EVIL C
his website
CAPITAL RADIO - The First Mad Year!
Looking Back
It is only now, many years later, reviewing these pieces that I have begun to understand the complex nature of the personalities who were involved with the start of Capital Radio.
At the time, of course, I was too busy adapting myself to the hectic pace of getting the station finished and on air, to pay much attention to the people at the top of the pile.
My memories of the first year are still pretty clear, and despite the hassles of living in London, the opportunity to meet all the famous people was a great thing, and I don't regret any of it.
Play the OPENING audio file.
THE PERSONALITIES
Sir Richard Attenborough, Chairman. 
John Whitney, Managing Director.
Tony Salisbury, General Manager. 
Bryan Forbes, Director.
Tony Salisbury died July 2006. A Guardian obituary can be found here.
This is the only image I can locate for him, from the front cover of his book, "A Chap's Got a Code".
He was a super nice guy, I am truly sorry to hear he's passed on.
ENGINEERING & OPERATIONS
Gerry O'Reilly, Chief Engineer: attended the 30th anniversary reunion in 2003, but is believed to have since died.
Emyr Walters, Asst. Chief Eng., no information
Clive Warner (author of this page)
Mike Winson. At Swansea Sound.
He has a minimal web site here.
Jon Myer; (to whom, thanks for remaining in contact)
Chris Rowling has retired, there's a picture of him here.
Mike Baker; he ended up
at Beacon Radio.
Russ Tollerfield;
he was at BBC Skelton HF
transmitting station, like me,
and later on at Radio London.
Shown here working on
Radio London's transmitter.
Mike Sykes;
(engineer for the album Interlife, 1978,
recorded at Capital Radio by
Dave Stevens and Mike Sykes.)
Mike also recorded The Beach Boys
Su
e Butler
Al Corbeth; (below) believed to have emigrated to Israel
Bob Wells; no information
Chas Kennedy; runs Canford Audio.
Peter Jackson
in 2002 was
working for Merlin Communications
Mike Bull; no information
Terry Pearce; no information
Dave Voyde; no information
Roger Kirk; deceased Aug. 2001
see The Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame for details,
an extract is reproduced below:
Born in London, brought up in Norfolk, Roger studied engineering at Kings Lynn Technical College.
He worked for BBC radio as a technical operator. In October 1973 he joined the new Capital Radio in London as a technical operator and, in the autumn of 1975, moved to Bradford's Pennine Radio as a DJ.
Ren Hunter; no information
Dave Taylor. no information
(please contact me if I have omitted your name
and you would like it added to the staff list, or you
would like your information updated or changed)
PROGRAMMING
Michael Bukht, Head of Programmes
It's been hard to find out what happened to Michael:
It was to South African radio's benefit that in early 1979 managing director John Moody found one of Britain's foremost commercial radio men at a quiet moment in his career. Michael Bukht had risen swiftly through the ranks of the BBC, worked on Jamaican radio, was a famous TV chef, and helped make England's second commercial radio station, Capital Radio 194, become hugely profitable.
Five British presenters including Kevin Savage were brought over. Having worked in commercial radio over there, they could be relied on by Bukht to help create the Capital sound.
- Nicholas Ashby is writing about the founding of Capital 604. The station broadcast for 16 turbulent years, and was eventually closed down by the ANC-led government.
Published on the web by Sunday Independent on December 12, 2009. (WORTH READING)
After Capital 604 Michael returned to the UK where he launched Classic FM and continued his career as Michael Barry, the "crafty cook".
In 2005, the Daily Telegraph has a piece on him in the UK:
The DISC JOCKEYS
Nicky Horne
Kenny Everett (deceased April 1995)
Dave Cash
Tommy Vance (deceased March 6, 2005)
Tony Myatt
Joan Shenton
Michael Aspel
Roger Scott; deceased. Died aged 46, 31st Oct. 1989.
Photo courtesy of The Radio Academy.
TRAFFIC
Who could possibly forget "Big Sue" and her amazing assets?
News Team: Sorry guys, you were not on my radar very much. I recall some cool radio car work, including one reporter crumpling paper to imitate the flames of the burning bank, which actually was another mile down the road - we were doing the newscast stuck in traffic. And as for the requests to mount the pavement in order to get past the traffic . . . it was MY driving licence guys! (laughing)
Part 1: Construction and Opening
It seems that September / October pretty often defines when I change employment, by design or otherwise.
