Big Ideas — Radio Today

TX changes its name, new contributors

With subscriptions taking off, expansion plans began to grow. The magazine began to be available in a few shops, thanks largely to the efforts of one subscriber who kindly trudged round various West End record shops and big newsagents trying to persuade them to stock it.

Alongside the magazine was added the TX Infoline, a telephone information and recorded message service. This has the good fortune to be allocated the memorable 01 400 8282 number and was soon well known throughout the pirate community. This helped hugely in gathering stories and info for the magazine, with many of the stations soon feeding in news. Generally we seemed to get on okay with most stations, though LWR slagged us off in an article in The Face for revealing technical info and claimed the mag had been banned from the Virgin Megastore after a storm of protest. I think they were still basing their views on the early issues.

TX Radio Today logo

New contributors began to write for the magazine: Clive Glover, Ken North, Lawrence Hallett and even Laser 558's Charlie Wolf. Charlie was cornered at a pirate radio convention and was amazingly easy to persuade to write — a fantastically nice guy all round. Meanwhile, legendary engineer Pyers Easton contributed most of the photographs to the magazine, although this was always tricky given the nature of the subject. We started having editorial meetings, gathering together to plan the next issue on a Sunday afternoon in the café at the Royal Festival Hall, where no-one seemed to mind us staying for hours.

The biggest change in the magazine probably came with the move to A4 size and the start of the transition to a new name, Radio Today. 'TX' had the disadvantage that only techies knew what it meant, while Radio Today was felt by everyone to be a better summary of the magazine's contents. I think it was also decided with an eye to pirates being given licences and the magazine becoming a kind of industry journal for the new radio stations. In hindsight though I wish we'd kept it as TX. Radio Today was rather bland as a name and the spirit of the pirates was what made the magazine special.

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