Why this archive exists
The Story
Every recording here is a snapshot of a time in my life.
I've loved radio since I was a small lad. Not just the music, but everything around it. The jingles. The production. Steve Wright's talkie bits. The Simon Bates Golden Hour and Our Tune. Jackie Brambles. And after dark, Radio Luxembourg drifting in and out on that fading signal, and when the programmes stopped, the strange tones it played into the night. They freaked me out a bit. I kept listening anyway.
Then in the late eighties I worked out how to record it properly, at a quality worth keeping, and I started taping everything. Shows, chart rundowns, whatever was on. At weekends my mate would come back from London with mixtapes, Dave Pearce's rap show on GLR among them, and I'd copy those too. I had to capture it all. So I did: cassettes, then MiniDiscs, then DATs. Boxes and boxes of them.
By the early nineties I was working in a locksmith's shop in a small Dorset village. A properly boring job, and radio was what got me through it.
The obsession became the career. I ended up in radio production myself, and made the jingles for Pete Tong's Essential Selection, the show that had me captivated as a listener in the first place. Twenty-five years on, I'm still making radio sound like radio.
But the boxes never left me. This archive is me finally opening them. Digitising those snapshots, cleaning them up, and sharing them with anyone who wants to remember what it felt like when the radio was on. If any of it takes you back, it's doing its job.
, Stevie