Radio Free London is now back on the air (Nov 2004)
playing out archived programmes from 1970 to 2001
Website here
or click here to listen

The Radio Free London Site staff in 1989

Nigel Grant Mike Burnett & Dawn Peters

By the way the car jack and jack handle carried by Nigel and Mike was a joke for the photos - honest guv!!.

This era of RFL started in spring 1988 and continued until late 1989. We were Broadcasting on 92.15MHz from a 24 storey tower block in Brixton, South London called Brittany point.

On air presenters at the time were Ken Myers, Mike Burnett and Nigel Grant. The music was the usual mix of classic rock and heavy metal which was recorded at 1& 7/8 IPS onto the Tandberg open reel tape machine seen in the pictures above. This gave us about 6 hours of transmissions from just before 7pm on a Saturday evening until the tape ran out. The audio quality was a bit poor at times (for an FM service), but much better to have poor audio quality than risk going back to change the tape.

Our transmitters were all a modest 20 watts but this easily covered London providing you were not at the bottom of a hill or living near high powered transmitters, such as Crystal Palace, which would often cause us interference. Funny isn't it; they told you We were the ones causing interference. Don't believe a word of it!

We were not raided by the DTI during this time, even though Mike Burnett had a suicidal habit of making jingles to take the piss out of them. In fact we were all quite volatile at the time with Nigel Grant talking on-air of Boning people, limb from limb, who annoyed him and Ken Myers having a intimate relationship with a Cindy doll while on-air. All in all it was a great laugh for both station staff and listeners alike.

• Notable memories are Myself (Mike Burnett) and Nigel Grant running down the stairs after someone noticing us on the roof and trailing 3600 feet of programme tape down the stairs as we went.

• Mike Burnett being pulled by the Police and having the boot of his car searched which contained the transmitter and tape machine. I had great difficulty explaining away the messages to Eric Gotts (DTI) which were written in thick marker pen on the side of the transmitter, especially as the rig looked a bit like a home made bomb. It had red and black wires trailing from it and for some strange reason Nigel Grant had written part of the message to Gotts in Turkish!

• Dawn Peters, who had originally worked with Radio Telstar, met up with Mike Burnett in 1986. Dawn worked very hard with Mike doing site work and producing jingles and they are still making sweet music together today!

• Mike Burnett fell 15ft off an internal tower block ladder and fell against a concrete wall hurting his back.

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