaxy network” which “consists of evolving mainstream music supported by entertaining and relatable presenters.” And yet, according to Ofcom, Choice FM’s licence is still for “a targeted music, news and information service primarily for listeners of African and Afro-Caribbean origin in the Brixton area but with cross-over appeal to other listeners who appreciate urban contemporary black music.” How can both these assertions be true of a single station?

For the black community in London, and for fans of black music, this will be the final straw. Just as happened in Birmingham, the new owner and the regulator will have collectively sold Choice FM’s listeners down the river. Another station that used to broadcast unique content for a unique audience will have been wilfully destroyed in order to make it almost the same as an existing station, playing almost the same content. We have many commercial radio stations, but less and less diversity in the music they play. Radio regulation has failed us.

For Choice FM, the writing was on the wall in 2003 when Capital Radio bought the station and one (unidentified) former DJ commented:

“Choice [FM] was there for a reason [to be a black music station for black people], but that reason changed [since] 13 years ago. That’s why you’ve got over 30 pirate stations in London. If Choice FM kept to the reason why they started, you wouldn’t need all them stations. But Choice has become a commercial marketplace. They’ve sold the station out and they should just say they’ve sold the station out. What’s wrong with that? They have sold the station that was set up for the black community and they know they’ve done the black community wrong. But they’ve made some money and they’ve sold it. Why not let your listeners know?”

For me personally, as a black music fan and having listened to Daddy Ernie for twenty years, I am much saddened. In the 1970’s and 80’s, I had found little on the radio that interested me musically, so I listened to pirate stations and my own records. During those two decades, I actively campaigned for a wider range of radio stations to be licensed in the UK and, by the 1990’s, I had played a direct role in making that expansion of new radio services happen successfully. Where did it get us? Now, years later, I have gone back to listening mostly to pirate radio and my own records (and internet radio). I am sure I am not the only one.

The radio industry and the regulator seem not to understand one important reason why radio listening and revenues have been declining for most of the last decade. They need to examine how, through their decisions, they have consistently sold down the river their station audiences and the very citizens whom their radio licenses were specifically meant to serve. Listeners vote with their ‘off’ buttons when station owners renege on their licence promises and the regulator lets them. Choice FM is sadly just one example.

In 2006, a lone enlightened Ofcom officer, Robert Thelen-Bartholomew, had asked at a radio conference:

“Is there room to bring the content of illegal stations into the fold? One way or another, whether we like it or not, we have a large population out there listening to illegal radio. Why do they listen? We are trying to find out. But, if you listen to the stations, they are producing slightly different content and output [from licensed stations]. Some of it is very high quality. Some of it is very interesting. So, what options are there for bringing some of that content into mainstream radio?”

Seemingly, none. The last FM commercial radio licence the regulator offered in London was more than a decade ago. Last year, when two small South London FM stations (one licensed for a black music format) were closed by their owner, the regulator unilaterally decided not to re-advertise their commercial radio licences (see my story here). A pirate radio station has not been awarded a commercial radio licence by the regulator for two decades.

Why do pirate radio stations still exist? Because, just as in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there are huge gaps in the market for radio content that – in spite of BBC radio, commercial radio and their regulators – remain unfilled. It is no coincidence that the share of listening to ‘other’ radio stations (i.e. not BBC radio and not commercial radio) in London is near its all-time high at 3.1%.

Farewell, Choice FM. I knew you well for twenty years.

And, irony of ironies, we are in Black Music Month.

[thanks to Sharleen Anderson]

[Originally published in 2010 at https://grantgoddardradioblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/choice-fm-rip-birth-and-near-death-of.html . Three years subsequently, ‘The Guardian’ published a remarkably similar, shorter article ‘RIP Choice FM‘ authored by Boya Dee.]

[Re-blogged now at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-birth-and-near-death-of-licensed.html ]

KISS FM rejected, government awards first London-wide radio station in 16 years to its jazz codger chums : 1989 : Jazz FM, London

 Alongside the revolution in television broadcasting, a similar battle of the airwaves is being waged on the radio. Will this forever wipe away the narrow choices offered by existing stations? Or is it possible to have faith in a revolution being waged from Downing Street? Grant Goddard examines the background to the first franchise application in London and looks at the way ahead for both winners and losers.

It was a little after 6am when Gordon Mac made his first phone call to the Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA]. This was the long-awaited day when it would be announced whether his station ‘KISS FM’ had won the new London radio licence. But, despite an assurance that someone would be at work in the IBA’s Radio Division at this time, a recorded message merely told him to call again during normal office hours.

Mac was bursting to know whether the last seven month’s work making a huge written application to the IBA had been a success. KISS FM had earned an enviable reputation as London’s best dance music station during four years of pirate broadcasting.

But transmissions had been stopped from December ’88, in line with the government’s demands, to try and win the single London FM licence advertised by the IBA.

Mac left home in a hurry and drove across town to the KISS FM office in Finsbury Park. The rail strike had already clogged the streets with traffic, leaving him too much time to ponder the outcome of this crazy licence lottery.

By the time he reached the office just after 8am, the day’s post had already been delivered. The embossed IBA envelope enclosed a two-page letter, but the second sentence said it all: “I am afraid the decision is, for you and your colleagues, a disappointing one.”

Thirty other applicants were opening similarly apologetic letters across the city, but there was one group who could now celebrate in style – ‘London Jazz Radio’ [LJR] had just won the first new city-wide music radio licence since ‘Capital Radio’ in 1973.

The IBA’s press conference that afternoon was a strangely defensive affair. There were not many questions about LJR, but plenty of time was spent discussing why KISS FM had failed to win. Though the IBA refused to elaborate on the relative placings of the 31 losers, KISS FM was definitely in the short-list of five or six, and most probably the runner-up.

The awkward sensitivity shown towards KISS FM’s rejection reflects an awareness that they were certainly the public’s choice for a new London station. KISS FM was the only applicant to have already established a strong awareness among Londoners of its name, its music and its presenters.

The recent success of KISS FM team members Coldcut, Jazzie B, Richie Rich and Derek B in the pop charts has confirmed the station’s role as an important catalyst in the growth of home-produced dance music.

A further embarrassment was caused as this affair was the second occasion in recent years when a carrot has been dangled in front of pirate broadcasters to induce them to quit the airwaves. And the second time the carrot has been unexpectedly pulled away at the last minute.

The first voluntary pirate shutdown happened in 1985 when the Home Office encouraged them to apply for experimental community radio licences. Then, after lengthy prevarication and the receipt of 286 applications, the plan was abandoned.

The second carrot was offered last year with the unveiling of the IBA’s ‘incremental contract’ scheme for 21 new stations. Only those pirates who quit the airwaves before 1 January 1989 would be allowed to apply, so several stations (including KISS FM) duly complied and shut down. So now that the London licence has been awarded to a wholly non-pirate group, it was hardly surprising to see yet another carrot pulled out of the bag and shoved in KISS FM’s face.

“KISS FM put in a very strong application,” admits Peter Baldwin, the IBA’s director of radio. “IBA members felt very strongly that there were a number of applicant groups who could have been offered a contract, and we are seeking the government’s agreement to release additional frequencies so we can broaden the offers to these applicant groups.”

So KISS FM could be given a licence soon as a sort of prize for runners up?

“One has no idea where KISS FM will come in that,” says Baldwin, “but I’m bound to say that, given the government’s attitude towards pirate broadcasting, I think it would be imprudent for anyone to go back on the air if they have an aspiration towards broadcasting [legally].”

But this third carrot sounds equally precarious if it depends on the IBA’s success in evincing government agreement to more stations.

“Two more FM frequencies could be available in a short space of time – six to nine months,” explains Baldwin. “It would be for the government to decide. The IBA’s view is ‘should the listeners of London who haven’t got certain genres of broadcasting have to wait 18 months for that moment to arrive?’”

So the message to KISS FM is: sit tight, don’t do anything stupid (like return to piracy) and, some day soon, you may yet win a licence if we can persuade the Home Secretary of its political expediency.

Back in the KISS FM office, the disappointment of not winning is evident in the grim faces of a small group of station staff and presenters who are answering a stream of phone calls from well-wishers and listeners wanting to know the outcome. Three bottles of champagne sit unopened on the corner of Gordon Mac’s desk, where they remain unnoticed for the next week.

Mac himself is busy supplying quotes to enquiring journalists and does a live phone interview on the BBC London station ‘GLR’ with sympathetic soul DJ Dave Pearce. Some members of the KISS FM team who are not so close to the sharp end of the operation are unenthused by the carrot consolation prize, but Mac understands the need for cautious diplomacy now more than ever.

Seven months have already been spent raising more than £1million in capital, and a five-figure sum has been sunk into the application procedure to date.

A carefully worded press release is prepared, expressing “extreme disappointment” that KISS FM did not win the licence, but backing the IBA’s demand for more frequencies to be allocated to further London stations. KISS FM’s campaign focuses on 104.8 FM which becomes free in November when ‘Radio 1’ vacate their temporary London channel.

KISS FM presenter Heddi still feels the need for more direct action to satisfy the dozens of listeners who have phoned up asking what they can do to help. Over the next weekend, she visits several London clubs and solicits more than 3,000 letters of support addressed to the Home Office demanding the release of further frequencies for stations such as KISS FM. Gordon Mac delivers them personally to Douglas Hurd’s office exactly a week after the IBA’s fatal announcement. No acknowledgement or response is returned.

Mac seems to be treading a fine emotional line between huge personal disappointment at the outcome of several years’ hard work and cautious optimism that a licence still remains within the realms of possibility.

“Whether it takes three months or three years,” he says to GLR, “we will carry on campaigning until we are given the chance to be a legal radio station in London.”

In a more salubrious part of town, champagne bottles are being put to good use. London Jazz Radio’s nine-year campaign for a licence has paid off handsomely, particularly with its development of an all-party parliamentary lobby to argue the merits of its case.

The station’s founder, David Lee, is a 59-year-old jazz musician whose distinguished career has included TV themes, jingles and the writing of Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren’s 1960 hit ‘Goodness Gracious Me’. He wrote to the IBA suggesting the idea but received a faintly dismissive reply explaining (wrongly, in retrospect) that new legislation would be necessary before such a station could be introduced.

So Lee started on the road for the necessary legislation to be enacted. “I happened to bump into a guy I’d known but hadn’t seen for over 20 years, who was an amateur drummer but also a member of the Gilbey’s Gin family and working as a board member of Grand Metropolitan Hotels.” This was Jasper Grinling, ex-managing director of International Distillers, ex-director of corporate affairs with Grand Met, and now chairman of LJR.

