Piccadilly Radio

At 5am on the 2nd of April in 1974 a legend was born when the first Piccadilly Radio jingle hit the airwaves. All went fairly smoothly through the first news bulletin until DJ Roger Day mis-cued the first song so that the first second of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations sounded positively squidgy:

First five minutes of Piccadilly Radio, 2 April 1974

Piccadilly Radio was Greater Manchester’s first commercial radio station and it inspired listeners all over the North West with its mix of news, music, interviews, sports, drama and current affairs. Manchester Central Library’s climate-controlled archive vaults hold over 1,500 Piccadilly Radio master tapes, on obsolete and hard-to-maintain reel-to-reel format.

Piccadilly Radio, one of the UK’s first commercial radio stations, launched a month after the 3-day week restrictions were lifted in an economically-depressed Manchester in 1974. Despite this, the station launched the careers of many famous broadcasters including Mike Sweeney, Susie Mathis, Timmy Mallett, Becky Want and Mark Radcliffe.

The tone was friendly, fun and experimental, the opposite of its stuffy local rival BBC Radio Manchester. The station pioneered socially-informed programming including its ground-breaking Careline which won awards for the sensitivity with which it dealt with such difficult topics as abuse and health issues.

Piccadilly Radio made Susie Mathis the first female daytime presenter on independent radio in 1981. On the other end of the spectrum it also had space (either side of a suspension for swearing live on air on a Sunday!) for one of England’s first ‘shock jocks’, James Stannage.

Meanwhile teams of young journalists worked on news, sports, music, drama and features on everything from birth of punk to the first intercity passenger railway. Outside broadcasts capture ordinary people’s responses to events including the Pope’s visit to Heaton Park, the Moors Murders and local sporting triumphs and disasters.

Piccadilly Radio excelled in radio drama from sitcoms to short unsketched comedy to science fiction, launching the careers of Caroline Aherne and Chris Sievey among many other actors, writers and producers.

Radio historian Dr Philip Johnstone writes, “Manchester was home to Piccadilly Radio, one of Independent Local Radio’s most prolific and accomplished stations in drama and comedy which exemplified a wider ethos among ILR’s dramatists and was highly influential in its expressions of regionality and use of local vernacular culture”.

Alongside Granada TV and the BBC’s local radio and television, Piccadilly Radio stands as one of the most important archives documenting how late twentieth-century Greater Manchester understood itself through the earthquakes in music, sport, economics and politics which shook the fledgling city region.

The Piccadilly Radio and Key 103 archives are stored at Manchester Central Library. The collection is made up of over 1,500 Ampex reel-to-reel tapes, 100 minidiscs, 20 cassettes and 50 CDs recorded between 1974 and the 2000s.

The tapes are now fifty years old and many are degrading fast with ‘sticky shed syndrome’. This can make them unplayable and means that they have to be ‘baked’ dry and treated with alcohol before being played one last time while being transferred to digital storage. Here’s a before and after baking comparison of a jingle.

Jingle before baking (PICC/226)

Jingle after baking (PICC/226)

For the National Lottery supported Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project three distinct programmes on over 100 tapes were chosen to be digitised:

• Arena – a documentary programme on social and cultural issues.
• Top Twenty – a series of short drama productions based on popular music.
• Sweeney’s Gang – a talk show hosted by Mike Sweeney featuring musicians, sportspeople and other prominent entertainment figures.

You can listen to these radio shows and more at the Sound + Vision pods at Manchester Central Library. You can search the catalogue for the rest of the Piccadilly Radio collection online (look for references PICC and PICC/2). In 2025 the rest of the collection will be digitised and made available thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery players.