So here we were, with a’ radio station’ in our house. The early days consisted of weekly shows, called The Irreducible Representation, which consisted of me playing electronica, electro and progressive drum and bass for 2 hours.
They also involved the entire front room being rearranged (until semi-permanent shelving could be put on the walls) to accommodate a begged, borrowed and re-appropriated collection of CD discmen, record decks and mixers. With deep thanks here to Capt Naked aka James Merriman and others.
I have little desire to revisit the archives of those programmes yet but no doubt one day I’ll drag them out and duly die inside at their awfulness…one has to cut one’s teeth somehow.
Pretty quickly, guests slots were conjured up; producers Accelra, Pete Um, Vacuum on Vacuum (more anon) and DJs/promoters Charlie Don’t Surf amongst the crew.
CDS were Toby Lloyd and Damo Hallsworth; both gifted DJs with complimentary states in music, mostly involving red LEDs and noise. Gabba was a genre riding high at that time for them…
Some beautiful (some scary) mixes and performances came from these shows but our first technical loss was marked by the Great Lost Um Session, where a harddisk failure lost what all who were present agreed was one of Pete Um’s best performances…
Pretty soon, I started talking seriously with Toby and Damo about putting on live events with some of the artists we were promoting on-air and streaming them live from the venue. We came out from The Junction and The Portland Arms in Cambridge and from the Norwich Arts Centre, all when the BBC were still having small difficulties with streaming live just over the web.
And so began a run of gigs with the likes of Dangermouse (might not be the one you’re thinking of), Global Goon, Debasser, Tokyo Windbag, Sam Dedbeat Himself, d’Damage (the last 2 in Norwich with our Norfolk Brethren Uncollected) with an outstanding one of these being Schneider TM, a German outfit.
Schneider left a whole bunch of DATs at the venue and they needed them for a John Peel session at Maida Vale the next night (one which prevented us from broadcasting our gig)…cue a wheeze of me and great friend Ed Woodhouse piling down to London and gatecrashing a live broadcast with The Man himself to save the day; a truly life-changing experience to see the grumpy old genius doing what he ever did but better than anyone else could ever dream…RIP JP.
That summer of 2003 came to an end and a natural lul in the Cambridge live music cycle began.
What to do next? I had already been down to the legendary Resonance FM in London, the arts based Comm Station, to do one of their Clear Spots to promote our work. We were learning so much and it all felt as if it could go somewhere…but where?
There used to be a legendary venue in Cambridge called the Boat Race on Burliegh St, which broke the regional duck of many an international live band; it had been a centre for gigs in the city for many years but was running into difficulties.
By now, we were out at gigs and events whenever we could make it and the Boat Race was a precious small-medium venue in a city where provision was (and still is) barely adequate and one which is dominated by the arts/music agenda of the City Council. Untold wonders also go on behind closed doors at the University with little access for the general town population…
I felt I had to do something and ended up running a petition against its closure, spoke at an Area Committee meeting and submitted a business proposal to Enterprise Inns, the landlords, for me to take it over as a broadcasting live music venue.
Obviously, this didn’t have my desired outcome but thanks to a lot of internet forums and the Cambridge News, a lot of support did come and a lot of attention was directed towards 209radio.
This resulted in a lot of people coming out of the woodwork wanting to find out more. It also resulted in me questioning what our little station was or could be in the future, an internal conversation which came out into the world after meeting one Gil Karpas, local musician and promoter who was then working at The Portland Arms.
“Can I have a show then?” “What do you play?” “Broken beat and jazz bizniz.”
And so began Phase 2…
My interest in radio goes back a long way, but it has to be said as a punter only.
I spent my first 5 years with my parents on Merchant Navy ships in the late 70s and so radio, both for communications and entertainment, was an important part of our lives. Although too young to remember this specifically, I’m told that visits to off-shore stations were quite common.
As I grew up, taping the chart show on a Sunday was a weekly joy, as was listening to Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 and lapping up The Peel show…but still no ambitions were felt to be behind a microphone.
When radio really, really bit me was living in a tent after arriving in the Cambridge area following University.
This period was helped enormously by John Peel as our only in-tent entertainment was a radio and John kept me and Lucy feeling connected. The effect his show had on us was huge…familiarity and comfort came with his relentless search for the New.