“He happened to know an MP by virtue of his high rank,” continues Lee, “so we asked him and, in a very short time, we had a 14-strong all-party group. I call it my ‘Parliamentary Jazz Band’. Based upon that parliamentary support, we felt we could start to move. We would literally have got nothing without it. It allowed us to get the ear of people of reason.”

The MP Bowen Wells is now a director of LJR, as is Lord Rayne, ex-chairman of London Merchant Securities plc. Fellow shareholders include Lord Colwyn, Lord Dormand, Earl Alexander of Tunis, Viscount Portman and four other MPs – Jim Lester, Tom Pendry, John Prescott and Nicholas Scott.

The “people of reason” Lee reached included the Home Secretary himself. Before the award of the licence, Lee admitted: “I have great admiration for Douglas Hurd and, if it hadn’t been for his understanding, we wouldn’t be in the position we are today.”

“He was one of the first people to realise that it is quite wrong for a place the size of London not to have a station to represent so large a minority. He realised it and made sure those ‘people who know’ realised it.”

Indeed, Hurd on several occasions cited a London jazz station as an example of the new type of radio service he was intending to introduce. In retrospect, this should have been observed as an omen that parliamentary lobbying had already proven effective, long before the contract for the new London service was advertised.

The IBA are understandably keen to stress it was their decision to award the licence to LJR, based upon their assertion that the station will cater for a wide variety of musical tastes. Paul Brown, the IBA’s head of programming, explains: “LJR is a jazz radio station but, in assembling their application, they did a lot of research which told them that an audience would prefer to have a jazz radio station that provided a wide spectrum of jazz including, for example, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, salsa and also some of the big band performances.”

The station’s research showed that 41 per cent of those adults sampled liked to hear jazz on its own, while 63 per cent preferred to hear it mixed in with other styles of black music. But LJR’s own programme plans actually reject these findings and propose a fairly narrow jazz-dominated music policy.

A computerised playlist system is planned which will schedule one Afro-Caribbean record every two hours, one “boogaloo/soul” record every two hours, and one R&B record every 12 hours. Hardly a great concession to broader tastes.

Yet the IBA insist that LJR’s intended schedule also include “a good range of music styles derived from and related to jazz, including big band music, vocal standards, R&B and forms of Latin American jazz.” This statement is inconsistent with LJR’s own description of their output as “20th century jazz and jazz influenced music” in their ‘Promise of Performance’ – the legally binding statement of their programme plans.

Selecting such a specialised music station would have proven a hard decision for the IBA to defend, particularly when other applicants such as KISS FM were proposing to integrate jazz alongside many other styles of music. So have the IBA now insisted that LJR adopt a more catholic music policy in order to make their choice more politically acceptable?

“We are specifying that there must be a broad spectrum of output,” says the IBA’s Peter Baldwin, “and therefore what LJR accept will be a Promise of Performance that the IBA will write for them and not necessarily reflecting exactly what they applied for.”

Confidence in LJR’s ability to incorporate diverse and newer styles of ‘jazz-influenced music’ is not instilled by the station’s choice of senior staff. Apart from the presence of DJ Gilles Peterson on the board, the average age of the other nine directors is 56.

All this political manoeuvring is pretty galling for the unsuccessful bidders for the licence, who see accommodations being made for LJR’s shortcomings and the IBA adopting a defensive attitude towards their choice of winner. Several applicants made a positive commitment to jazz programmes alongside other neglected forms of music. KISS FM had already enrolled Gilles Peterson as a member of their own jazz presentation team.

When LJR comes on-air in February [1990], the proof of their commitment to these diverse music styles will be evident from their first day’s programmes. In the meantime, KISS FM can only wait for a Home Office decision as to whether additional frequencies will be allocated to further London stations. The KISS FM team will not return to pirate broadcasting, but will continue to campaign for the right to have a legal dance music station in London.

A week after the IBA’s announcement, Gordon Mac called a meeting of KISS FM’s staff and presenters to explain the whole situation. There was righteous indignation among many of those present that, once again, the government had pulled a fast one and made empty promises to the pirate community, while at the same time rewarding their own friends.

There were predictions that pirate activity in London would increase as a consequence of general ill-feeling towards the authorities. There was even an undercurrent that KISS FM had been duped by the second carrot-on-a-stick and would be foolish to wait for the outcome of a further open ended half-promise. Several members of the KISS FM team were absent from the meeting. Jonathan More and Matt Black (alias Coldcut), Hardrock Soul Movement, Jazzie B and Norman Jay were all in New York attending the ‘New Music Seminar’. It’s a dreadful irony that, while many of the individuals involved in KISS FM’s championing of British dance music have recently reaped huge popular success, the station itself is now off-air and still waiting for its day to come.

Last Monday, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd finally agreed to licence two more London-wide FM radio stations. After taking legal advice, the IBA has determined that it must publicly advertise these two new contracts, inviting bids from previous applicants and new groups by a November deadline. KISS FM will be one of more than 50 likely applicants, and the outcome will be announced by the end of the year.

The writer is a supporter of KISS FM’s campaign to secure the new London waveband.

[First published as ‘Kissed Off’, New Musical Express, 26 August 1989, p.31]

[This was a small part of the bigger story recounted in my book ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio to Big Business’ about pirate radio, the station’s subsequent licence win and successful relaunch]

[First blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/05/kiss-fm-rejected-government-awards.html ]

Why are Canadian radio station audience data a state secret? : 2000 : BBM Canada

 Letters to the Editors, Marketing Magazine, Toronto

Dear Sirs

I am a radio programming consultant based in Toronto with twenty years’ experience in the industry. My work has created successful commercial radio stations in the UK, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Czech Republic, Estonia & Lithuania. When I start a new project in a city, the first thing I do is contact the designated agency for media ratings. On every occasion, agency staff have always been very happy to share their data with me and are always pleased to discuss their findings with a fellow professional. Some agencies have even produced custom reports to help me better understand their media market. They recognise implicitly that we are both working towards the same goal – a wider understanding of audience research data will produce a more efficient medium that delivers bigger audiences to more satisfied advertisers.

The story could not be more different in Canada. I called the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM Canada, founded 1944) this morning and was surprised to learn that it offers no public access to documents at its offices, and expressly forbids public access to any survey less than a year old, even to industry professionals such as myself. I was given two options: subscribe to BBM at a cost of over a thousand dollars; or consult back issues of surveys at Ryerson University. I had visited Ryerson earlier this week, where the latest data on the shelves is 1998 (prehistoric in media terms) and I was told by the Librarian that the University’s contract with BBM expressly forbids access to any data more recent.

I am at a complete loss to understand why the broadcasting industry in Canada funds BBM for research purposes and then does its utmost to hide the results. The radio industry may whine about declining audiences but, unless consultants such as myself are permitted to read, understand and interpret the latest market data, how can we make any positive contribution to our industry? I can call the Audit Bureau of Circulation in Canada, enquire about magazine readership, and be bombarded with reams of statistical data. But the radio industry in Canada – nothing!

In the UK in the 1990’s, I made a modest contribution to the development of radio research by tabulating and publishing the first Arbitron-style radio station rankings for every major market in the country. Such basic, easy-to-understand information seems to be impossible to collate in my own backyard, even for professional purposes. Or is that the way Canada’s cosy little media cartel wants it? And how does such a policy help grow the broadcasting industry in the long run?

Yours sincerely

GRANT GODDARD

11 August 2000

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/02/why-are-canadian-radio-station-audience.html ]

The great brains robber fearful his collar will be touched : 1991 : Gordon McNamee, KISS 100 FM

 “If this gets out, we’re screwed,” my boss told me. Actually, I have paraphrased because at least one expletive was guaranteed in this man’s every sentence.

He looked very worried. I was baffled. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

“I don’t just mean ME,” he added in response to my bafflement that maybe he mistook for insouciance. “I mean YOU too, everyone in this building, this entire business. We are all f……” I will stop there. You can probably guess his favourite expletive.

He thrust the inside pages from a Sunday tabloid newspaper across his desk and indicated I should read. It was a large news story about an apparently notorious drug dealer involved in sundry nefarious activities who had just been nabbed by ‘the law’. I had never heard of him. I was still completely baffled.

“Without these people, we wouldn’t be here,” my boss explained with deliberate ambiguity. I ran a lightning-fast Poirot-style drawing room denouement through my mind:

  • Surmise the newspaper suspect is genuinely criminal
  • I had never met him
  • I had done nothing criminal
  • My boss is evidently freaking out
  • Maybe HE is mixed up with this criminal
  • Maybe HE has done something illegal
  • Something SO illegal that it would close down our business which, Hercule indicates, is licensed by the British government.

Oh dear. Will I still have a job tomorrow?

This was not how I had anticipated my regular Monday morning eight o’clock drop-in to my boss’ penthouse office. He looked more than worried. He looked scared stiff. As if the Metropolitan Police might come knocking on his office door within the next hour. I had recently watched horrified as certain of his sacked employees had been frogmarched out of the building by a security guard upon this man’s cruel orders. Perhaps the boot was about to pass to the other foot, this time with the addition of handcuffs and a blue flashing light outside on Holloway Road.

He took the newspaper back from me, turned it back around and sat there in silence, staring at the article. He chose to elucidate nothing further for a full minute, so I bade him farewell, got up, closed his door behind me and returned to my own office downstairs. It was the strangest start to my week. I was left just as baffled. My boss never said another word to me about this incident. He did not need to. Its significance was betrayed by his changed demeanour from that day onwards. Gone was the happy-go-lucky faux bonhomie he had always oozed. From now on, he would behave as if a gunman might burst into the room and shoot him at point-blank range.

In previous years, it had been evident to those of us working for London pirate radio station ‘KISS 94 FM’ that there were dodgy things going on under our noses in its open-plan Finsbury Park first-floor office. Unlike its competitors who mostly attempted 24/7 radio services, our station had only broadcast from Friday to Sunday. How come rivals had been regularly raided and shut down by the government, or sometimes by their enemies, whereas KISS had been so rarely, if ever, forced off-air? Press articles had regularly alleged that violence, industrial sabotage and criminal activity were rife within London’s pirate radio business. Some involved criticised this as the perfect fabricated excuse for the authorities to raid illegal stations, close them and prosecute their operators. But was there some fire behind this convenient smokescreen?

