Listen

Jon on the Radio Airthrey float 1993

There’s a whole category of writing  on this site called radio.  I spent much of my childhood listening to a radio. I always think of it as simultaneously the most personal and yet the most sharable of mediums: it feels one-to-one but the experience can be simultaneously shared, almost anywhere.

Piccadilly Radio

When I was growing up my radio station of choice was Piccadilly Radio which, back in the early 1980s, was heard right across the North West of England.  Although, officially, it was Manchester’s local radio station the transmitters reach expanded to the whole region. From the day I heard the Pete Baker breakfast show jingles I was hooked.  Not for me the stuffy sound of 1980s Radio 2, which was played in our kitchen at breakfast time. No, I wanted pop music and, later, the madness of Timmy Mallet.

Sounds of My Life

Since then radio has been an important part of my life so, when I was looking at this site recently, it seemed odd that there was a page dedicated to photos but not one to the sounds I’ve collected. There are far fewer pieces of audio but I wanted a place to start to collect them.

There’s a number of pieces of radio audio that I have shared over the years: hear some of BBC Radio Shropshire’s April 1985 test transmissionsaudio from the 1987 launch of Beacon Radio’s expansion into Shrewsbury & Telford; a recording of the 1994 launch of the UK’s first Country music station, London’s Country 1035 or relive memories of Dave Ward’s B Team Piccadilly Radio breakfast show – an early UK zoo format morning show – with a few episodes of Umbridge.

For me, station imaging always does its job: it’s the jingles that get me hooked listening to a station: the Sound of Piccadilly Radio 1981 showcases some imaging from a very different era but it got me listening. And I’ve archived one of my favourite jingles of all time from Capital Radio in 1995: although buried in the New Year montage it’s just clever, or as I described it, the work of a jingle genius.

Follow me on SoundCloud or AudioBoom to hear more as I upload them or see the year-by-year listing as it grows.