Since we last spoke before Xmas, I have made a move …. to Phnom Penh. I am writing this sitting on a hotel balcony overlooking the Mekong River. How did this happen? Nearly two years ago, when I was living in Brighton, I was interviewed by the BBC World Service Trust for a job managing their projects in Africa and Asia. I didn’t get the job but they said they would get back to me if something suitable came up. I heard nothing more until the week before Xmas, when a message was left on my voicemail asking me to call the BBC office about a possible consultancy job in the New Year. Apparently, they had contacted Owen [Leach, former colleague at Star TV India and Metromedia International Inc.] to track down where I was now, he had told them about my job at the Radio Authority, which they found was closed, so they tried Ofcom. They wanted me to go to Cambodia as early as possible in 2004 to support their project there that was partnered with three Phnom Penh radio stations. Could I spare two or three months? [see blog]
Only a week earlier, my line manager at Ofcom (who too transferred from the Radio Authority) had told me that I would have no work to do during the first quarter of the year and that “there is nothing for you to contribute to” with regard to Ofcom’s strategic review of the whole radio licensing process. So I asked if I could take unpaid leave to do the BBC work. My request was refused. I asked if I could take paid leave to do the work, since I had eight weeks of holiday accrued that had to be taken by year-end 2004. My request was refused. Suddenly, I was told that there were essential tasks that I would be needed to work upon during the first quarter of the year. I was also told that, when the radio licensing regime restarted in the second quarter, it would be essential for me to be there. So when could I take the vacation to which I was entitled? I received no answer. I thought long and hard about the options open to me. I had applied for all sorts of jobs internally with Ofcom that were more suited to my skills (in departments dealing with audience research, market intelligence, policy & strategy), but no one had offered me anything. The prospect of spending at least three months sitting at my desk doing nothing (just like my job at the Radio Authority) whilst the new Ofcom radio licensing strategy was being decided by others did not appeal to me. I had already spent a year doing almost nothing. So I quit. [see blog]
A week later, I was heading for Cambodia. I arrived here on Tuesday of last week without even had a meeting with the BBC World Service in London. They sent me the airline tickets, a contract and a certificate of health insurance. I am here initially for two months, but which is likely to be extended to three months. They are paying for my hotel bill at a very nice, newly built ‘boutique’ hotel owned by two French businessmen. My room is huge. The hotel has wireless internet access and a modern restaurant. They have contracted me as a consultant (their first, so the contract is numbered WST 001), but the manager in London says that, if the work is successful, I should get further work out of the BBC. He has been very honest and admitted that I am helping them out of a large hole. The project is paid for by the UK government Department for International Development (DfID) who want results by their year-end this April before they will renew funding for 2004/5. My job is to produce the required results. The pay isn’t great (£750/week + US$100/week pocket money) which they have admitted, but they say they are eking it out of the existing budget, as a consultant was not budgeted for.
The BBC set up an office here last year (there is no BBC Phnom Penh correspondent) which now employs around 40 people. It is in a beautiful colonial villa next door to the British Embassy. It has everything you could want – drivers, computers, mobile phones, photocopiers, etc and the essential air conditioning. There are several UK staff here – the project manager is an ex-‘Panorama’ filmmaker, the head of radio is an ex-World Service studio manager, the head of TV was executive producer of ‘EastEnders’. I had no briefing before I left as to what I was expected to do here, so I have spent this weekend reading all the BBC documents about the project, and now have a better idea. The BBC is shifting its strategy from simply making the odd programme or series to be broadcast in developing countries towards a more holistic approach of training staff of existing radio stations in developing markets (i.e. Cambodia) to be market leaders. But the BBC doesn’t have any staff who can do that because existing staff are used to having huge BBC resources available to them to achieve even simple objectives. Small-scale cheap commercial radio is simply not their forte. Even a simple phone-in, in BBC terms, is thought to need a staff of at least 5 full-time people for a single weekly show. The BBC has signed contracts with three stations here to deliver a mixture of pre-recorded spots, phone-in shows and management training (combined with hardware purchase) that will make these stations market leaders. There are 18 stations in Phnom Penh. My job is the training. Money is almost no object. DfID has given the BBC £3.3m for 3 years, not only for radio but also for the production of a two episode/week soap for TV. [see blog]
Phnom Penh isn’t as basic as I expected. True, there is no public transport or taxis, but every fifth vehicle is a 4-wheel drive and there are internet cafes on every corner. Although it’s the winter, it is very hot and dusty here, particularly in the middle of the day when the city closes down for a daily two-hour siesta. There are fewer shops than India and no corner convenience stores. I have just found the nearest supermarket to my hotel this morning, which is almost a mile away, but was surprised to find it took credit cards. There are no ATM’s in Cambodia. Everything is denominated here in US dollars as the local currency is worthless. The city is filled with Westerners as there are so many aid projects here of one sort or another. There is a daily English-language newspaper and an English radio station (‘Love FM’), despite the fact that very few Cambodians speak English. All shop signs and road signs are in Khmer and English because of the sheer number of aid workers here. The city is laid out in the Parisian style by the French with wide boulevards (though the traffic travels in both directions on both sides of the street) and vast gardens that stretch down to the river. Lots of Buddhist temples everywhere. Not so much outright poverty as Mumbai, but then Phnom Penh is a small city and there is no apparent rural-to-urban drift. Most people that survived Pol Pot lived in the countryside and stayed there. [see blog]
Anyway, enough of me. Let me know how things are going. I have intermittent wireless internet access at the hotel, and more reliable internet access at the office. If your itinerary passes this end of the world, please drop in. I’m sitting here eating mince pies (made in Australia) that I bought from the supermarket and thinking about ordering a pizza delivery tonight. Sometimes I wonder if I am really in Cambodia at all (although the endless karaoke phone-in shows on all radio stations remind me that I am not somewhere ‘normal’) [see blog]. Our only worry at the moment is that King Sihanouk has left for China to have a serious operation and, if he were not to survive, there is no succession plan in place and the likelihood of a people’s revolution because parliament has never been recalled since the last election. Oh, and the chicken flu that has arrived here Friday from Vietnam and Thailand. Apart from that, things are fine.
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.
September 1989. The other information I needed was a copy of the finished KISS FM application form from the last bid [for a London FM commercial radio licence – see blog], and a copy of the huge appendix that had accompanied it. [Pirate radio station co-founder Gordon] McNamee pulled out his own private copies from a shelf unit alongside his desk, and told me that my need for these last remaining copies of the documents was greater than his at that moment in time. I took both documents and started flicking through them on the train journey home, hoping they might offer me some inspiration.
The application looked pristine, as if it had been completely untouched. Then I came across the page that outlined KISS FM’s intended staff structure, showing each job in the company and how much it would be paid. In pencil, McNamee had scribbled out two of the station’s seventy-seven staff positions. One was the programme director, a position created specifically for [application co-ordinator] Dave Cash, but which was no longer required since he had dropped out of the bid. That change was understandable. However, the other post McNamee had crossed out was the station’s programme controller, the job for which I had been earmarked. No new posts had been added to the diagram, no jobs had been re-titled and no other amendments had been made. It was clear that, in the new scheme, Dave Cash and I no longer held positions within the company. These changes left KISS FM’s head of music, Lindsay Wesker, reporting directly to McNamee, who now acted as both the company’s managing director and programme director.
I was shocked to have found out accidentally that I seemed already to have been ousted from the KISS FM master plan. What should I do? During the weeks and months that followed, McNamee made no mention of this revised staffing structure, so I started to forget about its implications. Maybe these had been mere doodlings that McNamee had made immediately after the failure of the first licence application. I had no idea.
It was only much, much later I would learn that these scribbles held far more significance for my future than ever I could have imagined at the time.
May 1990. [McNamee’s personal assistant] Rosee Laurence had been busy for weeks, organising a surprise thirtieth birthday party for McNamee at Flynns nightclub in London’s West End. She had printed and distributed specially printed invitation cards to everyone involved in KISS FM and to the media contacts the station had built up over five years. Laurence asked me if I would make a speech at the event, trumpeting McNamee’s successes and congratulating him on behalf of everyone involved in the station. I was very reticent as I had always hated making public speeches. However, Laurence insisted that I should make the speech, though she agreed that I could share the task with KISS FM DJ Dean Savonne, who was one of McNamee’s oldest friends.
On the evening of 10 May 1990, several hundred people gathered inside Flynns club to see McNamee arrive in the company of his parents, who had pretended they were taking him out for a meal to celebrate his birthday. As he was shepherded through the front door, the whole room burst into a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday,’ followed by tribute speeches from Savonne and me, along with a brief introduction by KISS FM financial director Martin Strivens. The whole event was rather flamboyant, worsened by McNamee’s expression of blank surprise at the huge welcome he had been given. Mentorn Films was present with cameras and floodlights to commit the whole event to videotape for inclusion in the documentary about KISS FM. This made the evening much more of a media spectacle than a private birthday celebration.
That evening, and the next day in the office, it was obvious that McNamee was not at all pleased by Laurence’s organisation of the surprise event. He showed no gratitude and acted as grumpily as he had ever done in our company. I had given him a pair of solid silver cufflinks as a birthday present, though he had hardly even thanked me for the most expensive gift I had ever bought for anyone. The only thing that seemed to concern him was Mentorn’s filming of the event [for a Channel 4 TV documentary]. His mood did not improve until he had persuaded the company to agree not to use any footage from that evening in its documentary. It appeared that, because McNamee had been unable to rehearse his performance for the surprise birthday party, he did not want to be seen on film as he really was – a moody, often grumpy, man who seemed to like to feel in control of people around him and who liked to appear sufficiently powerful to make them jump to his commands.
September 1990. Eight days after KISS FM’s arrival on the airwaves [having won a London radio licence on its second attempt – see blog], the station staged a huge public launch party in the form of a daytime open-air concert on Highbury Fields, only a few hundred metres away from the Holloway Road office. Although publicity for this event had initially been very slow, by the beginning of the month the event had gathered a momentum that seemed impossible to stop. Naturally, the station had promoted the concert extensively on-air during its first week, and new acts were being added to the all-star line-up on a daily basis.
Driving into work that Sunday morning, my journey came to a standstill a mile from the office. Cars had already been parked along the roads leading to the event, and the pavements were jammed with people walking to the event. It took me an hour to travel the final mile to the radio station, a distance that usually only took a matter of minutes, even in the weekday rush hour. Suddenly, it was brought home to me very clearly how enormous KISS FM’s listenership must be after only a week. At the radio station, everybody was excited because we could look out of the office window at the back of the building and see, literally, thousands of people teeming into Highbury Fields. These were our listeners! For the last week, we had been broadcasting into the ether above London, never knowing whether more than a few hundred people were listening to us. But here was the proof. If any one event made the entire KISS FM staff believe that the station was already a success, it was the sight of all those people who had decided to spend a sunny September day with us … just because we had invited them.
Although most of the day’s activities were taking place at Highbury Fields, the KISS FM building was also very busy. The entire floor used by the programming department had been turned into a changing room for the artists to use. This proved very convenient for us to grab interviews with each of them before they went on-stage. Sufficient material was gathered during that one day to make dozens of editions of ‘The Word’ programme over the following few weeks. I went downstairs to the production studio and found a very fraught Lyn Champion, head of talks, in animated conversation on the phone. She put the phone down and told me that Gordon McNamee had been calling her, demanding that she put on-air a live link from the Highbury Fields stage. I was surprised. During all the preparations, McNamee had not mentioned to me anything about a live link-up.
Investigating further, I found that McNamee had unilaterally arranged for the station’s engineering contractor to set up a microwave radio link from the event stage to the studio, without informing us. Champion was very concerned that the quality of the audio received from the stage was so awful that it did not bear transmission on the radio. I listened too and, indeed, it sounded like someone playing a stereo system very loudly in a bathroom. The quality was appalling and would sound exactly that way coming out of listeners’ radios. I felt that it would do neither the station, nor the artists who happened to be performing at the time, any service to broadcast such poor-quality sound. Besides, I was not sure that KISS FM had even sought permission from any of the artists to relay their live performances to the whole of London.
