West One | Emergency FM, Bristol | 11 September 1988 | ACID HOUSE HIPHOP ELECTRO UK RAVERS
In late 87 or early 88, Paul Hassan and around 4 or 5 of his friends, who enjoyed going out partying on the Bristol underground scene and all enjoyed a lot of varied music, felt that there was a gap not being filled by the current pirates in Bristol.
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Paul and his friends thought that it would be great if somebody set up an alternative station that played a lot of the music they liked and heard that wasn’t currently being played by stations that perhaps should have been playing it. This thought quickly turned into action. This was the birth of Emergency Radio 99.9FM.
It became a serious operation, with the idea being that they would create a brand identity, this Emergency brand being associated with Bristol’s best DJs playing the best music they could. Whatever the genre, it was to be the best of that genre that you were going to find outside of the area of the world it originally came from. Concentrating on quality rather than quantity, they kept the broadcasts to Sundays. There were practical reasons behind this too; such as there wasn’t enough time to run it all week.
Paul was working as a radio journalist at the time and some of the others had media jobs, or were sound engineers, which meant they all had access to skills and equipment that they needed. They also had good contacts in London. They were something of an anarchist group but with lots of motivation and organisation. They planned the schedule carefully to roll with the time of day, playing Gospel at start-up (they didn’t just want to please the party people), moving on to more soulful or funky sounds, through World music and Jazz, peaking with House and Hip Hop and finishing off with chilled out reggae, dub and roots shows until the early hours.
The transmitter was commissioned from a builder in London and was specifically designed to interfere as little as possible, with filters and so on, as a lot of the pirates in Bristol weren’t so good with this kind of thing and Emergency didn’t want to antagonise the authorities in this way. It was only 10 watts, but this was enough from a good high studio location to cover the city.
Broadcasting direct from the studio meant moving it around a lot. They broadcast from a lot of different locations around the city, including Ashley Hill, St. Pauls, Montpelier, Clifton and even Stoke Bishop. Rumours were spread around as to where the studio was going to be every week. This was partly to do with putting the DTIs Radio Investigation Service off the scent and partly to do with keeping people away who wanted to hang around and chill in the studio. They were always very strict about keeping locations secret in this way. DJs were in the studio to do a job, they had to make sure they were on time and professional as possible.
Advertising was kept to just the amount needed to keep the station on air. This was set up via a mailbox number at the Full Marks bookstore at 37 Stokes Croft (which closed in 1988). This was also where SYT Radio had a mailbox. An Emergency sticker was placed on a lamppost on the junction between Stokes Croft and Jamaica Street in 1988 and managed to survive right up until 2005!
Despite the attempts to keep interference to a minimum, Emergency had chosen to use a frequency occupied by the authorities by accident, and so had to move to 97.9 as soon as they realised this. This transmitter was sold to another station later on, probably Black FM. Some of the Emergency DJs also ended up on Black FM, such as Joey Jay and The Don.
Emergency was never raided during its existence and Paul reckons they never missed a Sunday once they got going. Towards the end of the life of the station, Paul was introduced to the idea of microwave link systems at a party in Bath by an employee of the Radio Authority, one of their engineers who himself had run pirates in Bath during the 50s! He’d built a microwave system and offered it to Paul. So, they had this added to their setup, but Paul feels they never really got the best from it as it was getting close to the end of 1988.
In the early hours of Boxing Day 1988, they disappeared. They then teamed up with Venue Magazine to try and get the license for Bristol, but in the end FTP got the license and that was it.
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