Every week, KISS had held numerous rammed club nights in venues across London, collecting the door money in cash. Hundreds of pounds, thousands on busy holiday weekends, would be counted out and bundled up on an office desk, to be dispatched out the office front door in the hands of station co-founder Gordon McNamee’s personal assistant, Rosee Laurence. Those substantial cash revenues did not appear to be reflected in the subsequent published accounts of McNamee’s company, Goodfoot Promotions Limited. Where that cash went I never knew. I had realised that, despite my training in economics and accountancy, it was best not to ask or get involved in the financial labyrinth of this illegal radio station.

McNamee regularly described his business style as “ducking and diving”, defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the action of cleverly doing everything you can in order to succeed, or to avoid a situation, even when this may not be completely acceptable or honest.” For those familiar with the popular 1980’s British television sitcom ‘Only Fools and Horses’, McNamee would have fitted right in with its cast. His gift was his East End gab. He could persuade almost anybody to do almost anything … that would ultimately benefit himself. Running one of the dozens of London pirate stations had at least corralled a useful boundary to his ruthlessness. However, that limitation evaporated once he hit the radio jackpot.

What happened next was all my fault. After KISS FM’s first attempt to win a legal London radio licence had failed, McNamee slumped into lethargic depression and paralysed inaction. I stepped up to the challenge of initial defeat by instigating a lobbying campaign with co-worker Heddi Greenwood to persuade the government to advertise further radio licences (which succeeded) and, then, by managing and writing a second licence application (which succeeded against all odds). To achieve this, I had to make the difficult decision to sacrifice my job editing a new monthly black music magazine ‘Free!’ that I had just founded. My motivation was my long involvement in London pirate radio during two decades, since when I had dreamt of Britain’s first legal black music radio station. Eventually, I made that happen.

However, once the licence had been won, McNamee’s demeanour changed significantly. Newly attired in a sharp Paul Smith suit and shirt, he set out to hobnob amongst bigwigs with money whom he convinced that the station’s application had succeeded due to HIS entrepreneurial skills. Although he had only five GCSE certificates to his name (amongst them woodwork and technical drawing) and was barely literate, having “bummed out of school most of the time”, his ego started to believe the ‘rags to riches’ story that press profiles were painting around him. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1980’s propaganda promised that any East End barrow boy could ‘get rich quick’ through hard work in London’s financial and corporate sectors. It was the era of ‘loadsamoney’ when huge advertising billboards posted around London promoted local talk radio station ‘LBC’ with the slogan ‘GREED IS GOOD’ in massive letters.

Whereas pirate era meetings had previously been held within our open-plan office, McNamee now held them privately elsewhere with who knew whom and with outcomes unknown. He had always convinced the press that the pirate KISS FM was a ‘collective’ of its DJ’s even though it now seemed to operate more than ever as his fiefdom (KISS FM DJ Jazzie B’s “be an asset to the collective” lyric proved similarly shallow). Secrecy became endemic. McNamee’s domestic arrangements had always been sketchy, which I had presumed was the product of his ‘wife plus mistress’ private life. But he had progressed from being cagey to obsessively clandestine.

Weeks before the now legal KISS 100 FM launched, McNamee insisted I visit his new home for a Sunday business meeting and lunch. However, its address was apparently so confidential that I could only be told it by phone as I stepped into a taxi at the start of my long journey from one end of London to the other. I had to swear on my life that I would never share its location with anyone. Upon my late arrival (after the taxi ran out of petrol), I entered an expansive Edwardian house in Dulwich filled with expensive stuff, including huge blown-up photos of McNamee on walls throughout. The place was a shrine to both the man’s ego and the decadence favoured by the nouveau riche. I had to hide my disgust, as I had yet to be rewarded for my work winning KISS FM its licence. I was living in a damp suburban top floor flat without central heating.

It was galling to see McNamee showing off such opulence even before our new radio station had launched. Where had he got the money to buy this home? Where had he got the money to buy £90,000 of share capital in the newly created ‘KISS FM Radio Limited’ company that would be operating the licence? No explanations were offered to any of us who had been involved in our supposedly ‘collective’ enterprise – now HIS business – before it had won the licence. I was promised rewards (shares, a bonus, an immediate salary) for my efforts winning the station, none of which McNamee honoured. He was proven to be a cold-hearted liar in his treatment of me. I am certain I was not the only one.

I never knew if the Monday morning ‘criminal’ incident in his office was connected somehow to these apparent financial shenanigans that had suddenly made him ‘rich’. What I do know is that McNamee was never the same again. After Easter, he started to work a bare minimum of hours at the station. My office overlooked the private car park to the rear of the building so that, every morning, I would hear him arrive at precisely nine o’clock in the morning and then leave at precisely five o’clock in the afternoon. During the day, McNamee was no longer seen around the building. Apart from his presence at meetings, I rarely saw him to talk to any more. There was a lot of whispering around the building that things were going very badly for him.

Whenever I had to visit the top floor to see McNamee in his office, he would usually be sat behind his desk, doing nothing in particular. Often not, he would be staring at the latest share prices on the Teletext pages of his huge colour television. He seemed obsessed with the notion that he was some kind of entrepreneurial whiz-kid. He even started comparing himself in conversation to Richard Branson, the boss of the Virgin empire. Often, I would find him listening to old soul or jazz-funk records in his office, rather than to KISS FM. It seemed as if he was barricading himself into his corner office on the top floor, trying to ignore the realities of the radio station that were going on around him.

He clearly lacked the management skills to make the station a successful business, having appointed as departmental managers ‘outsiders’ who failed to understand our unique radio product and who all failed to meet their targets. I was the only ‘insider’ to head a department and became the only manager to meet my target (one million listeners per week by end of Year One) some six months early. Consumed by his own failings, I could see McNamee grow to despise me for my success. At one stage, he even told me: “Do you know what I hate about you, Grant? You’ve got the answers to every bloody question. And they are always bloody right.”

What he failed to grasp was that my expertise was derived from education, training and experience. I had not been born on a council estate with it. Unlike him, I had been involved in the radio business for two decades. Unlike him, I had implemented a (then) radical music policy that had turned around the fortunes of a large British commercial radio station (Metro Radio, Newcastle) a decade earlier. Unlike him, I had managed people since the 1970’s. Unlike him, I may not have possessed the gab, but I had a range of skills that were necessary to launch a successful radio station from scratch … and that is exactly what I did. Inevitably, having managed the station to ratings success, I was deemed no longer necessary to McNamee’s increasingly paranoid behaviour and was ejected without an ounce of gratitude. Then he slandered me in a national newspaper, bizarrely accusing ME of ruining HIS radio station! 

Jump forward to June 2024. The same Gordon McNamee was honoured with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for “services to music”. It seems totally appropriate that it was bestowed upon him by the most corrupt, dishonest self-serving British government observed in my lifetime, run by a Prime Minister and staff convicted on 126 occasions of breaking COVID lockdown laws they themselves had legislated. Many current Tory politicians still idolise Margaret Thatcher and the ‘policies’ that helped her dominate 1980’s British politics. In 2022, Prime Minister and former Goldman Sachs banker Rishi Sunak had even asked on camera a homeless man if finance was a business he would “like to get into”, a scary echo of that Thatcher propaganda.

During my media career, I have had to work for a clutch of bosses whose activities appeared somewhat non-legal, several of whom were eventually prosecuted, two of whom were sent to jail. That is a sad reflection on the calibre of people who rise to the heights of British business where ‘meritocracy’ seems to have been labelled a dirty word … by those who are already installed on top.

[See also ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business: The Inside Story Of A London Pirate Radio Station’s Path To Success’ by Grant Goddard, Radio Books, 2011, 528 pages]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-great-brains-robber-fearful-his.html ]

Kick archaic studio-bound public radio production out into 21st century public spaces : 2011 : BBC Radio

 Technological advances made during the last two to three decades have changed our world almost beyond recognition. Everyone now has the ability to be almost permanently ‘connected’ to a world beyond their immediate personal space.

Has BBC radio fully embraced the benefits of these technological advances? From an external perspective, the answer appears to be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. BBC radio seems to have implemented new technologies less obviously than BBC television. Yes, BBC radio programmes and stations now have an online presence, receive e-mails and tweets, and distribute their output live and on-demand via IP. But no, the basics of radio production have changed very little beyond a conversion from analogue tape to digital hard-drive storage.

In the 1920’s, a male radio announcer would sit in a BBC radio studio, dressed in a dinner jacket and reading a pre-prepared script. In order to be interviewed, guests would have to physically come to the studio. Everything had to be broadcast live, as there was no technology to include ‘actuality’ from beyond the studio’s confines. All the news and information had to be filtered through the on-air presenter. Listener involvement was limited to letters submitted, selected, edited and read on-air by the presenter.

Surprisingly, the radio production format has changed little in the interim ninety years. Presenters still sit in studios filled with expensive radio hardware and they still act as filters for the information that flows into the studio. Only three substantial changes are evident: recording systems have allowed interviews and actuality to be incorporated into programmes, and a programme itself to be time-shifted; phone-ins have allowed listener voices to be put live on-air via the telephone; and BBC reporters can be incorporated live into programmes via ISDN or IP from around the world. All these developments were pioneered by the BBC.

If we look at BBC television, we see that an increasing amount of content broadcast on the ‘BBC News’ channel comes in the form of photographs, poor quality mobile phone video (viz the ‘Arab Spring’ in Syria), eyewitness reports by phone line and Skype video/audio interviews supplied by the public from their offices or homes. In the current jargon, much of this could be called ‘user generated content’.

However, in radio, this revolution has simply not happened. When did you last hear a piece of audio on BBC radio that had been recorded and submitted by a member of the public? Never? In radio, public participation in the output still remains limited to content initiated or filtered by the production team. A member of the public will be asked to connect to the studio for a formal interview with a presenter either live in the studio, from a BBC contribution studio or via a phone line. Or a reporter may take a portable audio recorder out to interview a member of the public on location and the outcome is edited before transmission into an audio ‘package.’

The result is that, just as in the 1920’s, what we hear on the radio has still been filtered through the programme presenter and producer, so that the resulting programme is delivered from the confines of a cosy, air-conditioned studio. Radio is still largely produced in a vacuum that is far apart from the real world. Of course, there are obvious exceptions such as ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ and ‘Question Time.’ But these remain exceptions.

The continuing reliance within radio upon the hardware-equipped studio is particularly hard to understand when digital audio equipment is smaller, lighter, more portable and cheaper than its analogue ancestors. A radio programme can be produced, mixed, edited and broadcast from a basic laptop computer using software-based technology rather than considerably more expensive hardware. In this sense, radio should by now be far ahead of television, where digital equipment remains expensive, complex and still requires substantial bit rates and data storage for broadcast quality.