I contacted McNamee on his mobile phone at the event and told him that, after listening to the microwave link, I agreed with Champion that the sound quality was too poor to put on-air. McNamee exploded with anger and called me every swear word under the sun. However, I refused to lose my temper and told him that, from where I was standing in the studio, the quality would sound dreadful for the stations’ listeners, a fact that he would not be able to appreciate himself, being at the event. Everybody in the studio had agreed upon this – Champion, me and the DJ on-air at the time. It would be crazy to put something on-air that sounded so bad. McNamee raged at me some more and then the phone line went dead.
I imagined that McNamee might turn up at the studio and put the live link on-air himself, but maybe he was too busy enjoying the privileges of the VIP Enclosure he had organised backstage at Highbury Fields. I never saw McNamee visit the station studios that day, but I realised that I would bear the brunt of his bitterness at some point in the future, so I would not have escaped unscathed.
More importantly than putting the event on-air, by mid-afternoon the police and transport authorities were asking the station to broadcast appeals asking people not to try and travel to the event because the area could not cope with more visitors. I happily obliged. These announcements only served to reinforce in the minds of our listeners the power that the station was able to wield after only one week on-air.
At the very end of the day, when the crowds had finally dispersed happy and fulfilled, I cleared up the debris that the artists had left in their ‘dressing room’ and drove a mile or so down the road to the after-event party that had been organised. There were bouncers on the door of the venue, to whom I identified myself as a KISS FM staff member and showed my ID card. They made me wait … and wait … and wait. Then, one of them came back and told me that I was not on their list of approved guests. I told them that I must be. I worked for KISS FM and this was the radio station’s party. They insisted that I was not one of the invited guests of whom they had been made aware. I realised that there was little point in getting angry with two very large bouncers that KISS FM had contracted for the event. The only person I knew that would be inside the event with a mobile phone was McNamee. This was not a good time to ask him a favour. Instead, I drove home frustrated and angry at my exclusion.
December 1990. After the failure of the second [in-store] radio station at the Trocadero [shopping centre], McNamee busied himself with the organisation of a staff party to celebrate KISS FM’s one hundredth day on-air. On the evening of Sunday 9 December 1990, the station’s entire staff, accompanied by members of the board and several journalists, filled The Underworld club in Camden, a venue that was only a few yards away from KISS FM’s first office in Greenland Street. The event was an updated version of the annual KISS FM awards ceremony that had started in the station’s pirate days. McNamee thoroughly enjoyed taking the role of circus ringmaster for the night and, just like the Oscars event, he announced the short-listed candidates for what seemed like a never-ending succession of prizes.
Some of the awards were serious in nature – David Rodigan won ‘Best Daytime Show,’ Tee Harris won ‘Best Specialist Show,’ and Paul Anderson won the prize for ‘Best Mixer.’ There were also many joke awards with which McNamee could thoroughly enjoy embarrassing his staff – Sonia Fraser won the ‘Biggest Flirt Award,’ and Malcolm Cox won KISS FM’s ‘Worst Dancer Award.’ During several hours of ceremonies, McNamee ensured that just about everybody at the station was either nominated or won an award. After a stage show in which three members of the programming department dressed up to present a skit on stage of a soul song by The Supremes, the guests were left to mingle, accompanied by music selected by former LWR DJ Elayne who had been hired for the night.
It was an enjoyable evening and a good way for everybody to relax after three months of hard work. Once the awards section of the evening was over, several of the staff from my department came up to me, one by one, to express surprise that I had not been mentioned at all in McNamee’s ceremony or been nominated for any prize. One concerned member of my team expressed outright indignation that I had not even been thanked for my contribution to the station’s successful launch. “Have you not worked harder than anybody to make this whole thing work?” she asked.
I shrugged off these comments as if I was not bothered about my complete omission from the night’s events. But I too could not have helped but notice that McNamee had left me out. I was not at all surprised. McNamee usually made no bones about snubbing in public those former colleagues who had fallen from his favour. That night, everybody celebrated the fact that KISS FM had already won 750,000 listeners. McNamee seemed to be celebrating the fact that he did not need my services anymore.
June 1991. I knew that, whatever story McNamee had told the press about the reasons for my dismissal [see blog], I could be sure that the reasons he must have offered to the company’s board to ensure my sudden departure were probably much more lurid and fantastic. I dreaded to think what McNamee might have been saying, in confidence, to colleagues within the radio industry about what dreadful deeds I was supposed to have committed at KISS FM before he had found me out. Was there anything that McNamee would not do to try and destroy my reputation?
That question was answered three weeks after my dismissal. I received a phone call late one evening from Daniel Nathan, a colleague in radio whom I had employed at KISS FM temporarily to help train the DJs. The two of us regularly exchanged news about developments within the industry. At the end of the conversation, Nathan asked me how I had reacted to the newspaper report about my dismissal. “What report?” I asked him, knowing that the media trade magazines had already run out of steam with the story. He went away for a while and returned to the phone with the Independent On Sunday newspaper in which he had seen the article.
Under the headline ‘KISS FM Keeps Status Quo,’ the report said: “KISS FM, London’s hippest radio station, has fought off an attempt to take it into the mainstream of pop music. But the former pirate has dismissed its head of programming after he suggested that ‘the radical sound of young London,’ as KISS calls itself, ditch the soul, Latin, house R&B, rare groove, salsa, blues, hip hop, reggae and bhangra music styles that made its name. Grant Goddard, head of programming at KISS, was sacked by the managing director, Gordon McNamee, after proposing to dismiss the weekend disc jockeys and play more commercial music to compete with Capital Radio.”
I could not believe the ‘story’ that Nathan was reading to me over the phone, but the article continued: “While a soured Mr Goddard fed the trade press stories of a crisis – ‘Struggling KISS Goes Mainstream’ declared the magazine Broadcast – Mr McNamee, or Gordon Mac as he is known, had gone to Spain for a rest. By the time he returned, the rumour was that Virgin, the principal shareholder, was selling out to the publishing company EMAP, who were to install a rock music supremo to win new listeners. ‘That’s all rubbish,’ said Mac yesterday. ‘We’re not about to start playing pop music, although of course we are interested in taking listeners from other stations, including Capital.’“
The article continued with a glowing biography of McNamee, trumpeting his abilities, accompanied by his photo. I could not believe what Nathan had just read to me down the phone line. This was the first national newspaper to pick up the story of my dismissal, but the newspaper had made no attempt to discover my side of the story. Furthermore, McNamee’s lies had surely reached their zenith in this article. And the journalist had peppered the article with inaccuracies – Virgin was not the principal shareholder in KISS FM. EMAP, far from buying the radio station, already had a substantial stake in it. I was absolutely livid and was determined to do something about it.
Once I found the relevant issue of The Independent On Sunday in my local library the next day, I noticed that the article had been written by Martin Wroe. The name was familiar to me because Wroe had written regularly about KISS FM since January 1988, when a piece in The Independent, entitled ‘Pirates Who Storm The Open Airwaves,’ had been accompanied by a photo of McNamee standing in the pirate KISS FM studio. Wroe’s first article had offered a glowing account of “Gordon Mac, the twenty-seven year old North London entrepreneur who controls KISS FM.” In at least four further articles about the station, Wroe had described McNamee as “a hip young media mogul” and had referred to “the excellent audience figures of KISS FM.” If I had wanted to choose someone to write a positive account of recent events at KISS FM, who better to ask than a journalist, on a national newspaper, who had never said a negative word about me?
I was incensed that Wroe had made no attempt to contact me to discover my side of the story, despite the fact that the article had been published three weeks after my dismissal. Every other journalist who had written about my exit from KISS FM had at least spoken to me about the story, even if they had not believed my version of events. Wroe had written a straightforward character assassination piece, much as McNamee might have wanted. Just when I thought McNamee had finished sticking the knife into my back publicly, he had played his trump card.
September 1991. However, it was not until three months after Wroe’s article had been published that the newspaper printed a full retraction and apologised for Martin Wroe’s wholesale inaccuracies.
Another day, another meeting. Though this one was most unusual. Not a word had been spoken during the past hour. I was sat in the basement Meetings Room. I had a pile of papers in front of me to discuss. I had thoroughly prepared. However, after arriving early, I was still the only person present. My boss had insisted upon this meeting. So where was she? There was no phone call or message to inform of a delay. One really is the loneliest number. Having waited an hour, I returned to my desk upstairs in the team office. Strangely, nothing would ever be mentioned to me about that meeting. It was as if it had never not happened.
Once is an accident. Twice might be a coincidence. Three times is an act of passive aggression. This should have been the last of three meetings demanded of me in an email from my boss’ personal assistant. Their purpose was to brief Claire Enders about the processes by which British radio stations make payments to songwriters for playing their music. She was to be grilled as an ‘Expert Witness’ during a landmark hearing of the obscure ‘Copyright Tribunal’ that had all the trappings of a court proceeding. However, she never arrived for any of those three meetings, never explained her absences and no subsequent attempt was made to reschedule them. For three hours across three days, I had been waiting in vain. The email to me had read:
“We have put in the diary 1pm on Wednesday 13th September for you to spend the afternoon with Grant. We have also blocked off 10th/11th October for your second session with Grant.”
Claire Enders had responded to me and two colleagues who were tackling non-radio issues:
“The initial format I would favour is seminars each w GG [me], JB and AE to outline the key issues covered by each and how we have dealt w them. I will take notes. Ideally, each of GG, JB and AE should this week prepare a set of materials for the topic covered which includes all pleadings and relevant points and witness statements divided by topic. I will then read the materials then expect to be quizzed by each of GG, JB and AE on each topic until I am word perfect. Plse copy this to GG Thank you Plse don’t forget that either GG or JB need to be in court with me for my evidence (two full days) and either one will have to have an encyclopedic grasp of our three reports in order to assist.”
After our September meeting had become the first unexplained no-show, the timing of two further dates arrived by email: “GG in for 9th October 3pm, 10th October 1.30pm”.
Why had it fallen upon me to tutor the ‘star witness’ of the defence team? I had been hired by Enders Analysis that April to research and write analyses for its subscribers about the British radio industry [see blog]. However, by year end, I had found no time to write anything for publication. Instead, I was waylaid once my employer discovered that I seemed to be the only person in the office who understood the intricacies of music copyright. I was surrounded there by ‘analysts’ who wrote reams about their specialist media industries but who seemed scarcely to have sullied their hands working on the ‘shopfloor’ of sectors they professed to understand intimately.
I was different from them. They knew it, I knew it. They were posh. I was not. They had been privately educated. I had been born in a council house. My knowledge of the radio industry had been amassed from working my way up from ground zero, fuelled by a childhood thirst for knowledge about broadcasting. I was still at junior school [see blog] when I created multiple scrapbooks filled with newspaper articles about radio, scissored and UHU-ed from my parents’ and grandparents’ daily newspapers. I was still at secondary school [see blog] when I presented weekly music programmes on multiple London pirate radio stations, as well as producing identification jingles played across their output.
In 1980, my first paying job was at Newcastle commercial radio station ‘Metro Radio’ [see blog] whose declining ratings I turned around using my knowledge of pop music, my study of American music radio playlist systems and my economics training. One of my additional responsibilities as acting head of music was to correlate the reporting to copyright agencies of all the music played. Every presenter of every programme was required by law to handwrite A4 forms that recorded for each record played its song title, its artist, its record label, catalogue number and the duration in minutes and seconds it was used on-air. Around 300 songs played each day resulted in dozens of scrappy pages that regularly contained only partial information and blank spaces. A replacement computer system had been promised but never appeared. The forms had to be dispatched to three British statutory music copyright agencies: PPL, PRS and MCPS.