This time I had planned it; while going quietly loco on Masirah Island I had of course been reading the UK newspapers (slightly delayed) to keep up with possible jobs available when my one-year contract ended.
Thus I noticed that Capital would be looking for staff about the time I’d be back in England. As far as I recall I wrote to the chief engineer, at that time Gerry O’Reilly, a flamboyant personality with a ginger beard.
A month or so after I got back to England I went and had an interview with Gerry and one or two other people, can’t really recall who. And despite the fact that really I was a high power radio-frequency engineer, I ended up signing on with Capital as one of their sound engineers. This was perhaps two months, not more, prior to the station’s official opening.
I vividly recall my first sight of the location. I took the tube and alighted at Euston Square. Conveniently the radio station had leased the first floor of Euston Tower, directly opposite.
I walked out of the tube station and immediately noticed that the first floor windows still bore big white paint ‘X’s of the construction workers.
Above that the tower stretched up and up, clouds scudding by making me dizzy, and the top several floors of the tower looked distinctly odd compared to the others. A kind of dull gray colour.
I crossed Euston Road and investigated. The whole place appeared to be shut up. It was, admittedly, a Saturday morning and not yet nine o’clock.
From the bottom of the tower I noticed a greasy spoon opposite, on the left of the tube station by a hundred yards or so. As I watched, someone came out, so I knew it must be open.
I ordered a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea and sat down. At first I was the only person there, but then a couple of others wandered in. It turned out that they were two more of the station’s staff.
After finishing my meal I wandered back to the Tower and found workers busy hammering, sawing, wiring, concreting, and so forth. The only way in was across a rickety couple of planks spanning a yawning gap into the first floor.
Across the planks, then, and along a corridor to the left, plasterboard on each side, no proper electric lights, just a grubby cable dangling on bashed-in-plasterboard nails. Builder’s lampsockets. Bare bulbs.
I spotted a doorway and poked my head in. A smallish room, then a really large room. Inside, a guy in a suit wandered about clutching some kind of instrument. Suddenly it emitted a high pitched beep. The guy studied a read-out on the device.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Erm, this is where the radio station’s supposed to be, isn’t it?”
“’Course it is. You new here?”
“Yeah. I’m looking for Gerry O’Reilly.”
“Oh. Back into the corridor, turn right, all the way along to the end, first door on the right.”
“Thanks. By the way, what’re you doing?”
“Acoustics. This is the music studio.”
“Oh. Right.” I looked around. Bare concrete walls. Plasterboard. Holes for windows. Holes for doors. I nodded as I went out. “Right.”
At the end of the corridor I turned right and found a door on the left hand-labelled ‘Engineering’. I went in and found a long room with a workbench, various stores, especially black gaffer tape, XLRs, drums of cable, and so forth, and sitting on the end of the bench, Gerry O’Reilly. “Well hello there.” He had an easy smile.
“Hi again. So this is the radio station. When does it go on air?”
“Eight weeks. Sixteenth October.”
“Oh God. It’s impossible.”
“It’s going to be difficult, but we don’t have to have all of it working by then. Just one little studio for the disc jockeys and the telephone link over to the BT tower.”
“Well . . . “
“And we’ll pay overtime of course. You’ll probably be working ten hour days. By the way, here’s two of the other engineers.”
It was the other two guys from the greasy spoon.
Capital occupied the first floor of Euston Tower, and it started as a shell; consequently, the architects adopted the ‘ideal’ layout for a radio station. This consists of a shell-like arrangement, with the admin, social, and maintenance areas in the outermost layer, and the studios and ‘active’ sound stages contained in the protected core.
Taking the front entrance as my reference face of the square, and moving clockwise, sales and senior management; the next face, news and production; Mike Bukht’s office occupied the corner; then on the third face, the long engineering workshops and stores. I think the fourth face of the cube was accounts, and so on. Gerry O’Reilly, the chief engineer, had an office next to Michael Bukht, (otherwise known as Michael Barry, the TV chef.)
