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]

Traitor at the gates of soul : 1990 : Tony Blackburn, Capital Radio versus KISS 100 FM, London

 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 before 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% (source: 1993 RAJAR replaced 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 debut on 16 October 1973.

[Includes extracts 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]

Givin’ up Free! for funk (radio) : 1989-1991 : Free! magazine / Touch magazine, KISS FM, London

 August 1989. There was a momentary lull in the usually frenetic activity at the [former London pirate 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. [Pirate radio 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, record reviews, 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 [see blog].

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 playwright Sir 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-hand desk 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 logo design. 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 IKEA furniture 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 felt underlay, 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 [see blog]. 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 (see blog), 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 [see blog]. 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 [see blog]. 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 [see blog]. 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.

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

POSTSCRIPT

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.

KISS FM boss Gordon McNamee’s cruel obliteration of my name from the magazine’s history has since empowered his long-time colleague Lindsay Wesker to claim online “I created a magazine called free!” and to have “created free! Magazine” and “Created free! Magazine” and “created free! Magazine”. I am reminded of the iconic Norman Whitfield soul song ‘It Should Have Been Me’. Evidently, history is written by the vipers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh dear. Will I still have a job tomorrow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was galling to see McNamee showing off such opulence even before our new radio station had launched. Where had he got the money to buy this home? Where had he got the money to buy £90,000 of share capital in the newly created ‘KISS FM Radio Limited’ company that would be operating the licence? No explanations were offered to any of us who had been involved in our supposedly ‘collective’ enterprise – now HIS business – before it had won the licence. I had been promised rewards (shares, a bonus, an immediate salary) for my efforts winning the licence, none of which McNamee honoured. He was proven to be a cold-hearted liar in his treatment of me. There must have been others whose talents he exploited and later discarded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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