Some presenters hated this ‘extra’ work. They would put off doing the paperwork until their live show had finished, then forget and zoom off, instead piling all the records they had played in their locker, along with the blank forms and a vague promise to do it ‘later’. Much of the station’s record library ended up locked away for weeks in presenters’ lockers bursting with vinyl unavailable for airplay. When pressed to complete forms weeks later, they would have no memory of which track they had played from an album or its on-air duration so, naturally, they just made it up. From my perspective, any completed form – however inaccurate – was better than none at all and would reduce the grief I received from copyright agencies about missing data amongst the reams of paper submitted. It was chaotic. Did any artist or songwriter ever get paid the correct amount by the radio station using their works?
In 1990, prior to launching London’s KISS FM [see blog], I had to create a reporting system from scratch for the music it played. I was the only management team member who even understood our legal copyright obligations. Again, the promised computer system never arrived. I appointed one team member, Myrna McHugh, to co-ordinate the paper-based administration and, during our busiest times of the year, the workload required her to supervise a team of ‘temps’ hired to collate the voluminous information. The station regularly played ‘mixes’, ‘dubplates’ and ‘white label’ records whose copyright details were particularly challenging to determine.
In 2001, working in India on the launch of its first commercial FM radio station ‘Radio City’ [see blog], I met with the country’s copyright agencies to understand how to create a system to report the music played. Though our station was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Star TV’ business, I invited our competitors, including ‘The Times of India’ newspaper, to my presentation in a Mumbai hotel conference room to explain how music copyright functions and the legal requirements with which all our newly licensed radio stations would have to comply. I was pleased to be teaching my acquired knowledge to others.
By the time I joined Enders Analysis in 2006, my three-decade media career had also taken me to work at radio stations in Israel, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Estonia [see pdf].
I stumbled into my latest job just when a music copyright dispute was about to be heard before the Copyright Tribunal. The earliest wave of American online music streaming businesses had launched in Britain and disputed how much they should have to pay for the music they played to their subscribers. Their argument was simple: claiming their business model was no different from existing British commercial broadcast AM/FM radio stations, such as London’s ‘Capital Radio’, so they should pay the same low rates. However, those rates had been agreed in 1973 when commercial radio was first licensed in Britain, an era when it was unimaginable that consumers would someday request and hear specific songs via the internet.
The songwriters, represented by the Performing Rights Society (PRS), disputed the argument of these online businesses who added no ‘radio station’ value in the form of presenters, information, news and features to their non-stop back-to-back music. PRS had hired Enders Analysis to provide data and arguments to win its case. Claire Enders would appear before the Tribunal as an Expert Witness for PRS. During the months leading up to the Tribunal hearing this case, my role was to refine those arguments and to research/analyse the radio and music streaming markets to provide documented evidence. Some of this work I have subsequently published, such as ‘The Differences Between Traditional Terrestrial Broadcast Radio and Internet Radio’ and ‘Audio Podcasts and The Market for Podcasting’ (23 and 35 pages respectively).
I recall that one day, waiting at the Lebanon Road tram stop, a ‘Eureka’ moment made me realise that a document I had earlier found online undermined the argument presented by the music streaming companies that their product was ‘radio’. I contacted PRS and, working with its lawyers at Denton Wilde Sapte [see blog], we jointly developed a cohesive case backed by evidence to present in writing prior to the commencement of Tribunal hearings on 28 September 2006.
It was 5 December 2006 when Claire Enders was called as an Expert Witness before the Tribunal. I was sat in the front row on the lefthand side, between the PRS lawyers and their barrister, while the American internet team were on the opposing benches. Throughout the Tribunal, I would follow carefully the proceedings and write thoughts on Post-it notes passed to the lawyers who then made suggestions to their barrister. Enders faced me from the witness box a few metres away to the left of the Bench of three elderly judges. It resembled one of those courtroom scenes so beloved of television dramas. Enders was pressed by the barrister for the streaming services as to her expertise in the radio industry:
Kenneth Steinthal [New York Bar representing MusicNet, Yahoo!, AOL, RealNetworks, Napster and Sony]: “What exactly did you do to analyse the webcasting business before submitting your first witness statement?”
Claire Enders [Expert witness for PRS]: “In preparation of it?”
Steinthal: “Yes.”
Enders: “In preparation of it, the radio specialist I have on the team, who is called Grant Goddard, and I discussed, you know, what we were looking for, and in particular we looked at a large number of webcasts. We did a lot of internet research into the various models. We looked at what had been written about them in the US. It was also part of the job to look at how the different services behaved, you know, actually experiencing them.”
Enders: “My colleague, Grant Goddard, spends a lot of time analysing various web-based phenomena, as do many of my team, and so we listened to them and looked at how they behaved and so forth. So a lot of desk-based research and experimenting with the services themselves.”
Steinthal: “Can we separate what your colleagues did from what you did and ask you to focus on what you personally did to analyse the webcasting industry?”
Enders: “I personally spent time on ‘Yahoo!’ and ‘AOL’.” […]
Steinthal: “Other than spending time on ‘Yahoo!’ and ‘AOL’ to get a sense of what those services were comprised of and looking at ‘Shoutcast’, again focusing on what you did to analyse the webcasting market, what else did you do, if anything?”
Enders: “I also read the — I am sorry, I am not a lawyer, but the various documents that had been prepared by the various parties, various legal documents making various claims about their industry — about the specific aspects of both ‘iTunes’ with the MNO’s and so forth so. I am sorry, I think those are called pleadings, but there are other documents that have different names. So I was trying to understand what the issues were between the two sides.”
Steinthal: “Did you interview anyone engaged in webcasting?”
Enders: “I did not do so personally.”
Steinthal: “Is there anything else you did, other than what you have just testified to, to ready yourself for preparing your first report in May 2006?”
Enders: “No.”
Steinthal: “Other than your experience in connection with the potential ‘EMI’ interest in ‘Viva’ and in ‘Classic FM’ in the early 90’s, do you have any first-hand experience in broadcast radio?”
Enders: “It depends what you call first-hand, because I have always been an analyst and a strategist, so that — I am not an operations person. I have not run a station or anything, I just analyse business models. So, by that nature, one is always a bit removed from the coalface, if I may say.” […]
Steinthal: “Prior to this case, had you had any experience with respect to the licensing by MCPS or PRS of either terrestrial radio stations or internet radio stations?”
Enders: “No.” […]
Steinthal: “… I am trying to find out whether you did anything other than looking at the industry reports, for example, and talking to your colleagues as you testified earlier in doing –”
Enders: “Desk research, we did a lot of desk research.”
Steinthal: “Excuse me?”
Enders: “We did a lot of desk research, looking for – searching for information online.”
Steinthal: “Anything else that you did to inform yourself, to make the comparison that you made in your various reports between terrestrial radio and webcasting?”
Enders: “Other than looking at websites and doing desk research and listening to the stations themselves and so forth?”
Steinthal: “Right.”
Enders: “No.”
It was 11.35 on the morning of the first of day of testimony by Claire Enders. We had only started at 10.30. For the remainder of that long day and all of the next, I put on a poker face whilst cringing inside at my boss’ difficulty providing detailed answers to questions fired at her about the British radio industry. She had undoubtedly read my documents for the Tribunal, but why had she not been prepared to meet me so that I could share my acquired knowledge and expertise? Why the reluctance to fulfil face-to-face meetings she herself had demanded? Enders’ apparent view was that I toiled at “the coalface” whilst she was “not an operations person” but worked to “just analyse business models”, a latter-day Ian MacGregor to my underground mining activity. She and I never spoke about her performance those two days.
After twenty days of hearings, it took until 19 July 2007 for the judges to publish their 91-page verdict. It noted criticisms voiced during the hearings that Enders was “a commentator or a highly-paid industry observer rather than being a lively participant in any relevant field”. However, it did highlight that “in particular, she gave evidence to refute the suggestion that webcasting [‘streaming’ in today’s parlance] and commercial broadcast music [‘radio’] should be regarded as comparable products”, the argument I had successfully proven.
Overall, the judges’ verdict on Claire Enders’ performance as an Expert Witness was hardly positive:
“Even taking into account Ms Enders’ inexperience in this jurisdiction, her performance as an expert was, we thought, rather uninspiring. Her reports (which comprised a fulsome lever arch file of evidence together with numerous lever arch volumes of exhibits thereto) consisted to a large extent of data which had indeed been sourced by others, sometimes by a team which she herself led and the reliability of whose work she (often unquestioningly) relied on – only to find it wanting on closer examination. We certainly sympathise with the impossibility of mastering everything within so large a corpus of material. Nonetheless, on a number of key issues, she seemed confused, occasionally inaccurate and, more importantly, sometimes unable to provide reasons for the assumptions upon which her evidence was based. Surprisingly, she had not actually read the New JOL [‘New Joint Online Agreement’] but relied on a summary thereof. We do not wish to give the impression however that Ms Enders’ evidence was misleading; it was not. But we were not greatly assisted by it.”
Nevertheless, our client PRS and its legal team at Denton Wilde Sapte were very pleased with the Tribunal’s outcome. They invited me to participate in celebratory drinks after work in a Fleet Street members club. As the only Enders Analysis employee to have sat between them on the legal front bench throughout the proceedings, I had been impressed by their professionalism and gratitude for my contributions. My work had made a difference. Henceforth, music streaming businesses operating in Britain would be required to make considerably greater payments (‘royalties’) to songwriters whose music they were using. Not merely songwriters within Britain but throughout the world. The business model of American music streaming services operating in the UK would necessarily have to change.
In a subsequent presentation ‘Online Radio: The UK Business Model‘ I made in 2012 to the ‘Music 4.3: Smart Radio’ conference in London, I noted how this Tribunal had determined music streamers’ costs for using songs would be much more expensive than rates paid by UK commercial radio stations. The Tribunal had decided that “the per play rates in [online] agreements for pure webcasting [music streaming] are approximately six times those … under the [commercial radio] agreement.” The reason it gave was that “the Tribunal was of the view that independent commercial radio offered quite a different service to an [online streamed] ‘music, music, music’ service”.
As the Tribunal verdict had produced a ‘win’ for PRS, Enders Analysis offered to pay for myself and my work colleagues to share a celebratory afternoon outing. I should not have been surprised that they chose to take ‘afternoon tea’ at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand, a venue for the rich and privileged I had heard of but never coveted. My younger posher colleagues enjoyed themselves at “London’s most famous hotel”. I would have much preferred to spend an evening at the Jah Shaka reggae sound system.
The Tribunal verdict noted that Enders Analysis had charged its client PRS £750,000 for “preparing their reports” though additionally there were “VAT [at 20%] and charges for [Claire Enders’] attendance at the hearing”. The judges concluded that “incurring expert fees of this order of magnitude (and even taking into account […] the substantial sums of money at stake) was, in our view, seriously disproportionate”. Enders Analysis’ billing to PRS had likely exceeded one million pounds.
Within only a few years, most of the American ‘applicants’ who had forced this costly Tribunal – Yahoo!, AOL, RealNetworks, Napster and Sony – exited the UK music streaming market, each having spent millions on legal fees and their own bevy of Expert Witness submissions and expenses. It demonstrated what a ‘black hole’ exists for American online start-ups who seem to have unlimited money to try to push their way into countries around the world on their own terms, using their own lawyers to argue the unarguable and to attempt to stomp on overseas legal precedents.
My first nine months at Enders Analysis had been diverted into full-time work on this legal case instead of writing media analyses for its subscribers. Regardless, I had been pleased to utilise my ‘expert’ knowledge of music copyright gained over decades on the radio industry shopfloor. One day at work, Claire Enders stopped me on the office staircase, thanked me for my work on the Tribunal and unexpectedly offered me a bonus which I gratefully accepted. It may have been no more than a few percentage points of her ginormous fee but, combined with accumulated savings from my and my wife’s salaries, it provided us a deposit for the purchase in 2007 of our first home … at the age of forty-nine.
It was the first and last bonus I received in any workplace.
Pop music had been outlawed by the British government. Twiddle the dial of an AM transistor radio and you would not have found a single UK radio station playing the hits of the day. It was crazy. Contemporary popular music, along with the latest fashions and art, had become Britain’s biggest cultural exports. The ‘British Invasion’ had taken America by storm a few years earlier. Liverpool’s Beatles were the most popular pop group in the world. Yet none of this music could be heard on radio in Britain. It was so crazy.