These incredible technological advances in radio production have been well understood and seized upon by people outside the BBC who do not have privileged access to expensive hardware-based recording studios. In their thousands, these people are making their own radio programmes (‘podcasts’) and creating their own online radio stations. The technology has filtered down so far that even a local primary school has its own radio production studio, linked to a low-power FM transmitter on the school’s roof so that children can listen on ordinary radios to the programmes they make.

London is one of the most exciting cities in the world. Yet, when I listen to ‘BBC London 94.9 FM’, I do not hear that excitement reflected much in its output. What I do hear are presenters sat in hardware-based studios, talking with guests they have invited there or talking via phone lines to selected contributors outside. What is sorely missing is ‘actuality.’ News stories are often reduced to ‘packages’ that can be inserted into hourly news bulletins. Yet the technology already exists (smartphones, IP, 3G) so that the hundreds of news stories that happen in London each day could be put to-air quickly using actuality live or ‘as-live’ recorded by either BBC reporters or the public.

Existing technologies could be implemented to create an exciting news and information driven radio station for London that more closely reflected life in the capital. It would entail taking risks, but it is only through risk-taking that innovation will happen. BBC London’s share of radio listening in London is only 1.4% and the station reaches only 5% of the population each week. Licence Fee payers could be better served by a local radio station in London that used new technologies to create an audio soundtrack that reflected their lives in this city. Such opportunities to use new technologies to change the face of radio are being missed, or being left to television to implement.

I lived in Toronto for five years and the city’s only independent television station, ‘CityTV’, offered one of the most impressive uses of new technology I have ever seen. For a start, the station did not have traditional TV studios. News programmes were presented by anchors perched on the corner of their own office desks. The nightly one-hour local news programme was filled to the brim with reports from a small team of one-person ‘videographers’ who whizzed around the city all day and recorded every available story using a single handheld camera. Sometimes the quality was not great, but the content accurately reflected the life of the city much better than any other local medium in Toronto.

At CityTV, the weekday morning show was presented from the station’s ground floor foyer. Cameras, lights, cables, production staff were all left in-shot, as were the people on the busy street outside and casual visitors to the station’s offices. CityTV’s owner, ‘media visionary’ Moses Znaimer, called this infrastructure “the streetfront/studioless television operating system” and it worked fantastically. Every Friday evening, the same foyer was turned into a free nightclub that was televised live for several hours with DJs, visiting music acts and short interviews. Admittedly, CityTV’s output was sometimes chaotic but it used cheap, lightweight technologies to successfully break down the barrier that had existed previously between formal, studio-limited programmes and their audiences. The people of Toronto felt truly connected with CityTV because every city dweller knew the location of its downtown building and could wander in, even during its live shows.

I had marvelled at CityTV’s bold use of cutting-edge technology fifteen years ago. And, since then, technologies for television have advanced much further. But it is the medium of audio where even more fundamental breakthroughs have taken place. The ability to use a smartphone, a laptop or a cheap audio recorder to record perfect digital sound quality in WAV format has opened up the possibility to produce content for broadcast much more significantly than in television. Yet, from the outside, there seems to be no strategic vision to implement these technologies within the BBC in order to change the way in which radio more pro-actively involves itself with the world outside its radio studios.

Individual BBC reporters are doing amazing things with new technology. Nick Garnett provided live interviews for ‘Radio Four’ about the outcome of the last election from a moving tram in Sheffield using only his smartphone installed with the ‘Luci Live’ application for broadcasters. His personal website demonstrates in videos his evangelism for these new technologies. He contrasts his ability to produce live coverage of the recent Salford/Manchester riots safely using only his handled smartphone with the impossibility twenty years earlier when a high-tech van was necessary, even for a short live report, and the job of holding the microphone remained the responsibility of a BBC Studio Manager.

At the heart of technological change is a necessary accompanying change in working practices in many parts of BBC radio. Whilst television underwent fundamental change when it was transformed into ‘BBC Vision’, the radio infrastructure has remained much the same. Whilst BBC television has been mostly casualised by freelance staff, radio remains dominated by full-time employees. Although BBC television has stiff competition from commercial stations, BBC radio attracts the majority of listening (54% currently) and its share continues to grow. The grave danger is that complacency in BBC radio from high ratings can stunt innovation. 

Whilst there is no doubt that technological innovations have been successfully incorporated into current working practices within BBC radio, it is a much greater challenge to incorporate the disruptive influences of those technologies in a way that forces change in current working methods. For example, at present, producers and editors of radio programmes set the agendas of programmes themselves and then seek to fulfil those plans by inviting ‘talking heads’ and commissioning ‘packages’ to make their points. This is a demand-led production system, working from the demands of the producer.

However, in a world where there are already hundreds of pieces of audio content available to choose from to make a programme, the production system could become more supply-led. The editor would use a mix of commissioned pieces and the best or most appropriate of what already existed from BBC contributors or the public. In fact, the radio editor would become more like an editor of a newspaper, selecting from what content already existed, rather than commissioning every item from scratch.

If the thought of including ‘user generated content’ from the British public in network radio output proves alarming, it is worth remembering that there are dozens of media courses up and down the country whose students would love to add some BBC radio contributions to their CVs. There are also 300 community radio stations that have an existing ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with the BBC to share content in both directions. Yet BBC radio at network level does not seem to have reached out to the wider constituency of audio producers beyond its own staff and ex-staff. When I interviewed senior BBC network radio staff last year for a ‘BBC Trust’ report and asked why no audio was being recycled from BBC local radio, student radio or podcast producers, I was told that they would not meet the ‘quality’ threshold. Equally, you might ask why the Sony Award-winning ‘Hackney Podcast’ is not a regular part of BBC London’s output.

This ‘quality’ barrier is an anachronism that remains in place in radio and yet seems to have been largely overcome in television. Within BBC radio, ‘quality’ is even used as a means to segregate one division’s content from another’s. In television, if the content communicates something newsworthy or significant, blurry mobile phone footage is broadcast. Yet, in radio, the audio quality often seems more important to producers than the content itself. This requires not so much a change in technology, as a change in attitudes and editorial policies that have not caught up with the technological possibilities.

A station such as ‘BBC 1Xtra’ should be an exciting and ground-breaking experience to listen to. Yet, on the occasions I have listened, its output has seemed hideously studio-bound and insular to me. There appears to be little difference between 1Xtra and 1920’s BBC radio, as a presenter still sits in a hardware studio, but with an assistant who reads tweets instead of letters. During one show I heard recently, the presenter was reduced to bemoaning that he had left his lip balm at home, and a clip was used of musician interviews made days earlier backstage at an awards ceremony.

Surely a station such as BBC 1Xtra that is aimed at young people should have an immediacy and an incredibly ‘live’ feel to it that is able to challenge the speed of competing information sources delivered via the internet. 1Xtra should be overflowing with exclusive news, information and music, artists dropping in for short chats and ‘actuality’ broadcast live or ‘as-live’ that reflect the diversity of the British black music scene. Yet I do not hear this kind of excitement when I listen to 1Xtra. The station would be a perfect candidate to adopt CityTV’s studio-less operating system, where it could operate from an open-door shopfront rather than from the remote bowels of a BBC office. It could even broadcast from different cities week to week, like an ever-travelling roadshow.

I have a particular interest in 1Xtra because, twenty years ago, I had launched ‘KISS FM’ in London as the UK’s first black music radio station. Even then, I had used what few new technologies were available to make the programme content less studio-bound. I regularly sent one reporter out with my mobile phone (at a time when they were uncommon) and her interviews and actuality were put live to air using nothing more sophisticated than the phone’s low-quality microphone. The audience loved that immediacy. Then, after work, I would take a digital recorder to London clubs and record the whole night’s DJ set for subsequent broadcast. These technological innovations made KISS FM one of the most successful station launches of its time because listeners understood that the station was ‘out there in London’ rather than always studio-bound. 

 Let us be clear here. Radio needs to implement as many new technologies as possible in order to adapt and change what it can do if it is to remain relevant and valuable to its audiences. Although, in total, radio listening in the UK has reached an all-time high (partly as an outcome of the increasing population), there are some disturbing long-terms trends. Six years ago, 15–24-year-olds started to spend significantly less time listening to broadcast radio. More recently, 25–34-year-olds are also spending less time with broadcast radio. If this trend continues, part of an entire generation could lose the radio habit.

BBC Radio needs to compete for consumers’ time with every other distraction out there – particularly the internet, games, social networking and video. To do that, radio has to re-invent itself so that it is exciting and entertaining for a whole new generation. That requires radio to respond to the disruptive influences of new technology, not in a defensive way, but to embrace change and to understand that, just as with other businesses, if you do not change and adapt with the times, your brand could easily die.

At present, the BBC’s strategy for implementation of new technologies in radio could appear to be somewhat slow, scattershot and disjointed. What is needed is a joined-up roadmap to bring BBC radio firmly into the 21st century, a determined push to move radio beyond its 1920’s production methods, and a programme to combat internal complacency and inertia through persuasion and education. The biggest enemy to such change often derives from the people entrenched in an organisation, not from the availability of technologies. In that sense, the imperative for change has to come from within.

The BBC has a long tradition of being at the forefront of new technological developments in radio. It is admired the world over for its innovation in the radio medium and the quality of its outputs. The biggest current danger is that, unless a strategy is developed for BBC radio that combines the implementation of new technologies with changing methods of radio production, the BBC’s track record of innovation could be acceded elsewhere.

In our enlarged, globalised radio marketplace, it would be perfectly possible for Google or Microsoft to invest sufficient R&D seed money to develop a new style of radio that could set the youth of the world on fire (viz Facebook). Until now, the main threat to broadcast radio from the internet has been in back-to-back music applications (Spotify, Last.fm) which add no value to widely available pre-recorded music. However, compared to the visual medium, it would prove relatively cheap to add value to that audio content if you could identify the appropriate editorial that will appeal to a whole new generation as ‘the new radio.’ It is important that BBC radio faces this global threat by implementing innovation as a must-have-now rather than as a long-term objective.

Within the BBC, there are already plenty of staff embracing such change on an individual level. More than 300 BBC staff have signed up to Audioboo, a UK-based online exchange for short audio clips. Similarly, some BBC programme makers are contributing to PRX, a US-based online marketplace for both complete programmes and short audio clips. I understand that the BBC is currently developing its own in-house version of these sort of E-Bay‘s for audio content.

