Following a £90,000 studio upgrade, what do you do with the redundant equipment – especially when it itself is top-notch? In Chris Cary’s world you set up a new station.
Kiss FM launched in September 1982 from studios in the same building as Radio Nova at 19 Herbert Street and, in a nod to Los Angeles’s Kiis FM, the station that Cary so admired, he set it up on 102.7MHz. With the Christmas advertising market fast approaching, having a second channel also meant that they would be less likely to have to turn down business, especially as Nova itself was already oversubscribed.
Kiss FM studios December 1982
In many ways, Kiss FM was more like Nova than Nova itself. With more and more specialist and newsy programmes running on the main station, the sister station was able to return to basics. Clutter-free music with top presenters – indeed some of Nova’s best-known names migrated to the new station - or hopped from one studio to the other down the corridor.
It experimented with different music formats but was to all intents a more easy listening, less contemporary alternative to Nova.
Denis Murray and John Clarke in Kiss FM studio
Kiss FM announced itself into the public consciousness the following March with a competition that gave away £5,000 to one lucky listener who was caller number fifty after the station played a particular three songs in a row. Unfortunately, not long after, official action saw the station silenced in May which led to a prolonged absence off the air.
The official action that caused that silence was, according to many in the radio community, tied in to rumours that Cary was planning to put a new 50kW transmitter on the air in order to target Britain. At the start of the year talks were held with the view to siting the transmitter at the Mosney site on the east coast. Those talks hit a snag, delaying the plans somewhat. What exactly those plans were we will probably never know thanks to the events that occurred on May 18th 1983.