The British establishment, populated by the upper classes, had always looked down their monocled noses at popular culture. It had never touched their lives because they inhabited a world of people just like themselves who valued classical music, opera and English literature. Not only did pop music appear entirely frivolous to them, but it was an artform they found difficult to completely control. Not only did pop music’s lyrics (‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’?) baffle their sensibilities, but they suspected songs were laced with messages (‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’?) that might incite rebellion against their rightful position at the apex of British society.
The radio waves of Britain had been tightly controlled by the British government almost since the earliest invention of the medium. Although commercial radio stations playing pop music had existed in the United States since 1920, Britain’s elite remained doggedly determined to maintain a firm grip on every item broadcast to a heathen population that needed to be managed and patronised. From its beginnings until the present day, our government-controlled BBC has been stuffed with Oxbridge graduates who resolutely uphold the class status quo.
Despite the birth of rock’n’roll in 1954, BBC radio had remained determined throughout the 1960’s to ignore the resultant resurgence of British popular music that held unprecedented appeal amongst the young generation. Though The Beatles had sold more records than any other musicians in history, you would never know it from listening to BBC radio. The Fab Four’s songs were mostly confined to occasional live guest appearances on the ‘BBC Light Programme’ that my father anxiously recorded on his second-hand Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder so that we could replay their beloved pop music ad nauseum. Otherwise, the BBC’s lone music radio station remained firmly stuck in a bygone era.
On 14 August 1967, the United Kingdom parliament had passed ‘The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act’ whose outcome was to ban the British population from listening to pop music on the radio. From the early 1960’s, to the annoyance of the country’s elite, smart entrepreneurs from the US, Canada and Ireland had filled the yawning gap in the British radio market for pop music by anchoring ships off its coast, transmitting unscripted North American disc jockeys playing chart hits from beyond Britain’s territorial waters. Whenever we journeyed in our family car, I was always sat on the front bench seat of our Rambler between my parents, in charge of the volume and tuning dials of its American-made AM radio. Our favourite listening since its arrival in 1964 had been pirate radio ‘Big L’ on 266 metres that played lots of Motown soul and pop songs.
At midnight on 14 August 1967, Big L and its offshore companions closed forever, all made illegal by the new legislation. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the pop music radio station we adored had been eradicated from our lives. Pirate radio ships had enjoyed immense audiences, too popular for bigwigs at the non-commercial BBC and the stuffy British establishment to control, and (shock horror) they had used advertising revenues to fund their unlicensed activities. Commercial radio would remain outlawed in Britain until the following decade. Our household was reduced to listening to the multiple reel-to-reel tapes my father had previously recorded with a microphone from radio and television shows, though we already knew the songs’ running order by heart.
Weeks passed until 30 September 1967, the memorable day that pop music returned to the British airwaves when the BBC launched a new national station it named ‘Radio One’. The British government had implemented a ‘stick and carrot’ strategy by having banned the popular pirate stations whilst simultaneously forcing a reluctant BBC to initiate a replacement pop music service. This was a repeat of the 1945 fiasco when the government had had to force the BBC not to close its much-loved temporary wartime radio service of popular entertainment, the ‘BBC General Forces Programme’, and instead maintain transmissions to motivate Britain’s post-war weary working class [see blog]. Ironically, both these stations, BBC Radio 1 and the renamed ‘Radio 2’, would attract considerably larger audiences by playing recorded music than the BBC’s more expensive networks of original drama, discussions, classical music and news (‘Radio 3’ and ‘Radio 4’) that targeted the chattering classes predominantly in the Home Counties.
To those of us who had been committed fans of Big L, the BBC’s new pop station sounded like a pale carbon copy, even employing many presenters who were already household names from their pirate days. ‘Innovation’ at the BBC has long been the outcome of it copying someone else’s ideas that had already proven successful (viz BBC launched ‘1Xtra’ only after the success of my ground-breaking black music format at ‘KISS 100 FM’). Not desiring its new team of young, long-haired, non-Oxbridge presenters to spoil the refined atmosphere so carefully cultivated in Broadcasting House, the BBC installed these recruits in an out-building across the road named Egton House.
Bizarrely, the BBC made no attempt to ensure Radio 1 possessed brand integrity, frustrating its intended young audience by making the new station ‘share’ some daytime shows with long-time Radio 2 old fogey presenters (such as former 1950’s crooner Jimmy Young), and by not broadcasting at all during evenings when teenagers were most readily available to listen. The resulting junctions were jarring. I recall the Number One pop chart single unveiled before seven o’clock every Sunday by Alan Freeman on Radio 1’s ‘Pick of the Pops’ show, then immediately switching to Radio 2’s anachronistic ‘Sing Something Simple’ show of post-war karaoke tunes that ran for 42 years from 1959. I can still sing its dreadful theme tune that signalled my rush to the radio’s ‘off’ button.
From his very first Radio 1 programme, for years to come I would wake every weekday to Tony Blackburn’s breakfast show on my bedside radio alarm clock. I already knew him from his pirate Big L days, but the national exposure on the new station’s most listened to show catapulted him into national celebrity status. He went on to present the weekly BBC TV pop music show ‘Top of the Pops’, to appear on Mike Read’s ‘Pop Quiz’ TV game show and to host the ITV series ‘Time for Blackburn’. When he split from his actress wife Tessa Wyatt, the tabloid newspapers had a field day. His radio shows were always upbeat, optimistic and entertaining, accompanied by the barking of his fake pet dog Arnold.
Blackburn was an unabashed fan of soul music and was able to slip in the odd personal favourite amongst the playlisted pop records mandated by his staid BBC producer, Johnny Beerling. His persistent airplay of the song ‘Remember Me’ from the Diana Ross album ‘Surrender’ persuaded EMI Records to release it as a UK-only single that reached chart position seven in 1971. He wrote sleeve notes for several UK soul albums including the ‘Motown Chartbusters’ series and live albums by The Temptations and The O’Jays.
In 1973, the BBC put thirty-year old Blackburn out to pasture on Radio 2’s mid-morning show, replacing him on the Radio 1 breakfast show with twenty-four-year-old clever clogs Noel Edmonds, much heralded as the station’s ‘rising star’ since joining in 1969 rather than accepting his university place. It was time to retune my morning radio alarm to new offshore pirate radio station ‘RNI’. Although Radio 1 had been broadcasting a weekly soul show on Saturday afternoons, Blackburn was inexplicably never its presenter. However, in 1980 Blackburn did return to Radio 1 as host of the weekend breakfast show which would abandon its previous, child-centric ‘Junior Choice’ identity under which posh presenter Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart had played almost the same ‘comedic’ records week in week out for the last twelve years.
In 1981, Blackburn joined local station ‘BBC Radio London’ where, freed from the musical straightjacket exerted by Radio 1 producers, he could play soul music to his heart’s content on its weekday afternoon show. Fellow soul music fans Robbie Vincent and Dave Simmons had already played much black music there since its launch in 1970. Blackburn’s arrival, followed by Dave Pearce in 1984, cemented the station’s reputation amongst London’s black music fans as the only legal station worth a listen alongside the capital’s multiple pirate broadcasters.
In a masterstroke of mismanagement, this soul music ‘beacon’ on London’s airwaves was destroyed at a stroke in 1988 when the BBC decided to transform its predominantly music station into an all-talk station, sacking existing presenters and appointing Matthew Bannister from Capital Radio’s daily evening news show ‘The Way It Is’ to manage the renamed ‘GLR’. I attended the Corporation’s overhyped launch press conference (everyone arriving by Thames ferry) where it was self-evident that disaster loomed, Bannister having an excellent track record as journalist but no experience managing a radio station, let alone marketing a new brand image. Despite much bollocks propagated in the media that ‘GLR’ was the face of a revolutionary style of radio, the ratings testified otherwise. The station’s share of London radio listening nosedived from 5.0% in 1987 to 1.6% by 1992 (source: JICRAR) when it had become the second least listened to of the city’s fourteen licensed stations. The BBC had deliberately abandoned London’s soul music fans and sent us hordes back to pirate radio listening.
Immediately, Blackburn joined Capital Radio’s newly launched all-oldies ‘Capital Gold’ London AM station (previously programmes had always been simulcast on FM and AM), presenting its weekday breakfast show of pop music plus a Sunday soul music show syndicated to Capital’s co-owned UK stations outside London. This new station attracted 10.2% of London radio listening in its launch year (source: JICRAR), surpassing earlier ratings achieved during Blackburn’s seven-year tenure at BBC Radio London. His national profile was raised by television appearances on Channel 4’s ‘After Dark’ show in 1987 and Sky One’s weekday morning show ‘Sky by Day’ in 1989. I purchased his 1985 autobiography ‘Living Legend: The Tony Blackburn Story’ in an ex-library book sale and enjoyed reading it as a fan who had spent thousands of hours listening to his radio shows since the 1960’s.
When the government announced in 1988 the opening of bids for new commercial radio licences for London, the first since 1973, there was substantial hope amongst the capital’s myriad pirate stations that a black music station would be selected. Alliances were forged between existing commercial radio owners greedy for more licences so as to eliminate competitors, moneybags who had witnessed commercial radio become a ‘licence to print money’, music enthusiasts and contemporary pirate station owners. I teamed up with London pirate ‘KISS FM’ which, although not the longest running black music broadcaster, nor the most pervasive (on-air only during weekends, rather than 24 hours per day like others), had the greatest potential to win a licence.
‘Blues & Soul’ magazine published a rumour that Tony Blackburn was considering a licence bid in association with former ‘Radio Luxembourg’ DJ Tony Prince. In his autobiography, Blackburn had written that “if the [Controller] job at [BBC] Radio One is filled, I would like to open a twenty-four hour a day soul music station in London.”
In the KISS FM open plan basement room at Blackstock Mews, a planning meeting attended by more than a dozen people was held to report on progress of the licence application that would be submitted to the broadcasting regulator. Introduced to us was Dave Cash who had been hired to co-ordinate the production of the document. To this day, I have no idea how he came to be involved, how much he was paid or by whom. He had had no prior involvement in KISS FM’s pirate activities and had demonstrated no particular interest in black music during a radio career remarkably similar to Blackburn’s: presenting for pirate ship Big L, joining BBC Radio 1 at launch in 1967 to present a weekday daytime show, then defecting in 1973 to become launch production manager of London’s Capital Radio where he presented shows for the next 21 years.
The resultant KISS FM licence application submitted by Cash was weak, lacked relevant market research, offered a flimsy business plan and failed to argue a convincing case. The bid failed despite Cash’s experience from two decades in the radio industry. Whether any application would have won up against the government’s preferred bevy of old jazz music chums we will never know [see blog]. Cash’s involvement in KISS FM ended the day the licence outcome was announced. Maybe he was busy clinking champagne glasses with Capital Radio’s directors in their boardroom at Euston Tower. A jazz station would prove no competition to Capital’s fifteen-year commercial monopoly over music radio in London. Maybe even more champagne would be gulped the following year after the launch of the ‘Jazz FM’ station proved to be a ratings and commercial disaster (1% share of London listening, 1990 JICRAR).
Tony Blackburn had been moved to comment to ‘Music Week’ trade magazine: “I was amazed that the new London FM was a jazz station. I think KISS FM should have got the licence. I would have thought it would have been a soul station. If I’d been the IBA [broadcast regulator], that’s the one I would have given. The problem is, if they don’t give a proper legalised soul station soon, there’s going to be more and more pirate radio stations.”
To cut a long story short [see book], following Dave Cash’s rejected application, the government eventually offered two further London radio licences as the consequence of a lobbying campaign by Heddi Greenwood and myself at KISS FM. I co-ordinated, researched and wrote the second KISS FM licence application which won [see blog]. I then launched the newly legal station ‘KISS 100’ on 1 September 1990 [see blog] as its programme director, the sole management team member with prior UK commercial radio experience.
