I meet Project Director Karl Hartland in APU’s student union bar at a busy lunchtime. Karl has an aura of retro-chic with his shoulder-length hair, two-day stubble and his casual clothes of jacket, scarf, jeans and a battered pair of old trainers. Karl is accompanied by his friend Ed, who looks similarly relaxed and is a fellow member of the production team of 209 Radio.
As it is lunchtime Karl and I settle for coffee, whilst Ed ops for a Guinness; “I should feel bad about drinking alcohol at lunchtime” he says, “I should feel bad, but I don’t”. We all laugh. The bar is noisy so we find the quietest corner and settle down for the interview. As I take my tape recorder out of my bag Ed gives me some advice about recording techniques; “If you’re in a noisy area then you want to have your microphone as close as possible but put the recording level as low as possible. But you’ll learn that”. Whilst I thank him for his advice, I feel slightly uneasy about conducting my first professional interview under the watchful eye of Ed, a former journalist and now a film maker.
The station’s first broadcast was on 26th April 2003, Karl explains how it all begun; “I took voluntary redundancy from my previous job as a pharmaceutical chemist and decided I wanted to get into journalism, and at the same time I had a great renaissance with music, so the two came together and I thought I’d set up a radio station on the internet. My renaissance with music is what drove it. That’s where the radio station comes from; it’s a specialist radio station for electronic music.
I went to the Deadbeat festival in Norwich and just got into music so much more, so I decided to set up this studio radio show, trying to promote the music that I was really into but I didn’t think was really being represented in Cambridge. I thought that this would be a really good idea and it just kind of happened really. That evolved into webcast events and I started inviting people from all over the world, we’ve had people from all over, with got a guy from the States coming over at the end of the month, and we hold a normal gig for these people as well”. The normal gig Karl refers to is their monthly residency at Cambridge University’s Sports and Social Club on Mill Lane where they have held and broadcast live gigs since September 2003.
The station developed over its first eight months and became an established medium for specialist music in Cambridge, building a small but significant local fan base. Then there was an announcement that would send ripples through the local music scene; “And then last New Year the bombshell was dropped that The Boatrace was going to be shut down” says Karl. “And we ran a pretty high profile campaign to try and prevent live music from shutting down there. That attracted so much attention to what we were doing from other people in the music scenes and they said ‘so can we get on this? Can we start doing some shows?’ So well why not, its been run as an experiment to see what would happen with it so lets do it. We added a new wave of other specialist music from indie to hip hop, reggae and world music”.
As I am not from Cambridge I am unaware of the significance that The Boatrace had for the local music scene. Karl is quick to inform me; “The Boatrace was fantastic, it was a feeder venue for so many bands over the years. You’ve had Beth Orton, Oasis and many others. Franz Ferdinand played there and two months later they filled the Corn Exchange, that’s absolute proof that venues like the Boatrace are needed”. Ed is similarly passionate about the venue; “The value of small to medium sized venues is so undervalued. Let’s just hope that they make a decent wine bar out of it” he scoffs.
That’s all very well and good and there’s a proven market for this because the stations exist, but as far as there is worth in the music and the benefit for the community it represents, I don’t rate it. It’s all very well and good sending in text messages and getting shout outs and requests but that isn’t really doing much for the community”. Karl explains how 209 are different;
The thing we’ve always found is if someone hears something they relate to then they want to get involved in it. Being a membership based democratic organisation if enough people don’t like something that we’re doing then or feel that we should be doing something that we’re not then they can raise that matter and we can look about doing that. One of our cheesy marketing strap lines is ‘shape the radio that you want to listen to”.
Karl further explains the development of the radio station; “What we've found was with all these people coming together we were building a community from existing communities, from the existing music scenes. And then the big thing happened (the announcement of the closure of The Boatrace), we suddenly found ourselves becoming a community radio station and it just so happened, coincidentally, that the Community Radio Order was published in June so there was a bit of talk for a few weeks, ‘Will we do it? Can we do it?’ and I didn’t know it at the time, but there were community radio stations in Cambridge in the past.
Karl describes the history of community radio in Cambridge; “There’s been a whole series of projects; one of the most importantly was actually here at APU. So it’s a case in point really because the last of these projects was not protected by law because the Community Radio Order didn’t exist and what they actually had was a commercial radio transmission license. And they made the mistake of having one big backer - a sugar daddy. And as soon as things didn’t start going his way he took out an injunction on some of the directors who didn’t agree with him and the whole thing dissolved, and what we’re left with now is Star FM. So protection in law for community radio was so needed because this has happened in a lot of places around the UK”.
The two main turning points of the announcement of the closure of The Boatrace and the publishing of the Community Radio Order have shaped the station that exists today. There is still an output for electronic music but there is also a diverse range of specialist music broadcasting and community radio programming. Karl gives examples of their current output; “We’ve got a studio show which is put together by a local writer called Rob Coleman and a friend of his. At the run up to his show he’s running around town doing interviews with people like the Black Women’s Support Group, with the City Council, with the Cambridge Food Fare, any sort of community orientated matter really. Him and his friend read bits from the newspapers and do bits of comedy as well so it’s a proper sort of community magazine show”.
Other shows on the station include ‘Ralph’s Positive Hour’, where Ralph Nimmann of the Cambridge Interfaith Group & the Rainbow Network discusses a range of health and lifestyle issues. Also there is ‘Red Pages’, a local listings magazine, where its editor Wendy Rowe broadcasts a bite sized version of the magazine. And then there is ‘The Mole Investigates’ which relies on and encourages would be journalists to find a local story or event and then cover it for broadcast on the station.
