THE FOUNDER OF NTS RADIO SPEAKS TO ROAD ABOUT HOW IT ALL STARTED AND WHERE THE STATION IS HEADING.
What prompted you to start NTS?
The main thing that prompted me to start it was the fact that I felt that there wasn’t any alternative to mainstream radio. There were some alternatives but they were sort of hidden, no one really knew about them, you’d always have to look hard to find them. I think also from an almost sort of a personal point, I didn’t really feel there was something that catered to the varied taste in music that I like to listen to and that a lot of people like to listen to.
How did you go about starting it up?
It was hard. I did some business plans, I spoke to a few people and no one really took it seriously as an idea. I totally understood, I was saying I want to set up my own radio station when there are millions of other stations out there. But anyway, I saved lots of money and I got some help from the Prince’s Trust because I was just under the cut off age when I started. I managed to pull in some favours from friends and I was lucky enough to find space in the Gillet Square around the corner from here, and that was it man, things started flowing from there. Overall though it was a mix of a bit of luck and hard work.
NTS has a wide array of different genres playing, how do you go about finding and organizing it all?
It can be quite complicated, because the music is different but you still wanna have a consistent flow so it doesn’t sound so choppy and ‘changy’. It’s been a lot of trial and error, I mean one thing that we’ve always said is that it has to be varied, and it will never sound the same in one day. We’ve tried certain things that haven’t worked but we’ve sort of managed to over-ride them. We’re coming up to four years, over the four years we’ve sort of been able to find a formula that sort of works, to keep the flow, to keep the people still listening. In regards to finding the DJs, when I first started a lot of the people I first started asking where friends as I’d been DJing a lot around London before hand and had made a lot of friends that where DJs. The initial plan was to get around 12 DJs on in the beginning. Most of my friends said they’d do it and we also stuck some posters around and just said that we’ll keep it open, having 12 DJs wasn’t set in stone. From this we got so many responses and so many people
applying, lots of them playing really different stuff. We had this guy who’s show was called Devil Voodoo and he was just playing ritual music all the way through - we had people playing house music, people playing hip-hop, people playing this, people playing that. It was a nice, real mix of people. As I said we thought we’d have around 12 people come through but we had around 60 shows when it got running which was great.
Road is really interested in the ways that culture can be expressed, especially through the more lo-fi ways such as pirate radio. Would you say that NTS takes any inspiration from pirate radio?
Absolutely, we’d have been a pirate radio station if I could’ve dealt with the hassle. When I was younger me and some friends set up a pirate radio station in Edmonton. It was fun, I mean we only really did it just to impress girls really. We had a few bunch of girls come around and we had this little studio. It got to a point though where travelling all the time and the worry about someone coming to shut you down and everyone just sort of lost interest in it. Ever since that moment I’ve had sort of a bug, so to speak, to be involved in radio in some form. But from pirate radio I always take inspiration from the way it’s run and the way it works.
I watched The Square’s session the other day, how was it having them in and performing?
Yeah it was great. We’re all sort of linked, somehow through family and friends, it was really good. I’m a little bit more of a garage kid and didn’t really get into grime. A lot of my friends were all garage kids too but when grime came about they got into it. But for me, it’s just amazing to see these young kids coming up again. Grime’s having a massive resurgence and it’s great to see it happening because it’s a uniquely kind of London, British thing. It’s good to see as well that not just people from the UK but around the world are sort of clocking on to it now, like in Japan. I was in Japan recently and we were trying to link up with some grime kids over there but unfortunately it didn’t happen. But yeah, it was nice to have them on the show and it’s good to see everyone pushing them forward.
Are you looking forward to anything in particular coming up on NTS?
Yeah definitely. The station’s growth is really exciting. I mean we’re growing probably about 8-10% a month in listeners and stuff like that. Just the direction that we seem to be headed, we’re looking to start doing some stuff merging music and art, it will be fun to be working with some artists. Also it’s the sort of excitement of what tomorrow brings in a sense, if there’s always a sense of certainty it can get a bit complacent. Even though we’ve always got a strategy there’s always something that will happen along the way, which will take us in another direction, be it good or bad. The highlight though for this year is that we’re gonna be 4 years old in April, you know being able to take this to 4 years is great. Also some of the events we’re doing this year, some of the people that we’re collaborating with, some of the places in the world where we’ll be broadcasting from, it’s all really exciting.
What advice would you give someone wanting to get into radio?
It’s all about being dedicated. You’ve just got to believe in yourself and have confidence, that’s number one. That’s easier said than done, but if you feel passionate and strong enough about something then you can basically do it. This doesn’t just go for radio though it goes for anything, what ever you wanna do just stick to those principles. You’ve got nothing to lose.
INTERVIEW BY JORDAN RICHINGS