Tony Blackburn wrote in ‘Jocks’ magazine: “Now that KISS FM are legal, it will be interesting to see how they face up to the challenge of broadcasting for the first time on a truly competitive basis. Gone are the days when they paid nothing for playing records. Gone are the days when a truly amateur DJ, sitting in a makeshift studio in someone’s bedroom, was tolerated because he was a ‘pirate.’ And gone are the days when DJs on the station was [sic] paid little or nothing for their services. Now that KISS FM is legit, it will have to put out a truly professional sound to attract audience and advertisers alike.”
‘Blues & Soul’ magazine correctly responded that it had been the pioneering work of the many soul pirate stations, from ‘Radio Invicta’ in 1970 onwards [see blog], that had spearheaded the long running campaign for a legal black music station in London. Despite Blackburn’s evident affinity for soul music, there was nothing he had done personally to further that particular cause.
Asked his opinions about KISS FM’s launch by ‘Radio & Music’ magazine, Blackburn responded: “I’m pleased KISS FM is coming on air. I think it’s good for radio, but it isn’t guaranteed to get an audience. It’s not enough to play the right music any more – it has to be presented well.”
However, following the station’s launch, Blackburn wrote in Jocks magazine: “KISS FM didn’t so much open up on September 1st, it staggered onto the air with all the professionalism of a British Rail station announcement, infact [sic] I think some of the station announcers have better voices than a lot of the KISS FM DJs. For a whole weekend, we were subjected to humourless, badly spoken amateurs thanking the management and telling us all that they were now legal, something we’d all worked out for ourselves. At least every half hour, I was told how much the DJ loved me and that everything was ‘crucial.’ At one stage on the first day, I heard a DJ actually play a record for ‘everyone who knows me’ and then invited listeners to send in ‘fax messages on a fax ‘cause our phones ain’t workin’.’“
Blackburn continued in this vein for a further three paragraphs before concluding: “On radio, a good voice is important and the ability to use it properly, a lot of the DJs on KISS talk on a monotone, all sound the same and are not a bit entertaining. These people might be very good in clubs but make the station sound so bad I would go as far as to say it is not professionally acceptable. Naturally these remarks don’t apply to the professionals they have on the station such as Robbie Vincent, David Rodigan and a few others.”
A profile of Blackburn also appeared in the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ newspaper, in which he said: “When you listen to those new stations like KISS FM, it shows up how good these old guys are.” The interviewer noted, with understatement, that Blackburn “has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about KISS FM.”
Every Monday morning at nine o’clock, the heads of each KISS FM department met in its upstairs boardroom. At our next meeting, managing director Gordon McNamee insisted upon playing in its entirety from VHS cassette a five-minute commentary Tony Blackburn had broadcast on ‘Channel 4’. He seemed to take Blackburn’s criticisms very personally and asked me what was to be done. I expressed the opinion that this commentary, along with Blackburn’s similar press articles, had been cleverly staged by Capital Radio, but gave KISS FM nothing to worry about. After Blackburn had left BBC Radio One, he had criticised the station in the harshest tones. Then, after he had left BBC Radio London, he had criticised that station too. Blackburn was highly self-opinionated and conveniently seemed happy to damn any station that was not his current employer.
I suggested that, if Blackburn’s main criticism of KISS FM was that it sounded very different from Capital Radio, then it should be taken as a compliment. The huge volume of market research I had commissioned pre-launch demonstrated conclusively that, if KISS FM had launched sounding the same as every other music radio station, it would fail. It was our station’s very differences from its competitors that would make us successful. In fact, Blackburn’s stance in criticising KISS FM should only demonstrate to us that he had no idea what young people wanted from a radio station. His criticisms might even encourage more young people to listen to KISS FM than if he had said that he loved the station.
McNamee seemed unconvinced by my arguments. He was wounded by Blackburn’s comments and suddenly seemed filled with self-doubt about the station’s ‘different’ sound. I was reminded of the accusations he had lobbed in my direction late one night before the station’s launch – that it was I who would be personally responsible for the station’s failure. Now, at this management meeting, I was feeling that McNamee was too eager to blame me for Blackburn’s criticisms. Neither did I feel I was receiving support from the other heads of department present.
I could not understand what was going on inside my boss’ head. Had McNamee lost the courage of his convictions about the radio station he had co-founded? Rather than be a strong leader who demonstrated commitment to his loyal staff, McNamee already seemed to be floundering, only days after the station had launched. Through its employee Tony Blackburn’s criticisms, Capital Radio had scored a direct hit on the managing director of its first ever competitor in the London commercial radio market. It seemed to be left to me now to hold the ship steady and to demonstrate that KISS FM would only succeed if it refused to follow Tony Blackburn’s ‘advice.’
Already, I was becoming used to hearing highly critical opinions expressed publicly about KISS FM. The station was being targeted by the DJs of radio stations competing with KISS FM, and by people who were themselves probably outside of the youth audience the station was seeking to attract. For me, the fact that long established radio stations were bothering to criticise KISS FM on national television must have meant that our new, little London radio station was worrying them considerably. They had not made similar comments when Jazz FM or ‘Melody Radio’ had launched. I felt that this validated what we were doing. However, these issues would not go away and, if anything, they had started to become more significant within the station.
At the beginning of October 1990, Gordon McNamee showed me a two-page letter that KISS FM non-executive director Tony Prince had written to him, criticising the station’s unprofessionalism and expressing doubts about the daytime music policy. I met with McNamee and head of marketing Malcolm Cox and, together, we drafted a detailed response for McNamee to send back to Prince. It explained that KISS FM sounded this way not because we were sloppy or unprofessional, but because all the pre-launch market research that the station had commissioned demonstrated that this was the style of broadcasting that would prove popular with young people. KISS FM’s potential audience had stated categorically that they would not tune to a new radio station that sounded like a pale imitation of BBC Radio One or Capital Radio.
Having received McNamee’s reply, Prince still expressed reservations about the station’s direction, so I was asked to meet him in the boardroom to discuss the matter. This was a rare occasion for me to chat with one of the station’s directors. Prince’s main criticism was that there were insufficient features in KISS FM’s daytime programmes, something that, he believed, made successful radio. Why, he asked me, were there not more competitions in the morning show aimed at housewives? Could not the station introduce recipes or features that would specifically attract housewives to listen? I explained to Prince that the notion that housewives constituted the majority of radio’s daytime audience was a myth. I had painstakingly analysed the radio industry audience data to determine KISS FM’s likely listenership during the day, and it was certainly not housewives. The commercial radio industry had propagated the myth of the ‘housewife’ listener since its inception in 1973. I was programming KISS FM to appeal to the agreed target audience of fifteen- to thirty-four-year-olds. I did not believe that they wanted silly competitions or recipes. Forty-six-year-old Prince listened to me, but still seemed unconvinced.
I knew that the only incontrovertible proof of the appropriateness of KISS FM’s current programming policy would be statistics that showed the station was attracting a significant audience. Fortunately, only a few days later, the station received the results of a market research survey that its advertising agency, BBDO, had commissioned. It showed that the station had just over 750,000 listeners between 19 and 25 September. These numbers were a solid indication that KISS FM was already on target to achieve the one million listeners it had promised advertisers by the following September. The figures also showed that 96% of listeners were within the ten- to thirty-four-year-old demographic that the station was targeting. McNamee called a meeting in the boardroom to inform the staff of this good news, and the station issued a press release the same day. More than anything, this press release helped calm the internal rumblings from Tony Prince.
Whilst I was pleased with the 750,000 figure, I knew that the only data that mattered were the official JICRAR radio industry numbers that would not be published until January 1991. Neither did I want the programming staff to think that the battle for listeners had already been won and that they could work less hard from now on. I circulated a note to all fifty-seven personnel in my department:
“Many thanks for all the hard work you’ve put in to help achieve these impressive results. We all need to keep it up so that we reach our ultimate goal of getting one million listeners tuned in … In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that that our first full-scale audience research is underway. JICRAR started last month and continues into December. Thousands of people all over London are filling in diaries right now every day with what they listen to on the radio hour by hour … So, we’ve come a long way in the first month. Let’s carry on in the knowledge that we’re on the right course and can turn KISS into the most successful new radio station ever heard in London.”
The target demanded of me by the business plan was to attract one million listeners per week by the end of KISS FM’s first year on-air. I achieved 1,078,000 listeners within the first few months (2.7% of London listening, 1990 JICRAR; growing to 3.4% in 1991), while the proportion of housewives listening to our daytime shows was proven to be a mere 9%. If I had failed, I would have been sacked. Once I succeeded, I was sacked anyway by a boss desperate to take the credit and my job [see blog]. I took no pleasure observing him then lead the station on a downward ratings spiral to a low of 2.3% (1993 JICRAR).
I never met or heard from Tony Prince again. I never met Tony Blackburn. Both had frustrated my work. Neither had managed the launch of a new radio station, let alone one with a ground-breaking music format that truly became “the most successful new radio station ever heard in London” … since Capital Radio’s arrival on 16 October 1973.
August 1989. There was a momentary lull in the usually frenetic activity at the [former Londonpirate radio station] ‘KISS FM’ office, whilst we awaited the next Independent Broadcasting Authority [IBA] announcement that would give specific details of the application procedure for the two new London FM [commercial radio] licences on offer. [KISS FM co-founder] Gordon McNamee turned his attention to other matters, since he understood that there was still no guarantee of KISS FM winning the licence, even on its second attempt.
On several occasions, I had mentioned to McNamee my belief that there existed significant untapped commercial potential in KISS FM’s magazine, ‘The Written Word.’ A year earlier, the publication had started life as a single A3 sheet newsletter, entitled ‘94,’ that had been produced on a word processor and had been printed without photographs. At that time, it had been intended solely as an update for the station’s fans and its main feature had been the KISS FM programme schedule. As the station’s mailing list increased in size, so too had the content of the magazine. By the final issue of The Written Word, the thirty-two pages had included lots of photos, recordreviews, interviews and information about the London dance music scene. There were also several pages of paid-for advertisements which had helped to defray the increasing costs of printing and postage.
For several years, I had been fascinated by the proliferation of free magazines in London, with weekly titles such as ‘Ms London,’ ‘Girl About Town’ and ‘Midweek’ handed out during the morning rush hour to thousands of commuters at London’s railway and underground stations. For revenue, these magazines depended entirely upon the advertising space they sold, but their distribution costs were low and their print runs were huge. An increasing number of more specialist magazines were being produced and financed in this way. Travelling through Waterloo railway station one day, I had been handed a free entertainment and what’s on magazine that was aimed specifically at high earning commuters living in the suburbs. In my area of Northwest London, I regularly received a free copy of a general interest, colour magazine aimed at homeowners in the locality.
One of the problems KISS FM had encountered with The Written Word was the huge cost of sending out thousands of copies of each issue individually to every person on the station’s growing mailing list. I believed that these expenses could be reduced dramatically by distributing the magazine as a free giveaway to a wider readership that would pick it up from dance music record shops, music venues and clubs in London. Many more copies would have to be printed to circulate the magazine in this way, but the advertising space within it could be sold at a much higher price, since it would be reaching many more readers. Instead of being solely a KISS FM publicity vehicle, the enlarged publication could be London’s first giveaway magazine to be aimed specifically at the city’s dance music community.
McNamee liked my idea and could see the potential it offered him to earn much needed revenue to cover the overheads of running the KISS FM office. After several weeks discussing with him my proposal for the magazine, McNamee asked if I would like to launch the project and be its editor. I had experience in this field, having been editor of the student newspaper [‘Palatinate’] and student handbook whilst at university, and having launched an independent music magazine [‘N.E.’] in Northeast England. I accepted McNamee’s job offer and handed in my notice to the record company where I had worked during the last two years. McNamee said he would pay me £100 for three days’ work each week, plus eight per cent of the net profits generated by the magazine. Although this worked out to be less money than I had earned from the record company, I believed that the new job would improve my career prospects and provide an opportunity to be more closely involved with KISS FM.
