Capital Radio celebrates 40 years

The legendary Music Power logo.  Credit: This is ILR.

Happy Birthday to the UK's second commercial radio station.  Capital Radio started broadcasting to London as the general entertainment station for the capital on October 16th 1973, opened by Sir Richard Attenborough, who was one of the directors of the station.

The station was quite frankly the only outlet for new pop music in London as Radio 1 was until 1987 stuck on medium wave.

Capital in the early days mixed speech, such as drama with specialist music shows and the latest chart music with now legendary presenters such as Kenny Everett, Dave Cash, Roger Scott, Peter Young, Graham Dene and Michael Aspel.

The station became more music intensive in the 80s with the 'Music Power' branding which gave fresh new presenters an outlet on the premier ILR of the time.   Mick Brown, Pat Sharp, Jon Sachs, Richard Allinson, Neil Fox, David Jensen (formerly of Radio 1 and Luxembourg) provided a tighter formatted chart intensive sound.

Chris Tarrant joined after years of presenting children's tv from Birmingham on ATV and Central. He initially joined in 1984 and moved to breakfast in 1987 joined by Kara Noble as his sidekick, alongside flying eye travel presenter Russ Kane and newsreader Howard Hughes. 

His breakfast show added listeners and was the most listened to commercial radio morning show in the London market.  CT as he was also called on the station left in 2004 for Johnny Vaughan in an attempt to bring younger listeners to the station.

Capital were also visible at events across London, from discos in the 70s, to the big budget roadshows at Alexandra Palace and Crystal Palace in the 80s and early 90s, to the more recent Balls at the O2 in Greenwich.

What made Capital special was the sense of comradeship from the presenting team, the heavy London centricity and the interactivity with the listeners in the pre-social media era.

Capital's charity Help a London Child raised millions of pounds for children's organisations through their Easter weekend radiothons.  This was an opportunity for presenters who'd never work together before to co-present.   The format was simple, listeners would pledge money to hear tracks on the playlist and get a dedication, alongside a premium product auction.  The charity still continues to this day with the auction format on LBC 97.3.

With the increase of radio stations, Capital no longer had a monopoly of music radio and went through various changes including splitting the FM and AM frequencies, the FM service continuing the 'Music Power' tight formatted FM service, while AM relaunched as the classic hits format Capital Gold, which included some heritage presenters from the 1970s era of Capital Radio.

New radio services which targeted Capital's audience were launched in the 1990s such as Heart and Kiss FM which eventually dented Capital's share.  This led to drastic changes to Capital FM's format in the noughties, however it has returned to being a hit music station, although as part of a national network of Capital stations, which has lost some of the station's charm of London centricity.

However Capital, like LBC has survived for the last 40 years and is still playing the hits.

Happy Birthday LBC

The various incarnations of LBC Radio over 40 years.

Waking up this morning felt like being in a timewarp.  Douglas Cameron was once again reading LBC 97.3's news bulletin with his effortless delivery.  It almost made me want to get my satchel on again and head off to primary school with my mother.

LBC is 40 years old today, the first commercial radio station to be launched in the UK (with Capital Radio on October 16th), it's main role to provide speech radio to London.  The business would at the time be viable as they would provide the national news service for commercial radio stations which would be launched gradually throughout the 70s, known as Independent Radio News (IRN).

My early memories of LBC was listening to the late evening phone-ins from the likes of Robbie Vincent and Mike Allen which mixed serious topical discussion with more light hearted discussion, however Clive Bull's show was legendary.  Moving from Through the Night to the late evening slot where callers became as much a listen.  Babs from Bermondsey, Adrian from Tottenham Court Road and others were great radio.

LBC's politics off-air was just as interesting.  Strikes in the 1970s, numerous owners, the business nearly going bust, being sold to a foreign company who moved the station away from the City of London to Hammersmith, being forced to split the FM and AM licences to provide alternative services and then eventually going bust in 1993 when the Radio Authority decided to award the award LBC's two licences for FM and AM to Reuters who then bought the station to maintain the output until the official licence handover in October 1994.

Reuters replaced LBC with two non LBC branded stations, London News (Rolling news) and London News Talk (phone-ins), the latter taking on LBC's heritage in all but name.   However the two formats didn't perform as well as expected and a new consortium which included the Daily Mail and General Trust and upcoming media group GWR relaunched LBC on it's AM frequency and moved output to ITN's then new modern building in Gray's Inn Road, while keeping the rolling news service on FM.

In 2002, LBC was sold by the London News Radio consortium to Chrysalis who owned Heart FM, so once again moved from central London to West London.   The formats were also flipped, rolling news moved to AM while the talk radio format switched back to FM for the first time since 1994.  

The relaunch format was more highbrow, however Chrysalis didn't learn from the mistakes of Crown FM in 1989 which attempted to compete with BBC Radio 4 and then brought in David Lloyd who controversially brought in 'appointment to listen' radio.  This basically meant LBC's heritage format of news talk was axed outside of weekday breakfast and the rest of the output consisted of pub ammo style discussion.  One of the most controversial signings was Iain Lee, who brought with him younger listeners which Chrysalis desired to attract advertisers.  Yet it felt as if the heart of the station had been ripped out in Lloyd's attempt to bring revenue.  However he should be congratulated for the innovative LBC podcast where listeners paid a small fee to listen again to shows listeners missed.

Chrysalis eventually sold their radio business to a new radio group, Global who then acquired GCap Media, so Global moved it to their new broadcast centre in Leicester Square.   Under Global, LBC is at the heart of their newsroom, while a revamped news talk format was introduced which has seen ratings soar to over a million listeners.  Politicians are regulars on the station, with Nick Clegg and Boris Johnson presenting phone-ins and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone with former Tory MP David Mellor on Saturday mornings. 

LBC has finally settled down as an alternative to Radio 4, 5 Live and BBC London, but has returned to it's core values of news and giving Londoners a mouthpiece.

Happy Birthday LBC, it's well deserved.

Big groups are not 'protected' on radio discussion forums

A member calling himself 'neilm833' claims on the main radio discussion board that the big radio groups are protected when people promote niche online radio stations.

This is complete nonsense.

Global, Bauer and the other main groups come in for more scrutiny by anoraks than any other radio station.  Threads about Global's Heart, Gold, Capital FM, LBC 97.3 and the acquisition of GMG Radio are popular topics of discussion alongside Bauer's recent decision to switch Kerrang! for Planet Rock in the West Midlands and the merger of Metro Radio with TFM in the North East.

People from the radio industry will reply to defend their stations output or at least try to explain why they playlist stations in such a manner, which is largely met with resistance from elements of the anorak community.

Threads about internet radio stations tend to be created to either promote the station to fellow anoraks or to bash the major stations output as they have a more extensive playlist than your average radio station which cater to Joe Public.

Not all internet radio is programmed for the anorak in mind, the .977 stations in the US have many formats, but are tightly playlisted to attract different demographics and advertisers unlike the specialist culture of those promoted on the radio forums.

My own personal opinion is if somebody wants to recreate a heritage ILR in internet form for the anorak community, good luck to them, but please don't try to compare it to a mass market, larger budget commercial radio station as there's no comparison as both have different audiences.

As for 'neilm833'  Members of radio forums may remember a certain character from the noughties who'd complain about bitrates and post about soul/jazz stations etc.  Some things never change in the wonderful world of radio forums.