On May 8th 1990, Inner City Radio opened after a few days of tests playing ‘Soul II Soul’ tapes on 102FM and announced it would broadcast Thursdays to Sundays from 10am to 10pm on 101.75FM. Like most other pirates in Bristol the schedule would be filled with Reggae, Soul, Hip Hop and black-influenced chart stars…
Interference began as a radio project amongst some people in London and Bristol who were involved in direct action politics. Some of them also had a pirate radio pedigree. The idea was to splice together both these outlaw scenes and develop the overlap. The seeds were sown in summer 1997 following the Trafalgar Square ‘Never…
Magnum 100 FM first broadcast as SLR, Sophisticated Local Radio, and was linked to the SLR Radio in London. They started in 1990 as SLR for maybe a few days but turned into ‘Magnum Force’ quite quickly. It was originally run by Wile-up and Iroy, but Wile-up seemed to continue alone after a short time.…
Between 1988 and 1989, SYT Radio had provided an alternative to both the legal stations and the other pirates in Bristol, broadcasting pre-recorded shows from cassette. Activist Heath Bunting knew the technician for SYT and fancied having a go at broadcasting himself, so having access to a functioning transmitter he decided to re-launch SYT Radio…
Bristol has not had many stations playing purely dance music. Fantasy was one of the few to focus on the dance audience, but it did not last long. They were on at weekends only for between 2 and 4 weeks during spring and summer 1997. It boomed out various dance genres with a strong signal…
The story of Flight FM starts in about 1990. Two 15 year old lads, ‘Skinny D’ and ‘DJ Techno’, had been broadcasting using various station names (Spin FM, Bass FM, Hardcore FM…) using 50mW transmitters, drifting and humming up and down the dial for a couple of years. This was in the days before the…
FPR, Fran’s Pirate Radio, aka Radio Active, aka Solid State, was a one-man station run by a teenager from the Kingswood / Speedwell area of Bristol. They were on from sometime around late 1989 or early 1990 until July 1991. Inspired by Black FM, Fran explains how it got started… “What happened was someone went…
Two B.A.D Radio DJ’s, Soulful D and Master C, became dissatisfied with the station, so like so many others before them, decided to start their own. Radio For The People (Radio F.T.P) launched on 7th February 1988 with a stereo signal on 103.7 FM and DJ’s Dougy D, DJ Reds, The Soul Force Crew, The…
Power FM kicked off around the end of 1993 on 103.95FM (complete with a little sprog signal further up the dial). The initial tests featured Mixmaster M playing oldskool Hip Hop from 5 years previous when pirate radio had its first big wave in Bristol, followed by a brief “Goodnight, we’ll be on air properly…
Pukar Radio, like Raw FM, was born out of the close down of SPEC Radio at the end of 1991. SPEC’s Asian DJ’s Mac and Jabb decided that the Asian community in Bristol needed its own voice and music station. Bristol’s Asian community had been served on the otherwise largely West Indian operations since 1988,…