Besides, my recent experiences with the record company had left me frustrated and eager to explore a new work opportunity. Back in 1985, whilst working in Israel, I had discovered a female singer named Ofra Haza whose music, a kind of ‘Middle East meets West’ sound, I believed would be marketable in Europe. Since then, I had worked hard promoting her music and had succeeded in achieving airplay on national radio in the UK and positive press coverage. By 1989, one of the Ofra Haza songs I had found in Israel four years earlier had reached number fifteen in the UK singles chart. It was released by the independent record company for which I had been working. I asked the company for some compensation towards all the work I had done to make this artist a success, including a UK artist interview tour I had arranged in early 1989. The directors had met and decided to offer me a cheque for £200. I felt insulted by this amount, particularly as my years of work had given the company its biggest chart hit in a long time. Worse, the credit for Ofra Haza’s chart success was being taken in press interviews by someone else working at the record label. Now, all I wanted to do was quit the company, having earned almost nothing from four years of work having created Israel’s biggest international pop music star, and yet not having even gained any recognition.
I started work at the Blackstock Mews office on 22 August 1989, the first occasion I had earned money from KISS FM, despite having been involved in the business since the beginning of the year. I had been spending more and more time in the office, working with the other staff, but had never been offered remuneration. I looked forward to becoming a proper employee, although the one person in the organisation who did not seem to welcome my appointment as editor of the new publication was Lindsay Wesker [son of playwrightSir Arnold Wesker]. He had been editor of The Written Word, until its recent closure, and he probably felt that this experience, combined with his previous work for the ‘Black Echoes’ music paper, should have made him the ideal candidate for this new post. McNamee told me privately that he was well aware of Wesker’s antipathy towards my appointment, but assured me that he wanted fresh blood to be in charge of the project.
The day after I handed in my notice to the record company, I convened an evening meeting at the KISS FM office to discuss the new magazine. After a considerable amount of brain-storming, [co-worker] Heddi Greenwood suggested it could be titled ‘Free!’ reflecting not only the fact that it was to be a giveaway magazine, but also the notion of personal freedom to which dance music fans would be able to relate. Her suggestion was accepted unanimously. It was agreed that the first monthly issue would be published at the beginning of October 1989, that the print run would be around 30,000, and that the magazine should divorce itself entirely from the KISS FM campaign for a radio licence that had dominated The Written Word. Everyone felt that it was most important for the magazine to be viewed as an authoritative, independent guide to the London dance music scene. Heddi Greenwood would handle the advertising sales for the magazine, and McNamee had appointed Lindsay Wesker its deputy editor in a gesture of reconciliation. I set to work writing a substantial business plan that outlined the magazine’s purpose and ethos, which would also be used in presentations to potential advertisers. Over several pages, I defined the editorial content of Free!, its intended readership and the reasons I believed it would prove so successful.
Now that I had become the fifth paid worker in the KISS FM office, McNamee arranged a second-handdesk and phone extension for my arrival. I was now working at Blackstock Mews on a regular basis, from which I gained a greater insight into the way in which the members of the KISS FM team worked and their respective roles within the organisation.
I was busy putting together the blueprint for the new Free! magazine. I visited a cheap photo-typesetting company in Brighton, commissioned quotes from printing companies, called meetings in the office of potential contributors, and commissioned a logodesign. McNamee was becoming increasingly enthused about the potential profit offered by the new magazine, and so he quickly became more involved in its day-to-day running. He had almost stopped talking about KISS FM altogether and, despite our awareness that the new London FM licences were in the pipeline, McNamee directed the whole office’s efforts into this new publishing venture.
One extremely hot and sunny weekend in late August, the KISS FM staff spent the whole of Saturday and Sunday transforming the hitherto unused downstairs room at Blackstock Mews into an office for Free! All the accumulated rubbish was completely cleared out and the dark, dreary room was repainted – ceiling, walls, floor, everything. McNamee bought a job lot of small second-hand desks, which were moved outside to the Mews for us to paint in gloss black. The office stereo system was rigged up outdoors to provide us with musical entertainment, and McNamee dug out some old cassette recordings of programmes from KISS FM’s pirate days, which he had kept in his desk drawers, to entertain everyone.
Some brand-new shelves and storage units were purchased from the IKEAfurniture store, which McNamee and I assembled in the new downstairs office. There was one piece of furniture with which McNamee became obsessed: the construction of a huge, rectangular glass-topped table, more than six feet in length. It was the closest he could achieve, for now, to the impressive pieces of furniture he had admired in the opulent boardrooms of KISS FM’s new, corporate shareholders. Between the clear glass table top and its feltunderlay, McNamee spent hours carefully positioning press articles about KISS FM and pages from The Written Word magazine, along with some of the station’s publicity materials. Once the glass top had been screwed down to the base, the whole thing looked remarkably like a personal shrine to the KISS FM pirate radio station that McNamee used to run and to the commercial radio business to which he aspired.
One chapter in his business career now having ended, McNamee seemed determined to bury the deep disappointment of the failed [first] KISS FM licence bid and, instead, to put all his energies into turning my idea for Free! magazine into the money-spinner he longed for. The dream of KISS FM radio was very quickly being forgotten.
When I had accepted the job of editor, McNamee had promised that I would also be spending some of my time working on the second licence application, but the launch of Free! was proving to be very demanding and there was still little sign of action within the organisation about the radio licence.
McNamee hardly ever mentioned KISS FM any more, and the only aspect of the second licence application that seemed to occupy him was satisfying the chairman’s desire to assemble an advisory committee. Since the failure of the first bid, there had not been a single office meeting to discuss what had gone well or badly in the previous campaign, or to analyse what had been the good and bad points of the application. Whenever I broached the subject of the second licence bid with McNamee, he would shrug it off and change the subject to the potential success of Free! magazine, which had overtaken KISS FM as his pet project. This state of affairs frustrated me immensely, because it seemed as if McNamee had lost interest in making a second licence bid at all. He had already discarded KISS FM’s past and the possibility of winning second time around. In fact, McNamee had confided in a close friend, Joe Strong, manager of Dingwalls venue in Camden, that losing the licence had left him “absolutely devastated” and “absolutely inconsolable.”
I was perplexed. I arranged to meet a fellow journalist and radio worker, Daniel Nathan, whom I had known since moving to London in 1986, and with whom I felt I could discuss this problem. As the two of us walked across Blackheath one weekend, I ranted to Nathan about how incredibly close I thought KISS FM was to winning a licence on this second occasion, and how frustrating it was that McNamee seemed intent on wasting the opportunity. I had been the only member of the KISS FM team to attend the IBA press conference announcing ‘London Jazz Radio’s win (Nathan had been there too) and it was obvious to me how much enthusiasm some of the IBA staff had shown towards KISS FM’s bid. This time, there was likely to be a similar number of applicants for the two new licences and, unless KISS FM could submit an almost perfect application, the IBA would feel duty bound to award licences to other groups who proved that they were better organised.
Talking to Nathan clarified, in my own mind, the gravity of the situation. These two new London licences were likely to be the last on offer until sometime in the mid-1990’s. To throw away the chance of winning a black music station for radio listeners in London at this stage would be utterly crazy, particularly after so many people had campaigned for so many years in the hope of just such an eventuality. I decided that, even if McNamee was prepared to remain slumped despondently in his office chair, consigning KISS FM to a space in his glorious past, I certainly was not. If he wanted to wallow in his own despair, that was fine with me. He could carry on playing nostalgic tapes of his old KISS FM shows to everyone in the office, as he had been during recent weeks, but I was determined to do something more positive about winning the station a licence.
On returning to work the following week, at the first opportune moment, I confronted McNamee across his desk in the open plan KISS FM office. Why was he not doing anything about the second licence bid? Did he not believe KISS FM could win? If everyone else still had faith in KISS FM, was he not letting them all down? Was any work being done on a revised application? Was not Free! magazine merely a short-term distraction? Almost anyone could start a new magazine, but how many people could win a radio licence? Why had he slumped into total inaction? As I questioned McNamee, I could sense the other staff at their desks in the office trying to bury their heads in work and look as if they were not listening to our conversation. I explained to McNamee that I thought he was throwing away the biggest business opportunity he was ever likely to encounter in his life. I told him that, of the people within the KISS FM office, I seemed to be the best qualified person to organise and co-ordinate the second licence application [having previously researched and written successful project applications to Durham University, Manpower Services Commission, Northern Arts and Princes Trust]. For the moment, that work seemed to me to be a far more appropriate use of my skills than editing Free!, particularly as nobody else seemed to be doing anything about the KISS FM bid.
I suggested to McNamee that someone else should be brought in to edit Free! magazine while I devoted my full attention to re-working the KISS FM licence application. I had already prepared the groundwork for the new magazine during the last month, and the project could easily be handed over to another editor at this stage. On the other hand, if we did not act on the KISS FM bid now, we would never be offered another chance.
During this monologue, McNamee listened to me, smiled a lot, but said virtually nothing in reply. I could sense that, deep inside, he was incredibly angry that anyone should even dare to challenge his authority in this way. I had seen him act this way before, but only when directing his anger towards others who had displeased him. Instead of showing any response of anger or emotion, McNamee just glowered at you and clammed up. It was his usual cold shoulder treatment – ex-communication rather than confrontation – and you had to wonder whether he was already plotting some ghastly revenge to extract upon you in the future for your supposed crime. McNamee continued to be wholly unresponsive to my questions, so I told him that I planned to start work immediately on KISS FM’s application and that, initially, I planned to do some research in the comparative peace of my home. I promised I would willingly explain and hand over all the tasks I had completed on Free! magazine to whomsoever he wished. After all my suggestions, McNamee still offered me no response, so I gathered together my work and left the office.
After that ‘meeting,’ it was almost a week before I heard anything at all from McNamee. I had been busy working at home, as I had planned, and although I had regular telephone conversations with the other staff in the KISS FM office, McNamee had carefully avoided any contact with me. To me, this sort of behaviour appeared incredibly childish – McNamee seemed to be putting the vanity of his own ego above the need for his radio station to win a licence. Then, late one evening, he phoned me from home. He offered no explanation or apology for his attitude towards me that day in the office, and he gave no reason as to why he had failed to contact me at all during the intervening week. Our conversation was unemotional and business-like. He told me that, from now on, he would pay me £100 for spending three days each week working on the KISS FM licence application. He said he wanted more of my time, but I explained that I had other work commitments during the week on which I could not renege. He made it sound as if this arrangement had just come to him in a flash of inspiration, and that his offer was obviously too good for anyone to turn down.
He also told me that I would no longer be involved in Free! magazine in any capacity. He wanted me to visit the office and hand over all my paperwork to the newly appointed editor, who would be Lindsay Wesker. Finally, he disclosed the caveat that must have taken him almost a week to concoct. When my work on the licence application ended in November, I would no longer be paid by KISS FM, and neither could I resume the editorship of Free! magazine. In essence, I was being allowed to have my own way in the short term but, in the end, I had been made to sacrifice a permanent job at KISS FM. I would be forced to look elsewhere for work once the licence application process was over. This did not worry me excessively because I sincerely believed that KISS FM could win the licence this time around, whereas McNamee seemed already to have resigned himself to failing on the second occasion. This new arrangement cut my pay to a basic £100 per week, because I would no longer draw the percentage of profit that McNamee had previously agreed I would derive from Free! magazine. I was not told the details of the deal that McNamee had struck with Wesker to take over editorship of Free!, but Wesker could not hide his delight at assuming the position he must have felt he had always deserved.
However, when the much delayed first issue of Free! was eventually published at the beginning of November, Wesker’s tendency to indulge himself shone from the inside of the magazine. He contributed one page of his own photos and three and a half pages of his record reviews to the beginning of that first edition. These reviews included glowing critiques of a single released by KISS FM’s own label ‘Graphic Records’ and of a track recorded by Wesker’s partner, Claudette Patterson. I was no longer allowed any involvement in Free! and my name was deleted from the magazine’s masthead, in disregard of my work developing the original idea and setting the project in motion. Free! had been my ‘baby’ and I had had to sacrifice it for KISS FM. From then on, Wesker spent most of his time in the downstairs Free! office at Blackstock Mews, while the rest of us continued to work upstairs on the business of KISS FM and Goodfoot Promotions [Limited].