The imperative to centralise data storage of BBC audio so as to create an internal ‘cloud’ system for radio content provides the perfect opportunity to develop new production systems that can share content, both internally and from outside the BBC. The traditional ‘silo’ system, whereby individual radio programmes and individual radio stations have managed their own content resources, cannot be productive during a time when the Licence Fee produces pressures to share and consolidate resources as much as possible.

More than ever, in BBC radio, change is necessary. But change can also be very hard to make happen, particularly within large organisations. I would suggest that the task ahead is to develop an interlocking roadmap for radio technologies that embraces:

  •   more agile content ingest, storage and accessibility (avoiding transcoding)
  •   radio production processes that focus on the intrinsic public value of content, more than its audio quality or source
  •   the evolution of radio studios from fixed hardware to portable software
  •   a plan for multi-platform distribution based on cost-benefit analysis and accurate usage data (RAJAR platform data are inaccurate)
  •   IP delivery of radio via frictionless technologies, reducing bandwidth through multicasting
  •   a focus on content availability, connectivity and ‘searchability’
  •   the unlocking of BBC archive radio content
  •   an appropriate and future-proof metadata architecture for audio content distribution
  •   use of commodity software or collaborations with external suppliers wherever possible.

The aim: to ensure that the connections between BBC radio and its audiences are maximised through available technologies, delivering content efficiently and easily wherever and whenever it is demanded.

[In 2011, London recruitment agency Lonmoor invited me to apply for the vacancy of ‘Technology Controller, Audio & Music’ at the BBC. Following initial discussion, it was suggested I submit these ideas on paper, after which I received an email response: “We shall conclude our shortlisting process in the next week and be back in touch.” I am still waiting. It became the fifty-ninth consecutive BBC job for which my application was rejected.]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2025/01/kick-archaic-studio-bound-public-radio.html Available as a download.]

LBC 97.3 FM, London’s whitest conversation? : 2007 : ‘Is Radio Racist?’, The Radio Academy

 The conversation at the Radio Academy event in London entitled ‘Is Radio Racist?’ became heated when the chairman, ‘LBC‘ morning show presenter James O’Brien [JO], was questioned by ‘BBC Five Live’ overnight presenter Dotun Adebayo [DA] about the absence of ethnic minority presenters at LBC. At the start of the event, O’Brien said he had been asked to chair the debate because “I am actually officially the whitest person working in the broadcasting industry today.”

DA: “James, you work for a London station. How many black presenters are there, when 20% of the London population is African-Caribbean or Asian? How many black presenters are there on LBC?”

JO: “That’s interesting because there aren’t any black presenters currently.”

DA: “If I ask James how many black cleaners there are at LBC, it would be a high percentage.”

JO: “For what it’s worth, that’s not true. If you had asked me about production staff, I would point at two or three colleagues, both current and former, who are from ethnic minorities. I object to that question because I don’t think their colour is relevant to their ability to do the job.”

DA: “That wasn’t the point. I gave you one example of London media where there are no [ethnic] presenters. You should be embarrassed about that, James.”

JO: “I think that, at the moment, I am the best person to be presenting my show and colour is entirely irrelevant to that equation. If someone who is better than me comes along, they will get my job, whatever colour they are. I would hope my employer would have the bravery to appoint the best person for the job and not say…..”

DA: “How can you explain the fact that there isn’t one black presenter on your station?”

JO: “How would you like to be the one who only got the job because there aren’t any black people on the station?”

DA: “I would be happy to get the job because at least it was an opportunity for me, whereas there is no opportunity for me there at the moment. There are no black presenters at LBC. That’s something that’s disgraceful and you know that.”

JO: “I dispute that entirely, but it’s not about me. If you want to hear me talk about myself, I’ll be back on LBC 97.3 FM tomorrow morning [laughter from audience].”

Later in the debate, Salim Salam [SS], a former BBC producer now working for digital station ‘Colourful Radio’, returned the discussion to the same issue:

SS: “It’s a managerial question. Given that you want to have a media industry which is broadly reflective of the society in which it operates, and in the case of the BBC is directly paid for by that society, then you should be looking to get (LBC being an example) a station which is broadly representative of the society to which it is broadcasting. And the fact that it’s not is a managerial question.”

JO: “LBC takes up 24 hours of programming, of which every single one, expect for two [hours] between 5 and 7am, is phone-in. So if you want to talk about a radio station that provides a platform and an opportunity for every single citizen in the city to put forward their case, their perspective, their experience or their opinion, a phone-in programme or a phone-in station is almost immune to these accusations.”

SS: “No, it’s not, because I’m talking about the people who present the programmes and who make the programmes, which actually affects the editorial. There are two elements to this question. One is: who’s making the programmes and who’s presenting the programmes, and who’s doing the hiring and firing? … The other question is the editorial, and it’s not always a question of people walking around deliberately looking for opportunities to discriminate against black people. It’s about the questions that you ask. Muslim people, for example, have a hell of a lot of questions to ask about a lot of things. There’s nobody asking those questions for them because the editorial lines that are being taken all come from one particular point of view, and then the questions that are asked follow the perceived lines of wisdom or the orthodoxy of the time. So, if you are looking for an industry that is broadly reflective of the society in which it operates, you have got to ask yourself why is it not (whether it is racism or not)?  Secondly, if you are looking for solutions to that, look at who is doing the hiring and firing. Who do they know? Are they capable of making a rational judgement when they are faced with those applicants? The BBC’s own figures will tell you that black people, once they get to the final interview stage, are still three times less likely to get the job than their white counterparts. Are you telling me that black people are three times less talented or able? I’m not of that opinion. I think it’s either unconscious discrimination, or whatever it is.”

Jimmy Buckland, external affairs officer of RadioCentre, provided the meeting with data from the forthcoming SkillCentre 2006 Employment Census which found the radio industry overall employs 6.9% of staff from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, comprising 3.1% in commercial radio and 10.9% in BBC radio. Explaining that these results appear skewed because “commercial radio is more regional based than the BBC”, Buckland said that 19% of commercial radio’s workforce is based in London, compared to 59% of the BBC’s. He added: “What we have here is a problem of representation, definitely.”

[First published in edited form in ‘The Radio Magazine’ as ‘LBC Quizzed Over All-White Presenter Team’, #777, 28 February 2007]

[Originally blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/11/lbc-973-fm-londons-whitest-conversation.html ]

Caribbean drubbing on such an “Armageddon-like” day : 2024 : Hurricane Beryl, Carriacou

 “Clackety-clack clackety-clack, from Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo, from Timbuctoo and back!”

As a young reader, I learned these words by heart from a favourite children’s book, ‘The Train to Timbuctoo’ written in 1951 by Margaret Wise Brown. I daydreamed about the journey between these two strangely-named railway stations, evoked so perfectly by the author’s prose and accompanying illustrations. Decades later, I discovered I had been sold a fantasy, it being as improbable to take a train from Kalamazoo (a city in Michigan) to Timbuktu (an ancient city in Mali) as it would to line up at Marrakesh station ticket office behind Graham Nash. Only recently did I learn that Timbuctoo (a different spelling from the Mali one) is in fact the name of: a ghost town in California; a small settlement in New Jersey; and a failed farming community in upstate New York, none of which boast a railway station. Whichever were the book’s fantasy locations, I never did manage to travel there … by train or other means. But it had stimulated dreams of foreign sojourns.

Although I never read the book, the haunting instrumental theme music to the French dramatisation of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains embedded in my memory, half a century after having watched its thirteen black-and-white dubbed episodes repeated ad nauseum on BBC children’s television. Seven-year-old suburban me was enthralled by the prospect of living beside the sandy beach of a sunny tropical island, despite my aversion to spiders and snakes. Scenic landscapes filmed on Gran Canaria looked picture-postcard remarkable in the era before ‘package holidays’ and ‘charter flights’ opened up international travel. The series fomented a childhood dream of one day relishing a ‘simple’ life beside a gently lapping sea … perhaps accompanied by a ‘Girl Friday’ such as Tuesday Weld whom I had just ogled alongside ‘Richard Kimble’ in ‘The Fugitive’, my parents’ favourite TV serial. It was ‘Robinson Crusoe’ that fostered dreams of island-living.

For a month during early 2004, much of my time was wasted sat at a desk in the air-conditioned open-plan BBC office in Phnom Penh with a workload stymied by disagreements with management over the danger of fulfilling my contract in the crumbling Radio National Kampuchea headquarters, following the recent workplace death of a staff member. Seeking escapism from these frustrations, I listened to the few extant streaming reggae music stations of the time, but found none were playing the selection of ‘roots’ oldies I desired. My fruitless search had identified a gap in the global online market for listeners like me who had grown up during reggae’s most fertile and creative period between the 1960’s and 1980’s.

On my return to the UK later that year, I spent months awaiting the follow-up BBC work contracts I had been promised, but which never materialised. Without employment, I busied myself creating an automated online music station ‘rootsrockreggae’, digitising 15,000 reggae recordings I had collected since childhood. Broadcast from servers in Jamaica, I managed the operation remotely, generating revenue from a few local advertisers and commissions from listeners buying compact discs of music they had heard. It started small but, using an early iteration of ‘Google Ads’ to target North American reggae fans, the audience grew quickly. Within a few years, Winamp/Shoutcast ranked it amongst the five most listened to online reggae radio stations in the world, attracting an audience of tens of thousands each day. Its online player displayed constantly updated headlines from Jamaica, reggae news and weather reports, using my computer programming skills first learnt in the 1970’s. Like most online start-ups, sadly it never turned a profit.

Out of the blue, I received an email from the engineer of an FM radio station ‘Kyak 106’, asking if it could re-broadcast rootsrockreggae’s online overnight stream of dub and DJ music when no live presenters were available. I found the station’s website, listened and loved its enthusiasm for reggae, broadcasting to an island called Carriacou of which I knew absolutely nothing. I responded positively. This random communication prompted me to find out more about the location where my online station was suddenly being broadcast on 106.3 FM.

I discovered that Carriacou is a 12-square-mile island in the southeast Caribbean Sea with a population of 9,000. It is part of the former British colony of Grenada, independent since 1974 but retaining King Charles III as head of state. Physically, it is closer to Saint Vincent & The Grenadines (another independent former British colony, population 110,000, 4 miles away) than to the main island of Grenada (population 120,000, 17 miles away). Reading what little I could find online, I was quickly charmed by Carriacou’s old-style, friendly, relaxed way of life. It was not a resort island for rich Americans, its single airstrip too small for commercial planes, its colourful buildings were low-rise and its capital Hillsborough (population 1,200) had the feel of a quaint village with a short ‘High Street’.