Again taking the entrance from Euston Road as the reference, a wide, winding staircase deposited you on the main floor. From the centre of that corridor, if I turn left and walk to the corner, then turn the corner, just on my right would be the door to the music studio. Through this heavy door lay the control room for the music studio, complete with a sixteen-into-four Neve desk. Two fifteen-inch monitors hung from the ceiling. On the left of the desk sat a nineteen-inch rack fully stuffed with jackfields. Some of these jacks carried audio circuits from pretty much every room in the complex, so the engineers had a priority on this jackfield working properly.
Also in this control room sat the reverb box: a whopping heavy wooden box about 1.5 metres tall. Our technology of the day was pre-digital (analogue) and this was the best thing we had for adding reverb to audio. They were horribly expensive and required an acoustically quiet environment.
On the other side of the Neve desk, through a triple-glass window, and connected with the control room by an airlock door, lay the sound studio. This was the largest room in the building; I recall it as being about 10m x 15m and usually it had a grand piano installed.
Moving on from the music studio, you’d come to a door about half way down on the right, this being the door to studio 2, the ‘on-air’ or DJ studio. It was about the size of a small British bathroom.
The door to MCR, the Master Control Room, followed and if you opened it and went in, you’d find yourself facing the Neve 12-channel control desk. This was mainly a passive configuration and lacked any form of EQ etc.
Its main function was to allow the MCR operator, who could be one of the Tech Ops or an Engineer (it was all a bit like the BBC in those early days) to insert commercials, news breaks, pre-taped programmes, telephone callers, and so forth.
This control desk was set in a big horseshoe desk that allowed the operator to swivel around and quickly reach things like the triple ITC cartridge machines, twin Studer B72 tape decks, jackfields, and so forth.
To one side of the desk sat the traffic person, who selected the correct advertisement carts from a mobile cart library and told the operator when to play them. By looking to their left the operator could see the DJ and guest, if any, through a triple-glass window. Overhead sat two 100-watt monitor speakers and behind, next to the wall, racks of audio distribution and control gear.
MCR (above): Item list
1) The Schaeffer automated programme system. The "1" is a 36-cart Instacart machine, while on its right are two rotary cart carousels. Originally these were computer-controlled but the computer was quickly removed leaving the cart machines for manual use. The Instacart was so unreliable we rarely used it.
2) Gates turntable, another one hidden under papers to its right.
3) The NEVE type ILR control desk. It had no real amps or EQ, it was really just a basic mixer.
4) Talkback system for DJ and other areas.
5) Studer B-72 professional tape machine, there were two of these in MCR.
The operator is Chris Rowling - 1974 photo. Looks like he's saying somethimg into the AKG D202 microphone. We had a Neumann vocal mike in the DJ studio. I had an ancient Grampian ribbon mike that I used when I was working on my own projects because it gave me some natural bass lift.
Leaving MCR and continuing along the corridor to the rear of the building, the very last door, near the corner, leads into a similar set-up to the sound studio, except this is a small production studio for voice-over work or a small group. This control room, known as CR1, had a really nice 12-channel Neve production desk, complete with extensive EQ. A pair of Studer B72 15in/sec stereo tape machines and a tall 19” rack live here. This is where we recorded a lot of jingles and intros from Stevie Wonder, on the Korg Synth that also lived in that studio. Kenny Everett also preferred to work there. I spent a LOT of time in this studio.
Control Room #1
Photo courtesy of Roger Piper
Engineering and operations occupied most of the rear of the building. Otherwise there were no real sound studios here, except a couple of small listening booths for setting up commercials. Further around we had a 16-line phone room big enough for several operators to sit and screen calls.
On the first day, Gerry O’Reilly, the chief engineer, called a meeting for the engineers and everyone involved with audio.
Jon Myer, one of the trainee operators at the time, reminds me that the engineering staff included Chris Rowling, Mike Baker, Mike Sykes, Sue Butler, Jay Denson, Bob Wells, Chas Kennedy, Russ Tollerfield, Peter Jackson, Mike Bull, Terry Pearce, Dave Voyde, Roger Kirk, Ren Hunter, and Dave Taylor.
Peter Jackson later went on to become chief engineer, and Russ Tollerfield went on to Radio Victory.
Roger Piper, another engineer, I think a little later than my time, tells me there was also Peter Ockelford.
Gerry was chief engineer, Mike Bukht head of programmes, Emyr Walters assistant chief engineer, and Al Corbeth was head of the Tech Ops department.
LINKS:
gives lots of interesting technical info on the early days,
including the radio cars, RF links, and so forth.