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…
Once upon a time, a young gentleman & a young lady arrived in East Anglia with little more to their names than Welsh university educations and a Mk 5 sky blue Ford Cortina 1.6 L…
It was the summer of 1998 when I & my girlfriend of 2 years, Lucy Clifton, arrived for summer work with a plant breeder firm in Thriplow.
A good friend who lived in the village had recommended the firm he worked at every summer & accommodation would be no problem as his girlfriend had a great tent that we could borrow.
It would be a warm summer and the season was just a few weeks…
What we’d do after that was anyone’s guess but when you’re only just 22, who cares?
A carefree summer of tending rapeseed, harvesting rapeseed, cleaning rapeseed, planting rapeseed came & went; lifelong friends were made & shadows lengthened on the lawns.
Summer turned to autumn and then…hang on, it’s winter, Christmas week even!…we’d better get a shift on with something…
The unknown turned out to be Haverhill in Suffolk, of all places. I’m sure it has some redeeming features but our sole joy in our nicely Ikea’ed 2 bed rented terrace was Bob, next door’s incredibly tactile Ginger tomcat.
Living betwixt a sewerage plant and a flavour & fragrance factory, Bob’s ever-eager loving greeted us every day in this New Year & whenever we returned home from being a temp postie (me) or number-crunching for the MRC at Addenbrooke’s Hospital (her).
Lucy had bagged herself her entry into the rat-race but my chemistry just wasn’t being exercised on the doorsteps of Great Shelford.
An application for an analytic lab monkey had been lodged with a firm in Royston, Herts because I valued my mucous membranes & functioning tear ducts more than I suspected the local firm would; after 6 months it paid off…
We were Royston bound…