Such was my enthusiasm, buoyed by regular listening to Kyak 106’s live shows, that I started to sketch a budget holiday plan for Carriacou, taking a Monarch Airlines flight from the UK to Grenada, a ferry to the island and staying at ‘Ades Dream Guesthouse’. Initially, it was time constraints that delayed such a visit because my workload had permitted only a single day off that year (to attend my daughter’s graduation). Then, having unexpectedly and suddenly lost my over-demanding job and unable to find another, finance became the restricting factor.

Inevitably, life moved on. Although the listenership to my reggae station had continued to grow, revenues fell precipitously when the dollar commissions earned from compact disc sales were replaced by mere cents generated by newly legalised MP3 download sales. Lacking a job, I reluctantly closed rootsrockreggae in 2009, even though it was now regularly ranked the most-listened online reggae station in the world after five years continuously on-air. It was a disappointing and frustrating time. Without access to development funds, life had to be focused on survival above all else. I promised myself to retire to Carriacou as soon as I won the lottery.

Kyak 106 closed in 2014, the product of a falling-out between two of its three directors that escalated as far as a 2022 High Court judgement. Station engineer Michael Ward, having been summarily sacked by presenter Kimberlain ‘Kim D King‘ Mills, proceeded to commandeer the radio station and continue broadcasting from its Belair studio in Carriacou, until Mills called time and unilaterally shut the operation. Subsequently, Ward transformed Kyak 106 into an automated online reggae music station, adopting a slogan ‘Roots Rock Reggae from Carriacou’ that sounded remarkably familiar!

28 August 2008. When tropical storm Gustav arrived in Jamaica, I was listening for news to FM talk radio station ‘Power 106’ where presenter Althea McKenzie remained barricaded in its Bradley Avenue studio in Half Way Tree for hours on end. You could hear the wind and the rains aggressively pounding the building as she valiantly relayed information updates for residents and took phone calls from listeners, her voice sometimes wracked with dread and emotion. It produced some of the most impressive (but frightening) live radio I have ever heard, for which she should have won some broadcasting award. Gustav resulted in fifteen deaths and US$210m in damages on the island. McKenzie is still heard daily from 5am on this excellent station. I still dreamt of living on a Caribbean island, despite weather disasters such as this.

October 2017. I had accompanied my daughter for a meal in a Wokingham pizzeria when my sister asked me: “If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you want to be?” Without hesitation, repetition or deviation, I responded: “Carriacou.” The dream was still alive.

1 July 2024. Category 4 Hurricane Beryl tore through Carriacou on Monday morning, destroying 98% of its buildings, cutting its electricity, water supply and mobile phone coverage. Houses were reduced to matchsticks. Huge trees were uprooted. All vegetation was stripped away, turning the island from luscious green to brown. Several people (number still unconfirmed) died. Roads became impassable. All communication with the outside world was lost. To discover what had happened there, I turned to YouTube. There I discovered award-winning American journalist and ‘storm chaser’ Jonathan Petramala who had arrived on the island the previous day with colleague Brandon Clement to document the hurricane’s passage. His videos provided an absolutely remarkable record of the devastation.


Two decades earlier, when I had first sought information about Carriacou, YouTube was yet to launch. Today there are dozens of videos about the island. Petramala captured the ‘calm before the storm’ mere hours before the hurricane struck, incorporating drone footage illustrating the charm of its colourful buildings and its ‘paradise’ sandy beaches. His impassioned commentary heralded the calamity that was to come and, although the island’s one petrol station had closed after a run on fuel and the mini-mart was busy, there was no evident panic. “It’s going to be horrific,” he said … and it was.


The following day’s video was a bleak testament to the destruction Carriacou had endured. “This island is shredded,” Petramala commented. “These people are in desperate need of help.” A resident said: “Right now, Carriacou is finished for a couple of years.” I had never seen anything weather-related as shocking as the complete devastation shown here. It resembled a war-zone. The drone shots were heartbreaking. Another shell-shocked resident said: “The thing is: we have three [storm] systems right behind it. What about the people who don’t have the time to recover, who don’t have a roof over their head, who don’t have the resources to rebuild?”

This video was unique because communications (mobile, internet, radio) had been completely lost on the island in the hurricane’s aftermath. Carriacou has no TV station and its two local FM radios (‘Vibes 101.3’ and ‘Sister Isles 92.9’) had been knocked out. Using a vehicle battery, Petramala uploaded his video via the Starlink satellite. That Tuesday, there was no other footage online. Residents could be seen filming on their mobile phones but there was no signal coverage to share or upload videos and no electricity to keep their phones charged. The island’s population was in an evident state of shock. Petramala’s footage, in which he made repeated appeals for outsiders to help the population, was used in weather stories broadcast by television stations the world over to illustrate the disaster, deservedly garnering millions of views.

The next day, Wednesday, roads in the capital had been partially cleared by residents, allowing Petramala to explore beyond by vehicle. His next video showed the ‘Dover Government School’, designated as one of eight emergency shelters on the island, entirely reduced to rubble. Those who were sheltering there had to evacuate to its tiny library outbuilding completed in April 2023 that remained standing. In March 2023, the 40-bed Princess Royal Smart Hospital had reopened in Belair with fanfare as the island’s sole hospital after having been “retrofitted to improve [its] resistance to disasters like hurricanes”, using funds from the UK government and Pan American Health Organization. This video showed all its facilities unusable due to water damage.

Then, arriving at the government’s Emergency Operations Centre on Carriacou, also in Belair, Petramala explained to its seemingly baffled staff:

“I’m the only journalist on the island. We have a Starlink [satellite terminal] so we’ve been able to get in touch with the government down in Grenada. I think we’re the only people who have contact with the outside [world]. They want to be able to get in touch with you guys but nothing is working. … We can set [Starlink] up outside and give you guys ten minutes if you want to call down to the government in Grenada and communicate what has happened here.”

Surprisingly, the Centre did not appear to be a hive of activity after such total devastation. We did learn that only five of the island’s eight emergency shelters had survived (for 9,000 population?). Although the building’s generator was powering lighting, its “communications hub” (as promised by the US Charge d’Affaires) had not survived the hurricane, despite this “fantastic facility” having only been completed in 2021 with US$3m funding from the US Embassy. Did we see a basic radio transceiver (even a retail amateur radio set) to provide SOME two-way inter-island communication? No. Did we see walkie-talkies used by emergency staff for intra-island communication? No. An apparent dependence on commercial mobile phone networks (operators Digicell and Flow) was, er, unwise when their towers prove so vulnerable to weather and power issues.

Set up in their vehicle, Petramala and Clement allowed nearby traumatised residents to use their Starlink satellite link to contact their loved ones overseas, leading to emotional scenes. Later that day, a helicopter landed at Carriacou’s airport, Grenada prime minster Dickon Mitchell emerged and, interviewed by Petramala, resembled a deer caught in headlights (commented my wife). He promised aid “from tomorrow” but proposed recruitment of volunteers from the mainland and assistance from other countries over guaranteeing immediate assistance from his government. For islanders who had no homes, no water, no electricity, no food and no petrol, with vehicles destroyed and roads blocked, the unfortunate impression was of a lack of urgency two days after the hurricane had hit. (Excellent silent drone footage of the devastation recorded by Clement fills six YouTube videos.)

While Petramala and Clement had been arriving in Carriacou on the eve of the hurricane, Belair resident Rina Mills had been similarly filming from her vehicle the calm that reined that Sunday before the storm (accompanied by Belair youth worker Shem ‘Ambassador’ Quamina). Employed by the Carriacou office of the ‘Grenada Tourism Authority’, Mills’ warnings about the impending disaster were stark and serious. With hindsight, this video (like her many others) was a testament to the beauty of the island though, within a few hours, it sadly became a historic record of how much habitat and infrastructure were about to be destroyed. Her exceptional knowledge of the geography, history and culture of Carriacou, combined with her informal conversations, made her videos compelling. She promised: “After the storm, we’ll do an update as well.”

However, the next day’s destruction of mobile phone masts prevented Mills from updating viewers until Friday, when her 24-minute live feed was managed only by climbing to a high point on the south of the island to connect over the horizon to an antenna on the mainland. Mills and her partner had lost their home, like many other islanders, and appeared in an understandable state of shock whilst cataloguing the “total devastation” of their island and five known associated deaths. It was a sad, upsetting video that acknowledged how precarious is our day-to-day existence, whilst also demonstrating the resilience of the population and its sense of community in the face of unprecedented disaster. The contrast with Mills’ chatty pre-disaster videos could not have been starker. Coincidentally, I heard Mills interviewed that weekend on the BBC World Service show ‘Newshour’ about Beryl’s impact on Carriacou.

Once partial mobile communication was restored on the island, Mills uploaded video previously recorded in the aftermath of the hurricane. In the centre of the capital Hillsborough, next to the destroyed Post Office, a mobile water desalination plant had been set up to offer free drinking water to residents. This vital resource had been provided by American religious charity ‘Samaritan’s Purse’ which amazingly had dispatched a DC-8 cargo plane to Grenada (video of landing) the day after the hurricane, loaded with materials (video) to establish a field hospital, desalination plants around the island, foodstuffs, tarpaulins, clothing and bedding. Two dozen of its volunteers were airlifted to Carriacou and a barge was chartered the following day to bring the equipment there from Grenada. It was a much-needed vital resource at a time when Grenada government assistance was still not visible. “Hats off to Samaritan’s Purse,” commented Mills’ partner. “They were the first to get here, in my opinion.”

I had never heard of Samaritan’s Purse but was incredibly impressed by the scale and urgency of its work, operating a fleet of 24 aircraft and two helicopters from North Carolina. Video of a public tour of this DC-8 plane at the Dayton Air Show only days earlier demonstrated the huge volume of supplies it had carried. Its volunteers quickly spread across the island, distributing materials to residents from churches (Pastor Happy Akasie’s church in Brunswick in this video). By the following week, it had set up its second field hospital in Carriacou with doctors, nurses, medications and counsellors (video). Despite the island’s hotels/B&B’s having been destroyed, the charity operates self-sufficiently, building its own accommodation and bringing food and water for staff. It seems to embody the fictional Tracy family’s ‘International Rescue’.

