Commentary on the impact of Radio Invicta, London's first black music pirate radio station, on the development of music radio formats in the capital, written by Grant Goddard in July 2011 for Grant Goddard: Radio Blog.

1. RADIO INVICTA: THE GENESIS
OF BLACK MUSIC RADIO IN
LONDON … STILL UNFULFILLED
by
GRANT GODDARD
www.grantgoddard.co.uk
July 2011

2. I only knew Roger Tate (real name: Bob Tomalski) through listening to his programmes on the
radio. He was a DJ on 'Radio Invicta', London’s first soul music radio station, launched in
1970. Invicta was a pirate radio station. Back then, there were no legal radio stations in the UK
other than the BBC.
The notion of a campaign for a soul music radio station for London had been a little premature,
given that no kind of commercial radio had yet existed in Britain. But that is exactly what Radio
Invicta did. As Roger Tate explained on-air in 1974:
“Who are Radio Invicta? You may well be asking. Well, we’re an all-soul music radio
station. We’re more of a campaign than a radio station, I suppose. We believe in
featuring more good soul music on the radio.”
By 1982, 'Black Echoes' music paper reported that Radio Invicta was attracting 26,000
listeners each weekend for its broadcasts. By 1983, Radio Invicta had collected a petition of
20,000 signatures in support of its campaign for a legal radio licence. There was sufficient
space on the FM band for London to have dozens more radio stations. By then, local
commercial radio had existed in the UK for a decade. But nobody in power wanted to receive
the station’s petition and Invicta’s Mike Strawson commented:
“I have tried to speak to the Home Office about it, but it shuts the door.”
Radio Invicta eventually closed for good on 15 July 1984, the date that the new
Telecommunications Act had dramatically increased the penalties for getting caught doing
pirate radio to a £2,000 fine and/or three months in jail. By then, 'Capital Radio' had enjoyed its
licence as London’s only commercial radio music station for eleven years. Its monopoly reign
was still to run for a further six years.
It might have seemed in 1984 that Radio Invicta’s fourteen-year struggle to play soul music on
the radio in London had come to absolutely nothing. The Invicta team went their separate
ways after the pirate station’s closure. Roger Tate continued his career as a successful
technology journalist. After his death in 2001, aged only 47, one of his friends, Trevor Brook,
spoke of Tate’s determination to play soul music on the radio in the face of opposition from the
government and the radio ‘establishment.’ His eulogy at the funeral of his friend included these
comments:
“The government told the story that there were no frequencies available. Now Bob was
not stupid. He had enough technical knowledge to know that this was simply not true.
So, either government officials were too dim to realise the truth of the situation ... or
they were just lying. Nowadays, we have 300 independent transmitters operating in
those same wavebands, so you can probably work out which it was. Anyway, in
Britain, the result was that any proper public debate about the possible merits of more
radio listening choice was sabotaged by this perpetual claim that it was impossible
anyway.
So, we had pirates. Other countries which had not liberalised the airwaves had pirates
as well, but some of them took the refreshingly realistic approach that no harm was
being caused, and they permitted unlicensed operations to continue until they got
round to regularising the situation. Ambulances still reached their destinations and no
aeroplanes fell out of the sky. Not so in this country though. The enforcement services
Radio Invicta: The Genesis Of Black Music Radio In London … Still Unfulfilled page 2
©2011 Grant Goddard

3. here were too well funded and the established orthodoxy too well entrenched. That
'frequency cupboard' was going to be kept well and truly locked!
Bob had thrown himself into running a regular soul station, Radio Invicta. He built a
studio, tore it apart and built a better one. He eventually sectioned off part of the flat as
a separate soundproofed area. He built transmitters - and got them working. But Bob
was nothing if not multi-skilled, and he excelled in producing the programmes
themselves. Using nothing more impressive than an old four-track reel-to-reel tape
recorder, Bob would create highly polished jingles and station identifications. ‘Roger
Tate, super soul DJ.’ Other stations, both official and unofficial, listened to what Bob
and his colleagues did and their ideas were copied or imitated.
Faced with the authorities, Bob was remarkable, because he was absolutely fearless.
He was certain they were in the wrong and, given enough time, were going to lose the
battle. It was a war of attrition and only perpetual piracy was ever going to bring about
change. And he was quite right about that. The government kept winning the battle in
the courts but began to lose the moral one. Eventually the law was changed.
Do we have free radio now? In the sense that anybody can decide to start up a new
magazine, find the finance and get on with it, no, we don't have that for radio. The
process is bound up with a longwinded regulation and approval process involving a
statutory body which has had its fingers burnt in the past by the odd bankruptcy and
the odd scandal. So they play safe and issue more licences to those who already have
stations. The consequence is that originality and creativity get crushed into blandness
and mediocrity. My own teenagers constantly flip between stations in the car, but they
don't care enough about any of them to listen indoors. Fresh people don't get to
control stations. Behind boardroom doors, they might think it privately, but in what
other industry would the chairman of the largest conglomerate in the market dare to
say publicly that even the present regime was too open and, I quote, ‘was out of date
and was letting inexperienced players into the market’? That is a disgraceful
statement. Where would television, theatre, comedy, the arts, and so on be, if new
and, by definition, inexperienced people didn't get lots of exposure? The industry is
stale, complacent and rotten. Bob, there are more battles out there and we needed
you here.”
Ten years later, these words are just as pertinent. It is hard to believe that a bunch of
enthusiastic soul music fans who wanted to play their favourite music to their mates could
have posed such a threat to the established order. But the history of radio broadcasting in the
UK has demonstrated repeatedly that ‘the great and the good’ consider the medium far too
important to let control fall out of their hands. Their arguments, however ridiculous, were taken
completely seriously because they were the establishment.
Peter Baldwin, deputy director of radio at the Independent Broadcasting Authority, said in
1985:
“We wouldn’t want to be dealing with two current local stations [in one area]. If it’s
Radio Yeovil [operating as the only commercial station in Yeovil], well, that’s okay ...
But we couldn’t subscribe to competition [for existing local commercial pop music
station Swansea Sound] from Radio Swansea, unless it was in Welsh or concentrated
on jazz – and there probably wouldn’t be sufficient demand for that kind of service.”
James Gordon (now Lord Gordon), then managing director of Radio Clyde, wrote in The
Independent newspaper in 1989:
“It has to be asked whether there is really evidence of pent-up demand from listeners
for more localised neighbourhood stations ... Eight to ten London-wide stations would
be enough to cater for most tastes.”
David Mellor MP told the House of Commons in 1984:
Radio Invicta: The Genesis Of Black Music Radio In London … Still Unfulfilled page 3
©2011 Grant Goddard