The current broadcast is limited to approximately eight hours, this is due to the limitations of the station being based in Karl’s home; “The station is for everybody, all aspects of the community will be offered and they’re stepping up in their droves” he says. “We don’t have the resources to deal with everybody who wants input or representation. Because everything is run from my own home and it always has been. It’s all strapped up on the wall in my living room. We’ve got an office upstairs where people do editing and a bit of admin work”.
Karl explains how the station is geared towards community radio; “We’re a limited company, to the specifications of what Ofcomm want a community radio station to be. We’re not for profit, we’re volunteer driven and we’re democratic. Basically we’ve been adding community programming to our output since April. We have to prove certain things, we have to prove that the station would benefit social gain and show that we are committed to training and access. One of the things about community radio is because it hasn’t been protected in law before what we’re actually doing is creating a whole new tier of broadcasting for the UK. And we have to work out how it works. Now there have been pilot stations that have been running for many years that have done a lot of ground work in this and who we’re closely linked with”. I wonder what the basis is for a Community Broadcast License being issued;
“You have to prove that there’s a need for the station”, explains Karl. “Say if your out in the middle of the fens and you’ve got very little people around you, you’re going to find it hard to justify having a community radio station. But then again if you move into a bigger area, a bigger city, we’re quite lucky in Cambridge really because it is quite small. We’ve got a lot of voices in Cambridge that we can open up to and take advantage of. It’s a mutually beneficial thing. We exist to provide access to the media and the programming that you can’t get elsewhere. And for that we need people to come in, but we’re not just blindly asking people to work for us, we’re giving them a voice and a platform and training to represent themselves. It’s always a two way street”.
As part of their application for a Community Broadcast License 209 Radio have put together a future schedule; “We’re going to grow slowly and realistically” says Karl. “From 12pm to 6pm there’s community programming, interviews, magazine programmes, and features. That’s where the majority of our community programming is going to be, there’s two halves, there’s the specialist music and arts and then there’s the community and the two are going to meet in the middle because there’s community groups making music and there’s community groups making art. The rough divide will be that there will be community programming during the day and specialist music and arts more in the evening. here will be a sustaining service, the other half (12am-12pm), with repeats of 209 radio shows but we are also going to engage with community radio swapping, which is a big thing in London radio stations. There are projects where if you upload one of your shows you can download one from somewhere else. We’ve already had shows from New York covering things like G8 protests and stuff.” He explains.
“A more relaxed feel on Saturdays but on Sundays it’s a completely blank canvas. One of the beauties of creating a tier of broadcasting is that it is our duty to push the boundaries a little. And we’re opening up Sundays to any mad ass idea that you can think of. I’ll give you an example – Residence FM in London, one of the pilot stations, broadcast near the centre of the square mile, has no programming control whatsoever – it is a free reign. One of their programmes it’s a young mother with a laptop and a wireless connection who wonders around London with this laptop streaming to residence fm with her baby and her alto saxophone. It’s just her wondering around, going into a shop, talking to the baby, sitting having a picnic, playing a bit on her saxophone and it’s just an hour of that and it’s so compelling. It sounds boring as hell but it’s a really compelling programme”.
I wonder how this growth will happen if the station is still based in Karl’s living room. I ask Karl if a pot of money comes with a Community Broadcast License; “Not directly” he answers, “we would have to apply separately. There are small amounts of money available from places like the European Social Fund, The East of England Arts Council and Ofcomm”. Nothing about the running of a community radio station seems easy and it is clear to me now that those who are involved in such a station have to have a real passion for what they are doing. This is highlighted by the fact that Karl has taken seven months off work in order to develop the station and to complete its application for the license.
I ask Karl how he would like to see the station in five years time; “Coming up to the end of our first tenure then, we want to have an accredited course in place that we offer to ordinary members of the public who want to become involved” he answers. “We want to run our own accredited course that people can come in and get into a bit of technical or audio editing. We’d get them working with the people who are already doing that in the station and get them to shadow, get them to work with it and the training scheme has got little milestones and points at which the student and whoever is monitoring them look at how they are doing, how confident they are and at the end of the course you can get a certificate saying you’ve done this within the station. We also want to be involved with the Workers Educational Association, Connections, the job centre and any voluntary organisation. One of things is that we’re not just a training school; we’re an operating, and running radio station so any means by which we can attract and obtain volunteers through formal mechanisms is very good for us. We want to help and get involved with as many people as we can but we’ll have the proper mechanisms in place were people are filtered through us through outreach organisations like that”.
As the station only has roughly sixty listeners per week, I ask Karl what sort of figures he’d be hope for in five years time; “We want 20% of the listenership” he says, “On a par with BBC radio Cambridgeshire”. This seems an ambitious task but it is clear that it is the smaller things that Karl would be proud of; “We’d absolutely love it if someone we knew who had talent was broadcast on the station and then went onto greater things” he says proudly. “But also ordinary members who get involved in the running of the radio station and then go on to get a career in radio or media elsewhere, that would be really good as well. To see other people doing that would be wonderful, that would be so good”.
Judging by my meeting with Karl and Ed, the people behind 209 Radio do seem a very genuine and committed bunch. If the station gets the license then it would not just be a play thing for Karl and his friends but would truly be beneficial to the under represented members of Cambridge’s community. In a city dominated by University privilege and opulence it is refreshing to see a group of people committed to doing what they love with the hope of supporting the interests of the under privileged and under represented in the community. This is the ideal and a very utopian one it may be, but whatever the outcome any attempt at changing the established media for the better will be encouraged by this magazine.