Towards the end of this video, Mills understandably rails against sightseers arriving by ferry from Grenada merely to video the destruction in order to attract ‘hits’ to their social media channels. One example of this was bizarre ‘Coleen AKA Bright Diamond’ from the mainland who appeared to enjoy her ‘day out’ on the destroyed island, travelling on the back of an aid truck, making inappropriate comments, drinking from a wine bottle in the back of a car and buying bottled beer. Afterwards, the Grenada government introduced vetting of ferry travellers to Carriacou to prevent further ‘disaster tourists’ consuming the island’s scarce resources. Fortunately, these self-promoting types were in a minority, overshadowed by the many people and organisations who arrived on Carriacou to genuinely help out.

British solicitor and author Nadine Matheson had been visiting her parents’ house on Carriacou when the hurricane struck and recorded this scary video of its almost total destruction. Once back home, she is recording informative updates on her parents’ situation and a fundraising effort to replace the house’s roof. The structure is now covered by a temporary blue tarpaulin which, like so many other properties, was donated by Samaritan’s Purse.

Meanwhile, videos published by the Grenada government since the disaster have proven a quite surreal soft-focus experience after the stark wholesale destruction visible in locally-made videos. After its prime minister (who is additionally minister for disaster management) visited the island, one video showed him standing on the wreckage of a resident’s home, looking wistfully into the distance, accompanied by soft tinkling music. Its editor seems to be a big fan of 1980’s Lionel Ritchie music videos. There is lots of footage of government officials in fluorescent vests talking to each other, pointing at the destruction and being interviewed explaining what WILL happen but – dare I say? – not much footage of action IMMEDIATELY to tackle this humanitarian crisis. Initially, the government’s media focus (including its partly owned GBN television channel) was much more on the relatively minor damage suffered on the main island, rather than the total destruction of ‘sister isle’ Carriacou.

Watching hours and hours of government press conferences uploaded online, I was struck by the preoccupation with ‘process’ they exhibit, talking endlessly about which department and which officers are responsible, which meetings WILL take place and who reports to whom. This habitual use of the future tense is alarming when what should be stated was what had ALREADY happened and what was happening RIGHT NOW. The government’s adoption of the slogan ‘Carriacou and Petite Martinique Will Rise Again!’ for the disaster seems symptomatic of this somewhat wishful thinking. It raises the big question: WHEN? Electricity is unlikely to be restored to the whole island for many months. Petrol remains in short supply. The situation on-the-ground for islanders remains dire.

The government press briefing on 9 July, eight days after the hurricane had hit, promised: a 2,000-gallon water truck loaned by a company on St Lucia “will commence distribution to residents starting Wednesday July 10th 2024”; then “a second 1,800-gallon water truck loaned by the Barbados Water Authority is expected to arrive on Carriacou during the coming week.” Does Grenada not own one water truck? How have 9,000 people on Carriacou been expected to survive without government-supplied fresh water for more than a week? Why does the co-ordinator of Grenada’s ‘National Disaster Management Agency’ (whose last web site news update was three weeks ago), Dr Terence Walters, seem to consider in this press conference that distributing 2,000 food packages to residents (who number 9,000) five days after the hurricane hit was a satisfactory response?

Coincidentally, a mere four days before Hurricane Beryl hit Carriacou, a 120-page report entitled ‘Grenada: National Disaster Preparedness Baseline Assessment’ had been published by the ‘Pacific Disaster Center’. It concluded that:

“… results for Grenada showed significant multi-hazard exposure including hurricane winds, earthquakes, and volcanoes with nearly the entire population exposed. […] The assessment pointed to vulnerabilities due to Environmental Stress, Information Access, and Gender Inequality and significant deficiencies in coping capacity areas such as Air Support and Transportation Capacity indicating enhancements are necessary to bolster Grenada’s disaster response capabilities. Addressing these gaps, alongside targeted efforts to mitigate the identified vulnerabilities, will strengthen the nation’s overall resilience to disasters. […] Strengthening communication and information management systems is essential to support effective disaster response and comprehensive risk reduction strategies.” [emphasis added]

In 2019, the World Bank had allocated US$20m to be drawn down by Grenada to address natural catastrophes, but had noted in its report:

“[Grenada’s] Institutional capacity for implementation [risk] is rated Substantial due to weak inter-institutional coordination and the lack of technical expertise. Implementing the proposed operation will require the integrated work of several actors at the national and local levels to move the proposed policy actions forward. This could result in scattered, low impact, and/or uncoordinated actions.” [emphasis added]

Estimated damages and losses to Grenada’s economy from its most significant disasters suffered between 1975 and 2018 were estimated by the World Bank to have totalled US$967m (at 2017 prices). Hurricane Beryl’s financial impact is likely to be greater than these prior disasters combined, eclipsing the island’s annual GDP several times. Evidently, the fiscal catastrophe of accelerating climate change not only decimates small economies such as Grenada’s but cumulatively will precipitate a global diversion of resources away from consumption towards mitigation and repair of weather, temperature and sea level changes. 

It was evident in videos posted online that aid had quickly arrived from diverse sources: generous individuals, volunteers and groups on mainland Grenada, other Caribbean islands, the United Nations, France providing boats of supplies and troops on the ground (Grenada has no army), global charities. I watched a video of the French ambassador to Grenada interviewed whilst off-loading aid. Have I similarly seen the British high commissioner or governor general on Carriacou? Maybe I missed them. On 5 July, the UK provided £0.5m of immediate aid to Grenada and St Vincent, but will more substantial longer term assistance be forthcoming from the island’s former colonial power?

In 1983, the United States had sent 7,300 troops to invade and occupy Grenada because president Reagan chose to believe its newly built airport, funded partially by the British government, would be used to land Soviet bombers. 45 Grenadians were killed and 358 wounded. Today, if a major power were to devote similar resources to rebuild Carriacou quickly, its population might be able to endure the hardship it currently faces. However, despite residents suffering no electricity, water, food or a roof over their heads and with several emergency shelters destroyed, the government in Grenada has no current plan for significant evacuation of the island, preferring to remove only pregnant women, residents of old people’s homes and the hospitalised. How long are its citizens expected to survive when no cash is available from destroyed banks or ATM’s, forcing residents to make a four-hour round trip to the mainland? In 2024, these generous and stoic island people have been marooned in a hellish medieval landscape.

My dream of island-living is over for now. Carriacou can never be the same again. What will happen there is difficult to fathom. Its economy, seemingly reliant on retirees from the diaspora and small-scale tourism (independent travellers and two marinas of yachts) is ruined, forcing its people to make lifechanging decisions. Nowhere have I read that Grenada main island’s schools and sports halls have been opened to Carriacou refugees who have lost everything. At a time when thousands of its residents remain sat amongst the ruins of their dwellings, the Grenada government announced precipitously that:

“… the [Cayman Islands] Premier is extending an invitation to Grenadians who wish to work in the Cayman Islands, to return with her on Tuesday July 16 2024.”

The premier of this British Overseas Territory (population 85,000) was due to deliver aid relief to Grenada that day, but not before a further press statement had to hurriedly clarify that “no such offer was made during the courtesy call made to the Prime Minister of Grenada by the Premier of the Cayman Islands” and withdraw the implied invitation to potential economic migrants. Oh dear. (I recall when 8,000 refugees out of a population of 13,000 left the decimated Caribbean island of Montserrat following its 1995 volcanic eruption.)

I never got to visit Carriacou but, compared to the suffering endured presently by its resilient people, my regrets are insignificant. Watching the news from Carriacou engenders a sense of helplessness in the face of such overwhelming humanitarian need. I am highlighting Carriacou here only because it has been on my mind for two decades since receiving that fateful email from Kyak 106. The neighbouring islands of Petit Martinique and Union Island have been just as badly devastated by Hurricane Beryl. Though I am continuing to follow events in Carriacou, the mainstream media has inevitably moved on swiftly to other disasters elsewhere.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?height=476&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Funep%2Fvideos%2F1177977146792786%2F&show_text=false&width=476&t=0

Observing the aftermath of this catastrophic event since 1 July has merely reinforced the devastating impact of ‘climate change’ us humans have foisted upon populations who have done nothing to cause it. Nobody on Earth can afford to ignore this issue because its effects will inevitably be coming to your corner of the world soon. Nobody will be immune. It is coming to get you, whether or not you choose to believe it is real. Voicing this eloquently was an emotional call-to-arms video (initially at https://youtu.be/oYn-XarQM3M but mysteriously deleted since) by United Nations climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell who is seen hugging his grandmother amongst the ruins of her home on Carriacou, his homeland.

After having viewed Beryl’s immediate impact from a helicopter, Grenada prime minister Dickon Mitchell had described the destruction as “Armageddon-like” in a press briefing and promised:

“We know it is not something that will happen overnight, but we certainly believe that in the next week to two and a half weeks we should have a complete clean up.”

Weeks later, new videos from Carriacou continue to show a post-Armageddon catastrophe that could last months and years for its beleaguered population.

POSTSCRIPT

On 27 Jul, this blog entry had suggested “Hurricane Beryl’s financial impact [on Grenada’s economy] is likely to be greater than these prior disasters [1975 to 2018] combined, eclipsing the island’s annual GDP several times.” The World Bank had previously documented that “damages and losses” from Hurricane Ivan in 2008 had amounted to 148% of Grenada’s then GDP.

On 30 Jul, Grenada prime minister Dickon Mitchell, closing the 47th CARICOM heads of state meeting he hosted and chaired there, suggested that the country’s early estimated losses from Hurricane Beryl would amount to EC$ 1,000,000,000 = US$ 370,000,000.

A back-of-the envelope calculation of this assertion:

  • Grenada GDP = US$ 1,320,000,000 (source: World Bank)
  • 98% of buildings destroyed or damaged in Carriacou & Petit Martinique (source: Grenada government)
  • estimated population of Carriacou & Petit Martinique =  9,000estimated number of buildings (homes + businesses + public buildings) = 5,000 (wild guess)
  • estimated impact on GDP = 28%
    • estimated impact per building on GDP = US$ 75,500

However, the destroyed buildings included public schools, emergency shelters, Carriacou’s hospital, post office and police station, each likely to cost millions to rebuild/repair. Additional costs include destroyed infrastructure such as island-wide overhead electric cabling, ports, marinas, airport, beaches, agriculture, fishing, environment plus lost tourism income (14% of Grenada GDP in 2019, source: UN).

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/07/caribbean-drubbing-on-such-armageddon.html ]

The genesis of black music radio in London … still unfulfilled : 1970-1984 : Radio Invicta 92.4

 I only knew ‘Roger Tate’ (real name Bob Tomalski) 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 forty-seven, 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 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 longwinded 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’ [regulator], 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 DJ’s 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 it 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 1970’s 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.