Personally, I was very disappointed to no longer be involved in the launch and organisation of Free! magazine. However, I firmly believed that KISS FM would win the London licence if I could come up with the necessary facts and figures in this second version of the application form. There would always be another opportunity in the future for me to launch a new publishing project. Right now, this might be the last opportunity I would have to win London a black music radio station. The hard work had only just begun, and a lot of responsibility was suddenly resting upon my shoulders.
February 1990. During recent months […], Lindsay Wesker had become totally absorbed in his role as editor of the monthly magazine Free! and he was now spending little time on KISS FM matters. The February 1990 edition of the magazine presented the first opportunity for KISS FM to explain, in its own words, exactly how it had won its [second application for a] radio licence. Wesker wanted to write the article, but McNamee intervened and insisted that I should pen the two-page feature. Despite the magazine having been my original idea, this was the only occasion I was asked to contribute to Free!, and then only because McNamee had insisted. Wesker seemed incredibly territorial about the project he now viewed as ‘his baby,’ and he appeared to like to do as much of the work on the magazine himself as was possible.
June 1990. The next job appointment I needed to make was the station’s record librarian, who would be supervised by KISS FM’s head of music, Lindsay Wesker. Since taking over the editorship of Free! magazine from me the previous year, Wesker had had little involvement in the re-launch of KISS FM. He seemed almost obsessed with the monthly magazine, spending many late nights in the ground floor office writing articles and reviewing records. Since Wesker had no prior commercial radio experience to contribute, I had not been particularly worried by his absence. However, the person appointed as record librarian would report to Wesker, which is why it was vital for him to be involved in their selection. I loaned Wesker a large folder of all the applications I had received for this job [I had advertised in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper] and I asked his opinion of which might be the most suitable to interview.
The next day, Wesker returned the folder to me, having marked the handful of candidates he felt were most suitable. I looked through his selection and was puzzled by his choices. I asked him why he had chosen those particular applicants, none of whom had previous library experience. He explained that there were two qualities he had been looking for – the candidates had to demonstrate knowledge of dance music, and they had to be female. At first, I thought he was joking, but I quickly discovered that he was not. Wesker explained to me his theory that a record librarian had to be a woman, and stated that he was not interested in working with someone who was not a proven expert in dance music. I was shocked that Wesker could be so irrational in choosing a suitable person for the job. His method of appointing staff was proving to be as bizarre as that of McNamee.
February 1991. Gordon McNamee [now KISS 100 FM managing director] suddenly announced that the station would no longer publish Free! magazine after the January 1991 issue. I was proud to have created the idea for the magazine a year and a half earlier. Although I was no longer associated with its editorial team, I was sad to see Free! close just as KISS FM was proving to be a success with listeners. McNamee explained that the magazine was no longer earning sufficient revenues from advertising to cover its printing costs. However, there were rumours of other reasons for the closure. It was alleged that two KISS FM directors wanted to close Free! because it clashed with their publishing interests. Tony Prince owned the monthly ‘MixMag’ magazine which had recently switched from subscription-only to retail sales. Free! would be a direct competitor. It was also alleged that KISS FM shareholder EMAP [plc] planned to launch its own monthly dance music magazine. Free! would be a direct competitor. Fortunately, Free! found an alternative financial backer and was reborn [under new ownership] as ‘Touch’ magazine, which published similar editorial content.
Once Free! had moved out, the large downstairs room on the ground floor of the [KISS 100 FM] Holloway Road building suddenly looked very empty. I spent an evening picking through the debris left in the office of the magazine that had started life as ‘94’ in July 1988, and which had been such an important part of the pirate station’s campaign to win a licence. Free!’s sudden closure was a bad omen. Staff in the building started whispering about further cuts that might be made to save the company money.
FREE!, nos. 1-15 (November 1989 – January 1991), London.
Having purchased my first soul record (‘Time Is Tight’, Booker T & the MG’s, Stax 119) in 1969, I had been thrilled in 1973 to find a new homegrown monthly colour magazine ‘Black Music’ on the shelves of my local newsagent. I devoured every issue cover-to-cover until its closure in 1984 and wrote to many of its advertisers selling soul and reggae records. I could never have imagined then that, almost two decades hence, I would become the founder of Britain’s longest running monthly black music magazine, created as ‘Free!’ and renamed ‘Touch’ until its closure in 2001.
31 March 1990 was the memorable day when London‘s first licensed [South Londoncommunity 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 reggaemusic 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 advertisingrevenues. 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 UKmedia 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 (BBCdigital 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 weekdayevenings 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.
“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.
In March 1989, an advertisement appeared in the press, seeking staff to work for a new radio industry magazine. There had been several attempts to publish a radio-only trade publication since the launch of commercial radio in 1973, all of which had ended in failure. The industry had still not become large enough to sustain substantial amounts of paid-for advertising, or to build a large enough circulation to make such a publication financially viable. Then, EMAP plc, a major publisher of consumer magazines and regional newspapers, announced plans to launch ‘Radio & Music’, a fortnightly, glossy magazine aimed at the music radio sector. EMAP had established its reputation as one of the twenty fastest growing companies in the UK, with an annual turnover of £189m. It believed the time was right for a radio publication: “The radio industry is undergoing a radical change and deserves a radical voice to reflect the new environment … We will be the sole magazine devoted to the radio industry in all its guises …”
I was eager to secure further outlets for my writings about the radio industry, so I rang the phone number in the recruitment advert. I spoke to Brian Davis, the magazine’s managing editor, and arranged to meet him at EMAP’s John Street office at 6 pm on 22 March. There, on the top floor of ‘MEED House’, I found a group of advertising executives selling space in EMAP magazines by phone with a ferocity and aggressiveness I had never before witnessed. Davis greeted me warmly and the two of us moved into the penthouse meeting room, where he expanded upon the philosophy behind the magazine’s launch. I ran through my experience in radio [pirate radiopresenter/producer since 1972; executed turnaround strategy in 1980-81 of Newcastle’s ‘Metro Radio’ whose “audience figures show[ed] the greatest improvement [of all UK commercial stations]” and were “the highest since the station’s establishment” according to the IBA regulator; managed the production team at London community station ‘Radio Thamesmead’ in 1986; project manager at London’s ‘Capital Radio’ in 1986-88], and my writings about the radio industry [Radio Editor at London consumer magazine ‘City Limits’ since 1988; Radio Editor at ‘For The Record’ trade magazine in 1989], and I expressed interest in writing for the magazine in either a full-time or freelance capacity. Davis showed me the draft layout of a pilot issue scheduled for April publication, and he asked my opinion of some of the planned content.
He expressed interest in employing me in some capacity on the magazine, and asked me to submit two examples of my work: an opinion piece on one aspect of the radio industry that I felt was pertinent to the magazine’s readership; and a list of twenty editorial items I felt should be included regularly in the new publication. I obliged by writing an editorial on the conservatism of commercial radio playlists, and I drafted a list of twenty suggested features that included:
“sit in on a particular show & examine success/failure
pick a city/area & examine the radio market
details of artists’ radio promotion tours
who’s pushing what – record companies/pluggers’ hitlists
giveaway sampler CDs.”
I sent my suggestions to Brian Davis and awaited his response. I was still keen to be more involved in [London pirate station] ‘KISS FM’, but it was not earning me any money. Right now, some additional income from writing about radio would be particularly useful for me. I was hoping that Davis might offer me a post or, at the very least, some freelance work. While I awaited a response to the ideas I had sent to Davis, the competition for the London-wide FM radio licence was intensifying.
In a seemingly unrelated occurrence, I attended the opening ceremony of the fifth ‘UK Music Radio Conference’ on the evening of 4 April 1989, organised by the ‘Radio Academy’ at the ‘HMV Megastore’ record shop in London’s Oxford Street. The event itself was largely an opportunity for the radio industry to indulge in mutual back-slapping, but I was there in the hope that it might provide some source material for a radio article. I bumped into Brian Davis, managing editor of publisher EMAP’s new magazine Radio & Music, to whom I had not spoken since our initial meeting the previous month. I had yet to receive a response from him to the ideas I had submitted. Davis introduced me to his associate publisher, Peter Gould, and we exchanged small talk about the magazine’s impending launch. Recognising me across the crowded room, KISS FM’s Lindsay Wesker came to join our conversation and, once I had introduced him to the others, the topic switched to the ex-pirate station’s prospect of winning a London FM licence. Gould was very enthusiastic about KISS FM’s chances and showed particular interest in learning that the station was seeking a further investor. He suggested that a meeting with his superiors at EMAP could prove productive.
In early April 1989, EMAP launched the pilot issue of Radio & Music magazine although, strangely, its editorial was not particularly positive about KISS FM’s chances of winning the London FM licence. From a personal perspective, I was frustrated to find that, during this and the magazine’s following issues, several feature ideas which I had proposed had been used. The magazine’s managing editor, Brian Davis, had never contacted me again.
In terms of delivering value for money for the Licence Fee payer, ‘Radio 3’ is easily the most expensive of the BBC‘s five analogue radio networks. My calculations for 2009/10 show it had cost 8.5p per listener hour, compared to 1.7p for ‘Radio 4’, 2.5p for ‘Five Live’, 0.9p for ‘Radio 1’ and 0.6p for ‘Radio 2’.
There may be arguments about the artistic merit of Radio 3 (though I would argue exactly the same for Radios 1 and 2), but there is no denying that, in value for money terms, it is up there with the ‘BBC Asian Network’ [9.0p per listener hour] and ‘Radio Cymru’ [14.6p] on the expensive-ometer.
Remember the network’s history. After World War Two, the BBC was ‘persuaded’ to continue the popular wartime ‘General Forces Programme’ as a new domestic network – the ‘Light Programme’. Until then, the BBC had resisted the notion of a full-time comedy and popular music network as horribly downmarket. At the same time, as a cultural response, the BBC made its own decision to launch the ‘Third Programme’ (renamed ‘Radio 3’ from 1967) on which then Director General WJ Haley promised “operas, plays, discussions, features will be given the fullest time their content needs.”
As Sean Street wrote in his excellent account of UK radio from 1922 to 1945, ‘Crossing The Ether‘: “The message for the old guard was clear: taste would not be undermined by change, culture would not be sacrificed for populism.”
Radio 3 exists because the section of the BBC that would not be seen dead listening to Radio 2 (as the Light Programme was renamed from 1967) wanted their own high-brow radio station. The question is – should the rest of us still have to pay so highly for them to enjoy that privilege?
There is no doubt that Radio 3 produces some excellent unique programmes. The problem is that too few people ever get to hear them. And, if BBC Asian Network is still on the chopping board for these very reasons, how is it that Radio 3 has always managed to justify its continuing existence as a network that is virtually ‘untouchable’ when axes fall?
[Published reader comment to ‘Radio 3 Is Letting Its Listeners Down’, Sarah Spilsbury, The Guardian, 5 Oct 2011]
“Leadership of the [UK broadcast] industry appears to remain in the hands of predominantly white, able-bodied men”. Broadcast Training & Skills Regulator, Equal Opportunities Report 2008
In the United States, ‘diversity’ has been described as:
One of the “paramount goals of broadcast regulation in America”;
“One of the foundation principles in communications policy”;
“A broad principle to which appeal can be made on behalf of both neglected minorities and of consumer choice, or against monopoly and other restrictions”.
American Professor Philip Napoli portrayed the objective of ‘diversity’ in US broadcasting policy as a derivative of First Amendment goals to promote informed decision-making, cultural pluralism, citizen welfare and a well-functioning democracy. Napoli described the ‘diversity’ objective in terms of a ‘marketplace of ideas’:
“Thus, the marketplace of ideas has been conceived by the courts, legal scholars, and policymakers as a key dimension of First Amendment freedoms, in which citizens are free to choose from a wide range of ideas (content diversity), delivered from a wide range of sources (source diversity). The citizens then partake of this diversity (exposure diversity) to increase their knowledge, encounter opposing viewpoints, and become well-informed decision-makers who are better capable of fulfilling their democratic responsibilities in a self-governing society”.
