Quest 100 FM was formed in early 1992 by pirate DJ’s Dave Kilner, Steve Wilson and Andy Young as a result of feeling disillusioned by the state of Midlands based pirate radio at the time (i.e too much Rave, egos and crap DJ’s). Inspired by the more dance and soul based pirates in Birmingham and London such as Enterprise, Solar-Rock and Kiss their ‘quest’ was to create a more professional sounding weekend soul and dance station with more focus on the music and quality control.

It all started off pretty well… Money was coming in from plenty of ads. The signal and DJ line up was pretty impressive – broadcasting from Butterfield Court, Eve Hill (Dudley) and mainly comprising of upfront club DJ’s and pirate DJ’s from Elite, Freedom, Pow-wah and Fantasy FM. (It also spawned the radio ‘careers’ of names such as Roger Lewis and Matt James). Unfortunately, as with the stations that had inspired Quest in the first place, the station was often troubled with more than its fair share of problems and rarely managed to stay on for a full weekend without something going not quite to plan. Although it never had any DTI hassle (never stayed on long enough!), Quest did seem to suffer from constant technical problems (jinxed rigs blowing etc), studio thefts, coax cuttings and rigs and dipoles being taken either by the council or jealous rival pirates.

Around Summer 92, after a second studio theft, and with the imminent launch of legal station Classic FM on the same frequency of 100Mhz, Quest needed to move up the dial and decided to join forces with Exile’s Scott Davis and Karl Lyon to create ‘super station’ – Quest 100.5… adopting Exile’s old frequency and adding most of the better DJ’s from Exile (One policy from the start was ‘No Wayne Taylor’!). Unfortunately after suffering from the same sort of problems as before it only managed to last for one full weekend of test transmissions during winter ’92… and after losing another studio Quest was never to return again.

Eventually when Exile relaunched around ’93 many of the people involved with Quest including its founder members ended up being involved in some way. Steve Wilson did a regular show; Andy Young became the advert man (more famous for the ‘Wayne Taylor… He’s Crap’ and ‘Come to Church’ outtakes) and Dave Kilner also did a couple of one off shows.

In hindsight it was a bit naive to think 3 skint middle class teenagers were going to run a successful pirate without compromising on quality and not have any dodgy geezers involved. In this game you really do need the Wayne Taylors, Zippy D’s and Rowley men to make it work… Otherwise they’ll probably nick your rig! Good while it lasted though.

Downloads

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Audio

Quest FM Adverts 8 mins
Quest FM – DJ Nexuss 1 – 1992 46 mins
Quest FM – DJ Nexuss 2 – 1992 21 mins
Quest FM – Roger Lewis (Clip) – 1992 7 mins
Quest FM – Steve Wilson – 1992 8 mins
Quest FM – Test Transmissions – March 1992 58 mins
Quest FM – Tranzy D – April 1992 43 mins
Quest FM – Tranzy D – April 1992 (Edited) 23 mins