At Johnson Matthey I worked shifts for a while, alone in a lab very often, and so had my choice of channel to listen to. This is when my deep love of Radio 4 kicked in; blood would flow if they were to turn off this broadcasting monolith and I would lead the charge, I’m sure.
So it was at this point that I realised for myself the power of radio, that most intimate broadcasting medium, to comfort, inform, entertain and connect.
Coming back to life post-Johnson Matthey, I took my redundancy payout and invested in my new future as a journalist. A course was bought, a camera and recorder were acquired.
But of course I got nowhere quickly, completely underestimating the dues I would have to pay before my feet were up on a desk at Private Eye.
The crystallisation of my radio career came very rapidly. While searching for my next steps, I did a variety of temporary jobs to keep ticking over, including working in places where national commercial stations were the only common ground on communal radios.
I will create other posts about my own skewed take on commercial radio but now it’s suffice to say that this listening had a deep, almost physical effect on me. And not a good one either.
One early spring day in 2003, I was recovering from another great night in a strange London dungeon listening to the latest sounds. The day before I had read an article about internet radio and how this newish curiosity was becoming less and less technically difficult. Even to the point where you could do it in your own home.
At this point I was rather impressed by and addicted to Groovetech radio, an outfit operating in London who were really pushing out the internet radio boat, although I understand now that this was at the detriment of someone’s bank account and so it folded.
I had a pile of records. I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to share the great stuff we were listening to. I had a home. I could do better than what I was having to listen to at work…surely this could all be put together…
A half day of research and a debit card yielded an account with Live 365, a North American streaming provider. They allowed you to put up playlists, punctuated with their own ads, but also to switch and stream live.
A name? What name? What’s in a name? They often have numbers in…but I’m not FM.
I lived at number 209…
Lucy didn’t come home that evening, she arrived for the first time at the headquarters of 209radio but didn’t understand why I was so excited or actually how we could ‘have a radio station’ in our 2 bed terrace.
But nothing here would quite be the same again…
So, we moved to Royston for my work but for Lucy’s also as it was undeniably quicker to get to Cambridge from there by train (where she was working at Addenbrooke’s Hospital) than from Haverhill by bus.
What can I say about Royston? It is not a bad place and in the past there’s no doubt it was once an important and historic market town but these days it seems disconnected from both Herts and Cambs by the major roads that have grown around it.
But I was there for work and work I did for Johnson Matthey Plc, refiners and purveyors of precious metals and their associated compounds.
I started in the analytic labs and ended up in the Fine Chemicals department as Technical Support.
All in all it was a good life- lots of interesting if ‘bucket’ chemistry to stick my head in, all the friends we had made at the farm lived locally and Cambridge was just up the road.
But dissatisfaction set in after a few years there; I just had a strong nagging feeling that I should be doing something else.
To try and find that something, Lucy and I moved for the first time into Cambridge. We certainly sought a richer social life than living in Royston could provide.
Now the seeds of 209radio start to become apparent; our group of friends were party-loving and gregarious, we moved socially in creative circles, our music tastes had broadened and deepened together.
We had started to attend the Dedbeat electro and hip hop festival, run by some Norwich boys annually on the Norfolk coast at various holiday camps.
These gigs were legendary; ask anyone who went about the guy who discharged himself from hospital with a broken leg and a overdose of partying because he couldn’t bear to miss Andrew Weatherall’s set. This hero was back on the dancefloor with a cast and a wheelchair within an hour of leaving the hospital.
I had attended many many trance parties when schooling in North Wales but the sounds we heard and the parties we attended during this time were something else. They made a huge impression on us all; they have left their marks on us still, truth be told.
Then in the autumn of 2002, it was announced a division of Johnson Matthey was merging with a division of ICI and jobs must be shed, albeit under a voluntary redundancy scheme at first.
I had been thinking a lot about retraining at that point, perhaps as a journalist.
I would get a pay-out so I applied to be let go. They didn’t seem to want to let me but that only strengthened my resolve.
In January 2003, 27 years old- I left chemistry and embarked upon the path that would lead me to 209.
But as anyone who knows will tell you, I was already there…
