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

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

1.  1973 to 1990

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

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

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

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

Radio’s main problems in attracting national advertising were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.  1990 to now

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

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

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

a.   The emergence of radio groups

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

b.   The entry of media groups

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

c.   National advertising

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

d.   Cost cutting

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

e.   Local advertising

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

f.   London agencies

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

g.   'BBC Radio One'

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

h.   Lack of investment

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

i.   Networked programmes

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

j.   The rise of brands

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

k.   Format convergence

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

l.   The decline of the music industry

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

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

He’s the queen of snubs : 1989-1991 : Gordon McNamee, KISS 100 FM, London

 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.

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