Napoli created a flowchart that outlined the primary dimensions of diversity, their component parts and their presumed relationships:
In the United States, it was thought that the ultimate public policy goal of ‘exposure diversity’ could be achieved through significant regulatory intervention in the broadcast industry to forcibly create the antecedents ‘source diversity’ and ‘content diversity’. However, the latter interventions have remained mere proxies for the policy goal and, from empirical evidence over several decades of intervention, Napoli concluded that:
“The expectation that increased diversity of sources leads to increased diversity of content is far from a certainty
It may be that increases in content diversity should be considered essentially meaningless from a policy perspective if the additional content is ignored by the audience”.
By contrast, in the United Kingdom, ‘diversity’ has not been a prime policy objective of broadcast regulation. In part, this derives from the historical difference in the development of broadcasting between the two countries. In the United States, broadcasting evolved as a wholly commercial industry, propelled by competing stations serving local markets. In Europe, the model was state-controlled broadcast monopolies serving national audiences, supplemented only relatively recently by commercial competitors. In the US, broadcast evolution has been bottom-up, whilst the European model was entirely top-down.
More recently in Europe, ‘diversity’ has come to be recognised as an important policy issue in media regulation. In 2003, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers described ‘cultural diversity’ as an “essential public interest objective” in its member states’ measures to promote the democratic and social contribution of digital broadcasting.
In the UK, a report commissioned by government agency NESTA in 2001 concluded that:
“Cultural diversity amongst viewers, broadcast employees, producers and broadcast suppliers has noticeably worsened during the last ten years
Over the last decade, there have been a decline in the numbers of black people employed in influential positions in broadcasting; a decline in the numbers of programmes targeting black viewers and a decline in the numbers of black-owned production companies being commissioned by broadcasters
Diversity tools such as ethnic minority supplier targets; contract compliance; ring fenced resources; and publicly available monitoring data, have been recommended by a variety of industry organisations but have not been adopted by many broadcasters”.
The ‘diversity’ issue in broadcasting was placed centre stage when (as explained in a BBC presentation):
“In April 2000, a man stood up at the Race In The Media Awards in London and said … ‘The BBC needs to change dramatically if it is to be a serious player in 21st Century Britain.’ His name was Greg Dyke, Director General of the BBC”.
As a result, then BBC director of sport, Peter Salmon, was appointed to champion cultural diversity within the BBC, and he pledged:
“Changing the culture of the BBC has been crucial to ensuring an atmosphere in which diversity can flourish. The ‘One BBC’ initiative, which encourages risk-taking, honest discussions, creativity and dynamism across the whole of the BBC, has been an integral part of supporting our wider aims around diversity – a BBC fit for the 21st Century Britain”.
A decade after Dyke’s statement, it is instructive to document the levels of ‘diversity’ achieved in the UK radio industry as a whole, as well as in BBC radio. This is intended to help benchmark the extent to which independently commissioned radio content satisfies the ‘diversity’ requirement stipulated in the BBC Agreement. Borrowing the framework of Napoli’s flowchart, the issues of ‘source diversity’, ‘content diversity’ and ‘exposure diversity’ are examined in turn.
SOURCE DIVERSITY
1. Ownership
As a consequence of the Licence Fee system by which public broadcasting is funded, it could be argued that the BBC belongs to all paying households in the United Kingdom. The headline data on the composition of the population demonstrate that:
50.9% of the total UK population are female (31.0 million);
7.9% of the total UK population belong to ethnic minorities (4.6 million);
17.2% of the total UK population are disabled (10.6 million);
16.2% of the total UK population live in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (6.9 million);
5.4% of the total population of Great Britain believe in non-Christian religions (3.1 million).
The increasing ‘diversity’ of the UK population in the 21st Century theoretically translates into a more diverse collective ownership of the BBC. Each of us expects something back from BBC radio in the form of content that reflects our particular citizenship, be that our gender, our geographical location, our ethnicity or simply our love of jazz music. This multiplicity of competing demands obviously presents a major challenge for the BBC, much of whose content is broadcast to mass audiences on national Networks.
CHART: Market shares of the commercial radio sector by owner (% share of listening to commercial radio in Q4 2009)
In the commercial radio broadcast sector, consolidation permitted by the Communications Act 2003 has resulted in more concentrated ownership of the UK’s more than 300 commercial stations. Whereas, eight years ago, the three largest station owners accounted for 54% of commercial radio listening, they accounted for 75% in Q4 2009. The largest commercial radio group, Global Radio, was responsible for 39% of commercial radio listening in Q4 2009.
At the same time, the number of commercial radio analogue stations has increased substantially from 106 in 1990 to more than 300 presently and, as a result, a more diverse range of content is now offered to listeners. For example, the first commercial radio station to target an ethnic audience was licensed in 1990, and the first religious station in 1995. The DAB digital radio platform has also carried an increasing number of stations, although the reach of these services has been limited by the slow public take-up of DAB receiver hardware.
Ofcom does not publish data on the diversity of ownership of commercial radio licensees. However, the ownership of commercial radio would appear to have narrowed substantially as a result of consolidation. Although it is clearly not the BBC’s responsibility to balance the impact of less diverse ownership within the commercial radio sector, it nevertheless highlights the imperative for BBC radio to reflect the increasing diversity of the population it serves.
Napoli’s second issue of programming ownership has little relevance for the UK radio market because the overwhelming majority of content broadcast by both BBC and commercial radio is originated by the broadcaster itself, rather than sourced externally. Hence, the diversity of programme ownership is largely a product of the diversity in ownership of the broadcast outlets.
Skillset, the Sector Skills Council for the creative media industries, conducted an Employment Census in 2009 which estimated that 19,900 persons were employed in the radio broadcasting industry (BBC and commercial). Of the total:
16% were freelance
47% were female
7.9% were from ethnic minorities
2.6% were disabled.
These results were extrapolated from only 77 completed questionnaires returned from employers in the broadcast radio sector and from 9 in the community radio sector. This response rate may also explain Skillset’s estimate that, of 400 chief executives employed in radio broadcasting, 100 are freelance, 100 are female, 50 are from ethnic minorities and 50 are disabled.
Within its analysis of employment in the radio sector, Skillset noted that:
Women make up almost half the workforce, a greater proportion than that of the audiovisual industry as a whole
The radio industry employs a low proportion of ethnic minority staff relative to its locations in London, Northwest and Southeast England, where 60% of the radio workforce is located
In London, 11% of the radio workforce is from ethnic minorities, whereas 25% of the capital’s population of working age is from ethnic minorities
Disabled people comprise a higher proportion of the radio workforce than in the audiovisual industry as a whole
The age profile of the radio workforce is slightly older than that of the creative media workforce as a whole.
Skillset’s ‘Diversity Strategy’ for the media sector stated:
“Diversity, the drive to create a genuinely inclusive culture, is increasingly recognised as a business critical issue. Managing diversity successfully helps business to respond effectively to ever more diverse markets and to achieve new levels of creativity and innovation. … However, one look at the overall demographic profile of the sector’s workforce and it becomes apparent that there is still a long way to go to make it truly inclusive of our society as a whole”.
Skillset estimated that 48% of the total radio industry workforce is employed by the BBC, 43% by commercial radio, and 9% by community radio. Skillset found that the proportion of freelancers in the commercial radio sector was twice the proportion working in BBC radio.
The Broadcast Training & Skills Regulator [BTSR] collects data from broadcasters regarding the promotion of equal opportunities and training, as required by Section 337 of the Communications Act 2003. Broadcasters employing fewer than 21 staff (the majority of local commercial radio stations) are exempt from this requirement to supply data. The latest BTSR report, based on 2008 data, collated returns from 29 companies in radio, and nine companies working in both radio and television. Unfortunately, data from the latter nine bi-media companies (which probably include the BBC, Bauer and UTV) are not separated into ‘radio’ and ‘television’, making it impossible to build up a complete picture of the radio sector.
BTSR data from the returns of 29 radio-only companies found that 7,021 people were employed in radio broadcasting in 2008, of which:
46.1% were female, of which:
12.7% at board level were female
31.8% in senior management were female
64.2% in administrative & support functions were female
38.4% on freelance or contract basis were female
3.2% were from ethnic minorities, of which:
11.4% at board level (9 persons) were from ethnic minorities
3.6% in senior management (7 persons) were from ethnic minorities
2.5% in administrative & support functions were from ethnic minorities
1.4% on freelance or contract basis were from ethnic minorities
0.4% were disabled (30 persons)
1.3% at board level (1 person) were disabled
0% in senior management were disabled
0.1% on freelance or contract basis were disabled.
Because this data must be assumed to exclude BBC radio personnel, it would seem to indicate relatively low levels of diversity achieved by respondents from the commercial radio sector within the BTSR sample.
BTSR noted that, for the broadcast industry as a whole, reports published by Ofcom “indicated that little progress was being made by the industry overall in promoting equality of opportunity”. It concluded:
“Despite several broadcasters taking some action to promote Equal Opportunities, the employment data collected for this report indicates that barriers persist to recruiting people with a disability, in particular, as well as people from minority ethnic groups, to the industry. It has been commented on elsewhere that the broadcast industry lacks a strategic approach to managing equality and diversity. Indeed, the results of this analysis indicate that very few individual broadcasters have a strategic approach to managing Equal Opportunities or diversity”.
Across its total workforce, the BBC has adopted numerical goals for achieving diversity. The current targets for delivery by December 2012 are:
12.5% from ethnic minorities (actual 12.2% at 31 December 2009)
7% from ethnic minorities in senior management (actual 5.6% at 31 December 2009)
5.5% disabled (actual 4.3% at 31 December 2009)
4.5% disabled in senior management (actual 3.4% at 31 December 2009).
Skillset’s 2006 Employment Census found that, in BBC radio, 11% of the workforce was from ethnic minorities and noted that “the majority of the BBC workforce (some 60%) is based in London, where 24% of the working population is from an ethnic minority”. In contrast, it found that only 3% of the commercial radio workforce was from ethnic minorities, a proportion close to the BTSR data. From this evidence, BBC radio appears to be achieving considerably greater ethnic diversity amongst its workforce than the commercial radio sector.
CHART: BBC Audio & Music division workforce diversity
Analysis of the workforce diversity data for the BBC’s Audio & Music division (also referred to in this report as ‘BBC Network Radio’) at year-end 2009 showed that it achieved above average diversity for gender, but below average for ethnic minorities and the disabled, compared to the BBC as a whole. Much of Audio & Music’s complement of ethnic minority staff was accounted for by two digital radio Networks, 1Xtra and the Asian Network, both of which target ethnic minority audiences. These results highlight the relatively low ethnic diversity in the workforces of the BBC’s longer established radio Networks such as Radio 2, 3 and 4, particularly as all are London-based.
In January 2009, the trade union BECTU and the Radio Independents Group had organised an event in London specifically aimed at encouraging ethnic minority professionals to work in independent radio production. The publicity for the ‘Move On Up’ open day emphasised the significance of the independent radio production sector as a means to secure employment in the radio broadcast industry:
“Working with radio indies is a key route into the industry, and engaging with these executives provides a whole new set of opportunities”.
[Commissioned by the BBC Trust to research, author and present a report on its independent productions to a meeting of its main board, I pursued interviews with BBC Radio managers. Some refused to meet, some never supplied requested data and some merely patronised me, seemingly oblivious that they were public servants whose salaries and generous pensions were funded by the British population. My supposedly ‘independent’ report was edited line-by-line by the BBC’s Gareth Barr who insisted several chapters be expunged into appendices. I was not invited to the board meeting that belatedly considered the edited version of my report which now omitted all appendices (including this and my previous blog post). During my research, the BBC’s then Senior Diversity Manager had generously offered me relevant data to create the above chart of BBC Radio workforce diversity. Within months, her ten-year tenure at the BBC ended.]
Grant Goddard : radio broadcasting expert : media analyst : writer/author 