4. “The government do not believe that it would be sensible or fair to issue pirate
broadcasters with licences to broadcast. To do so, on the basis suggested by the
pirate broadcasters, would be progressively to undermine the broadcasting structure
that has evolved over the years.”
However, within five years, the government did indeed license a pirate radio station to
broadcast in London. Once Invicta had disappeared in 1984, it was superseded by newer,
more commercially minded, more entrepreneurial pirate radio stations – 'JFM', 'LWR', 'Horizon'
– that played black music for Londoners. In 1985, a new pirate station called 'KISS FM'
started, quite hesitantly at first. Its reign as a London pirate proved to be much shorter than
Invicta’s but, by the time KISS closed in 1988, it was probably already better known than
Invicta.
KISS FM went on to win a London radio licence in 1989 and re-launched legally in 1990. It
carried with it the debt of a twenty-year history of black music pirate radio in London started by
Radio Invicta and then pushed forward by hundreds of DJs who had worked on dozens of
London black music stations. KISS FM would never have existed or won its licence without
those pirate pioneers.
Sadly, the importance of KISS FM’s licence as the outcome of a twenty-year campaign
seemed to be quickly forgotten by its owners and shareholders. The lure of big bucks quickly
replaced pirate ideology during a period of history when ‘get rich quick’ was peddled by
government as the legitimate prevailing economic philosophy. KISS FM lost the plot rapidly
and soon became no more than a money-making machine for a faceless multimedia
corporation.
Right now, there remains as big a gap between pirate radio and the licensed radio
broadcasters as existed twenty years ago or even forty years ago. London’s supposedly ‘black
music’ stations, KISS FM and 'Choice FM', now sound too much of the time like parodies of
what they could be. Whereas pirate radio in London still sounds remarkably alive,
unconventional and creative. More importantly, only the pirates play the ‘tunes’ that many of us
like to hear.
The issue of how black music was ignored by legal radio in London, and then betrayed by
newly licensed black music radio stations, is on my mind because of my new book ‘KISS FM:
From Radical Radio To Big Business.’ It documents a small part of the history of black music
pirate radio in London, and it charts the transformation of KISS FM from a rag tag group of
black music fanatics into a corporate horror story. I was on the inside of that metamorphosis
and it was an experience that, even twenty years later, remains a sad and terrible time to
recall.
In 1974, Roger Tate had wanted more black music to be heard on the radio in London.
Ostensibly, that objective has been achieved. But the black music I hear played on white-
Radio Invicta: The Genesis Of Black Music Radio In London … Still Unfulfilled page 4
©2011 Grant Goddard

5. Radio Invicta: The Genesis Of Black Music Radio In London … Still Unfulfilled page 5
©2011 Grant Goddard
owned stations in London (there is no black-owned station) is a kind of vanilla K-Tel ‘black
music’ that is inoffensive and unchallenging.
If Croydon is the dubstep capital of the world, how come there is no FM radio station playing
dubstep in Croydon, or even in London? How come I never hear reggae on the radio when
London is one of the world cities for reggae? How come I had to turn to speech station 'BBC
Radio Four' to hear anything about the death of Gil Scott-Heron in May? Why is it that Jean
Adebambo’s suicide went completely unremarked by radio two years ago?
Legitimate radio in London seems just as scared of contemporary cutting-edge black music as
it was in the 1970s when Roger Tate was trying to fill the gaping hole with Radio Invicta.
Nothing has really changed. Except now there exists the internet to fill that gaping hole. And
FM pirate radio in London continues to satisfy demands from an audience that legitimate radio
has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t give a shit about. Is it any surprise that
young people are deserting broadcast radio?
Forty years ago, I listened to Roger Tate and London pirates like Radio Invicta because they
played the music I wanted to hear. Forty years later, I find it absolutely ridiculous that I am still
listening to a new generation of London pirates because they still play the music I want to
hear. As Trevor Brook suggested at Roger’s funeral, our radio system is so consumed by
“blandness and mediocrity” that “the industry is stale, complacent and rotten.”
Roger Tate R.I.P. You may be gone, but you and your campaign at Radio Invicta are as
necessary as ever today. Sad but true.
[First published by Grant Goddard: Radio Blog as 'Radio Invicta: The Genesis Of Black Music Radio In London … Still
Unfulfilled', 1 July 2011.]
Grant Goddard is a media analyst / radio specialist / radio consultant with thirty years of
experience in the broadcasting industry, having held senior management and consultancy
roles within the commercial media sector in the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia. Details at
http://www.grantgoddard.co.uk