[First published by Grant Goddard: Radio Blog as ‘Radio Invicta: The Genesis Of Black Music Radio In London … Still Unfulfilled‘, 1 July 2011. Available as download.]

[Republished at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/05/the-genesis-of-black-music-radio-in.html ]

Sacked by a boss desperate to steal my success : 1991 : Gordon McNamee, KISS 100 FM, London

 It was a little after seven o’clock in the morning when the phone rang. Normally, I would already have been out of bed by that hour on a weekday. However, the previous night’s ‘DJ meeting’ [open to all 44 KISS FM presenters] had tired me out. I was awake, but I was still trying to urge my body to get out of bed. The mobile phone stationed beside my bed rang noisily and forced my brain into action far faster than it wanted.

It was [KISS FM personal assistant to managing director] Rosee Laurence on the line, asking if I could schedule a meeting that morning with [KISS FM managing director] Gordon McNamee. I scrambled out of bed to retrieve my diary from the battered ‘WH Smith’ black plastic briefcase I always took to work. Requests for meetings at such short notice were common although, during the last few days, McNamee had had no contact with me. Laurence suggested ten o’clock. I explained that I already had an editorial meeting [of my programming department] scheduled for half past ten, but I could fit it in as long as the meeting was not going to last too long. She assured me that it would not. I scribbled “10am – Gordon” in my diary, replaced the mobile phone in its charger and got on with the business of waking up properly.

My diary told me that I had two further meetings that afternoon – a weekly sponsorship get-together at one o’clock with [KISS FM finance director] Martin Strivens and the sponsorship manager, Gordon Drummond, followed by a debriefing session in the boardroom at three o’clock with KISS FM’s partners in the Pepsi promotion. During the drive from my flat to the office, I reflected on the possible reason for the early morning phone call. Was McNamee going to tell me what had happened at the previous day’s board meeting? Was he going to pretend that nothing untoward had happened and that the board had approved all his [unachievable] targets for Year Two?

I was already running late when I became caught up in the worst of the rush-hour traffic along Holloway Road. Although my work day officially started at half past nine, I liked to arrive at work earlier so that I could snatch a little time to myself before the inevitable mayhem started in the department. However, that day, there was only time to down a quick cup of tea before walking up to the top floor in time for my ten o’clock appointment. Gordon McNamee was sat in his corner office when Laurence ushered me in. After exchanging morning greetings, I sat facing McNamee across his huge wooden desk. He shuffled from side to side in his chair a few times, avoiding looking directly into my eyes, and he sighed unusually heavily. Several times, he looked up at me as if he was going to say something, but then stopped short.

I stared at him blankly, not knowing what to expect. Eventually, he started mumbling something apologetically, but still he was making little sense. I knew then that McNamee had bad news to break to me. He had always been excellent at whipping his team into a frenzy of enthusiasm when something good was happening, but he was almost incapable of breaking negative news to anyone. He started speaking slowly and managed to explain that he had been “extremely vexed” by the memo I had delivered to him two days earlier. ‘Vexed’ was one of McNamee’s favourite words to use in situations when somebody had done something that displeased him. Anyone else might have been angry, but McNamee was always ‘vexed.’

As he reflected upon the contents of my memo and how ‘vexed’ it had made him, McNamee seemed better able to talk to me directly and to break the bad news. He explained that the board had met the previous afternoon and had decided that the company no longer needed my services. He muttered something about this being the hardest thing he had ever had to do and how he regretted the decision, but I was barely listening to his words. Instead, I was thinking how cowardly was this man sitting in front of me. I was thinking that, even now, he had no intention of telling me the truth of what had taken place at the board meeting, or how he had probably acted to save his own skin. What I wanted to know was what he had told the board about my dissent and what he had told the board of my contributions to the station’s success.

But there seemed little point in saying anything at all to the cowering figure sat in front of me, with whom I had worked so closely for more than two years. I got up to leave the room. McNamee had failed to deliver my promised rewards on so many occasions that I did not need to hear another fabricated story about why I was not getting things to which I felt I was entitled. As I left his office, McNamee said that it would be necessary for me to leave the building immediately, and he thrust some documents into my hand. I walked straight out of his office, shocked that, even at this stage in our relationship, McNamee was still incapable of telling me truthfully why I had to go.

Before I could reach the staircase to return to my office, McNamee had caught up with me and was asking me to stop. For a second, I felt as if I should ignore him totally and just carry on walking, but I turned towards him at the very top of the building’s stairwell.

“We could say that you had resigned, to make it easier for you, if you wanted,” McNamee suggested to me.

I stared at him coldly with a combination of anger and hatred that I could feel welling up inside me.

“Gordon, that’s a fucking insult,” I spat at him. Then I turned and walked down the staircase leading to my office on the next floor.

I was incensed. After all the sweat, blood and toil I had poured into this company. After all the personal sacrifices I had made to ensure that KISS FM succeeded. After my hard work had produced the required results more quickly than had ever been anticipated [Year One target of one million listeners per week achieved within first six months on-air]. Now, I was being asked to resign from a job in which I had achieved nothing but success. McNamee’s cheek to even suggest such a thing had made me really angry. I was in a rage as I stormed into my office. The programming floor was starting to fill up, as staff trickled into work. My first thought was the speed with which McNamee had insisted I must leave the station. Rather than suffer the indignity of being forcibly removed from the building by the station’s security guard, I started to pack up my possessions.

[KISS FM head of music] Lindsay Wesker caught my attention as he walked onto the floor from the staircase. He was one of my senior team members, so I felt I should break the bad news to him personally. The only private place I could think of to talk was the men’s toilet in the stairwell of the floor, so we crowded into the tiny cubicle.

“I’ve just been sacked,” I said to Wesker, “and I’ve been told to leave the building immediately.”

Wesker looked thoughtful, but did not seem particularly shocked. I suddenly understood that Wesker must have been the only member of my team to know what was going to happen to me, before I did.

“Just as you’ve said before,” said Wesker calmly, “it’s always the programming department that gets the chop.”

These were the very words I had shared with Wesker more than a year earlier, during the first programme planning meeting I had convened at [former KISS FM office] Blackstock Mews. Wesker had mulled over my words carefully then and, now, I realised why he had found those words so interesting. In Wesker’s eyes, he had got rid of me at last. I exited the men’s toilet without saying another word.

Having received no sympathy from Wesker for my predicament, I walked back to my office and continued assembling my personal effects. I had spent far more of my waking hours in that building during the last year than I had at home, so many of my own possessions were intermingled with that of the company. There was the portable television I had brought to the office when the Gulf War had started, there was a portable cassette player I used, the records I had used to make station jingles, and unread magazines that were cluttering the floor. These were all mine. I started gathering them together into a manageable pile to take away with me. Other staff on the floor noticed me through the clear plastic partition of my office and started to wonder what was going on.

I told Philippa Unwin, who had worked with me closely as the department administrator since the Blackstock Mews days, what had just happened to me. She became visibly upset. As I told other members of my team, they stood around the floor in disbelief and shock.

[KISS FM head of talks] Lorna Clarke said to me: “They can’t sack you just like that. You’re the only one who knows how this whole station works.”

I felt pressured by the urgency to get out quickly, so I started carrying boxes of my things down three flights of stairs to put in my company car parked at the back of the building. I suddenly realised that my hasty and unexpected departure from KISS FM could be explained away to the staff on any pretext, unless I could make some kind of statement myself. The memo that had ‘vexed’ Gordon so much had recorded all the significant events of the previous week, as well as having stated my unambiguous position on wanting KISS FM to adopt a realistic strategy for its future.

After less than a year on-air, one of the staff’s major criticisms was the lack of information about company decisions that trickled down to them from the senior management. Only those staff working most closely with me in the programming department understood that I was just as ill-informed about what was going on at board level as everybody else was in the building. Using a Prit-Stick from the top drawer of my desk, I glued a copy of my memo to Gordon McNamee onto the clear plastic partition of my office. My room opened onto the floor’s entrance lobby and the partition could be seen by everyone passing through the department. Alongside the memo, I glued the document detailing the programming policy changes I had been ordered by McNamee to devise.

While I continued to gather together my possessions, staff in the department started to read my two memos, all the while expressing outrage that my dismissal could be so abrupt. Then, Wesker burst into my office and handed me a sheet of ledger paper.

“Rosee [Laurence] upstairs says these things are KISS property which you have to give back before you go,” said Lindsay sheepishly.

Inscribed in red ink was a list:

“1) security tag 13-92 + ID pass.
2) office & studio keys.
3) car keys.” 

It was evident that Wesker had been anticipating my dismissal and was acting as messenger boy for the management staff on the top floor who were too cowardly to talk to me directly. I snatched the piece of paper from him, but ignored it. I asked him, rhetorically, how I was expected to take home all my personal possessions without being able to use the company car?

Before leaving the station for the last time, I walked around the programming department and said my hurried goodbyes to the few staff who were already at their desks. Because the majority of my team worked shifts, there were only a few people there. In the DJs’ office, [daytime presenter] David Rodigan was sat at his desk, facing the front windows that looked out over Holloway Road. His back was towards the office door, so I had to interrupt his preparations for that day’s lunchtime show to bid him farewell. He expressed outrage at my sacking and seemed bewildered by the speed with which I was being forced to leave.

There was nothing left to do except thank everyone who was in the department for the good times we had spent together and to give many of them one last hug. Some of the staff were crying, others were visibly angry, and some did not seem to believe the events that were unfolding right in front of their eyes. Wesker was the only person who seemed unmoved by the whole scene. He was busy protesting that I had not left the company’s property that he had been given responsibility to collect. I could not have cared less.

I got into my company car, half expecting someone to rush out and stop me driving it away. But they did not, and I drove away from the station’s car park for the very last time. I had arrived at work barely two hours ago. Now, I was already on my way home again. It felt as if some ghastly mistake had happened, some chance mishap over which I had been able to exert no control. I could not believe that this would really be the very last day I ever worked at KISS FM. The traffic was much lighter on the roads, now that the rush hour was over, so I reached home within half an hour. By then, I was feeling neither upset nor angry about my dismissal. More, I was stunned that the end could have come so abruptly, and without McNamee having offered any gratitude for my significant contributions to KISS FM’s success.

[Excerpt from ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business: The Inside Story Of A London Pirate Radio Station’s Path To Success’ by Grant Goddard, Radio Books, 2011, 528 pages]

[Originally blog published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/05/sacked-by-boss-so-desperate-to-steal-my.html ]