GTFM Turns 20: How It Started

Andrew Jones recalls how community radio station GTFM brought ‘The Music of Your Life’ from the top of the hill to the people of Pontypridd…

“I had heard a couple of twenty-eight-day Restricted Service Licence radio stations that had been set up in the Butetown area of Cardiff,” recalls Andrew Jones. “I thought that Glyntaff would be a brilliant place to set one up. At the time – around 1997 – I was area manager for Newydd Housing, managing the Glyntaff Estate and working closely with Glyntaff Tenants and Residents Association (GTRA).  So with support from Newydd and GTRA that’s what I did – and I became the first station manager at GTFM. We went on air for the first time in May 1999 for twenty-eight days.

“The name GTFM was deliberately chosen as a derivative of the name GTRA, as it would mean something in the immediate community but not the wider area. We wanted Pontypridd to tune into this bright new radio station for the town but be in no doubt that it proudly came from Glyntaff. Back then we achieved so much in terms of community development and regeneration.

“I loved radio and grew up listening to Swansea Sound in the late ’70s which was the best local radio station ever. The guy who set it up, Colin Mason, was a genius and understood the magic of radio intuitively and I think from that I just got it too. I had never been involved with student or hospital radio so had no clue about the technology – but I knew exactly how I wanted it to sound, etc. I learnt the technology as I went along. Back in 1999, all the music was played live off CD and to achieve a station sound, I had a big box of CDs in three rows: new, recurrent and oldies and the presenters picked from the front and put them to the back after each play in order to achieve rotation.

“That first twenty-eight days on air was a massive success. The whole

community listened and even set up a petition to keep us on air as they didn’t understand we could only broadcast for twenty-eight days! We did one further twenty-eight day broadcast in 2000 and then the opportunity arose to take part in a year-long community radio pilot in 2002. GTFM came back on air and has broadcast ever since.

“When we returned for the long-haul in 2002, I wanted to create more of an identity and ‘unique selling point’ for GTFM, which is when I coined the Music of Your Life slogan. Basically, that was a nod to the old Swansea Sound and broadcasters like Tony Blackburn who are passionate about music radio.

“I thought the playlist should be broad but uptempo and I wanted people listening to say: ‘Wow I haven’t heard that for ages’ and stay tuned.

“The early volunteers were a mixture of community volunteers from the estate and local schools. They had to learn from scratch. We had some help in terms of training from Red Dragon FM and latterly Galaxy 101. Other key presenters already had experience of hospital radio. It worked really well!

“One of my staff members at GTFM once asked me why I had loved Swansea Sound so much… I thought about it for a minute and said that I can only describe it as having a friend in the kitchen. One Saturday morning around 2002, I was at GTFM when it was based in the Ilan Centre, Rhydyfelin. The phone rang and when I answered it, the caller from Caerphilly wanted to tell us how much she loved the station. I asked her what she loved about GTFM the most. She told me it was her friend in the kitchen. True story!

“Back in the early days, we used to do a weekday later show from ten until midnight and we had a very ‘keen’ presenter who really got into his links between the songs. One night there was a terrific electric storm and the whole radio station was plunged into darkness. Despite this and the silence we could still hear him doing his link – he just hadn’t clocked we had gone off air!!

“GTFM has always had specialist shows and this was true of back in the first broadcasts where we developed specialist shows. The first presenter we had for the Country & Western show was legendary Welsh actor and comedian Stan Stennett. On the second twenty-eight day broadcast in 2000, Stan did four Sunday lunchtime shows.

“Clubland was alive and well back in 1999-2000, and we had all the biggest names in South Wales dance doing shows, including Time Flies, Cool House, Bulletproof and L’ America. Some of these stayed with us for years after we went back on air full-time – hence the decks in the studio!

“Those early month-long broadcasts also had a weekly show hosted by two local music scene enthusiasts. They were brilliant shows and each week, local bands would come in to the studio to play live and talk about their music.

“The fact that GTFM is on air more than twenty years later is testament to the hard work in those early years, building a profile locally and with key decision-makers like members of the Senedd.

“Remember back then, nobody had heard of community radio, so it was one hell of a fight to be noticed – but GTFM punched well above its weight.”

Written by Stephanie McNicholas