Why this archive exists
The Story
Every recording here is a snapshot of a time in my life.
Mid-eighties, and I was working in a locksmith's shop in a small Dorset village. A properly boring job — and radio was my saviour. Not just the music, everything around it. The jingles. The production. Steve Wright's talkie bits. The Simon Bates Golden Hour and Our Tune. Jackie Brambles. And after dark, Radio Luxembourg drifting in and out on that fading signal — and when the programmes stopped, the strange tones it played into the night. They freaked me out a bit. I kept listening anyway.
At weekends my mate would come back from London with mixtapes — Dave Pearce's rap show on GLR, late eighties. I had to capture it all. So I did: cassettes, then MiniDiscs, then DATs. Boxes and boxes of them.
The obsession became the career. I ended up in radio production myself — and Pete Tong's Essential Selection, the show that had me captivated as a listener, I ended up working on, making its jingles. Twenty-five years on, I'm still making radio sound like radio.
But the boxes never left me. This archive is me finally opening them — digitising those snapshots, cleaning them up, and sharing them with anyone who wants to remember what it felt like when the radio was on. If any of it takes you back, it's doing its job.
— Stevie