Going underground - with the Subterranean

It was to be several months after first hearing Subterranean Sounds' forerunner Radio Confusion before I got around to contacting the station, specifically its operator, Steve Midnight. As I have chronicled in a previous blog post, our first contact was to say the least somewhat inauspicious.  

The date would be around the beginning of April 1991. Your correspondent, then a rather naive 14-year-old with a style of contacting stations that betrayed my neophyte status as a free radio listener, wrote to the inimitable Mr. Midnight, solely it would seem, with the intention of procuring an at-the-time highly coveted QSL card. I now freely admit that I felt justification in my immature brain to request a tangible verification of receiving Radio Confusion, albeit probably only by dint of hearing the station identifying itself and its contact details. Nothing else. I obviously did not elaborate further about the programme, on what subject Mr. Midnight was holding forth, nor the musical content. With complete justification, these were the kind of begging/grovelling letters that the operator rightly gave short shrift to.

Yes, I did receive a QSL - at the time this induced in me a 'job done' mentality - but attached was a mild rebuke, along the lines of 'yes, you can have a QSL card; after all, if you hadn't heard the station you'd just be kidding yourself'. Feeling chastised but understanding the aforementioned words of wisdom and my own, rather embarrassed sensibilities, I doubt I ever wrote again to a station purely on the hunt for a QSL, instead turning my hand to what to me at least were interesting letters. Whilst these may have been grist to the mill for some operators, others remained more concerned that their signal had reached my area of the world. Even though my slavish desire for verification cards had been staunched, many station operators still assumed, even though one was never requested, that the underlying reason for contact was to add to my then QSL collection. 

I don't recall corresponding with Mr. Midnight again until Radio Confusion had morphed into Subterranean Sounds. I had though missed many of Confusion's broadcasts which took place on 7 MHz, an area of the band that my analogue National Panasonic receiver struggled with unless stations were running high power. Only when I had upgraded my listening station, albeit modestly, and that Subterranean Sounds was primarily heard on 3 MHz, usually around 3945 kHz, did I become a regular listener and correspondent, including several telephone chats with Steve.

The early days, in other words during the Radio Confusion-era, a music policy that centred upon the 'indie' genre was particularly evident, drawing inspiration from labels such as One Little Indian, now renamed One Little Independent in the wake of George Floyd's death. It is though Subterranean's varied output that included tracks by The Future Sound of London, Broadcast, and a period around 1995 where jungle/drum 'n' bass was give airtime, that particularly resonates with me to this day. Far though from being a continuous music station only interspersed with the occasional identification, Mr. Midnight would not be averse to including speech-based content to complement his musical taste, nor to launching into polemics on subjects that especially exercised his interest or displeasure. 

There would also be variation in Subterranean Sounds' programmes from the occasional guests who would join Steve in the studio - live and unleashed. Including Radio Mutiny/XTC operator Tommy Teabags/Matt Roberts, Live Wire's Bill Lewis, and Radio London/Aires' Andy Winter, the one name that stands out from the aforementioned free radio leviathans is Des Francis/Steve Collins of The Nitrozone, a station formerly known as Total Control Radio(TCR). Despite the conspicuously infrequent broadcasts by TCR and then under The Nitrozone name, I was never able to receive any broadcasts by either. The only time I therefore heard the station operator on the air was when he took part in a broadcast by another.

As is common with most of the stations that I have written about over the last couple of weeks, I cannot really put a date to when I last heard a broadcast by the station that was far better known as Subterranean Sounds than its former identity; I would though estimate it to be over twenty years ago, which seems highly implausible but sadly more than likely. There is almost a complete absence of information online to complement this abridged overview of one of the UK's most listenable free radio broadcasters during the 1990's, but I am sure some of those reading will be able to flesh out the detail from their own memories of the station.

There is nothing to suggest that Mr. Midnight is planning a triumphant return to the airwaves any time soon, with the station's period of operation adjourned sine die. I have though often pondered as to whether a resumption of broadcasting by many of the leading lights of the decade would tarnish or embellish their respective legacies, and if such an eventuality would give a much-needed shot in the arm(a somewhat poignant idiom) to the current scene that relies more on continuous music and canned announcements than producing diverse output that also includes, shock horror, interaction, opinion, and comment. Sometimes the past is best left just there and whilst nostalgia isn't always what is used to be, the feelings and enthusiasm generated in the 1990's will never be replicated by an attempt to reboot the scene thirty years later.

For me free radio in the 1990's embodied a spirit of a time which has manifestly moved on. There is little doubt that speech-based content accompanied by personal music taste was already a dying art thirty years ago, but was underpinned by the likes of Radio Orion(later the Bogus Jobseeker and the Bogusman), Subterranean Sounds, and XTC. Although the Bogusman can occasionally be heard via Channel 292, it is really only the evergreen XTC who now bucks the trend with programming that the audience won't seek alternatives to after a few minutes of listening. 

There will be many reasons why decade by decade the free radio scene has, although subjective and inevitably compared to a time that I regard as a golden era, deteriorated to a point where it seems many stations exist solely for the pleasure and satisfaction of the operator, instead of being a means of entertainment for shortwave listeners. I do still have to keep reminding myself that free radio can never be all things to all people, but at the same time those stations operators who are not overly concerned with what their listenership thinks must not just assume that an audience reared on dire and formulaic legal FM fayre simply wish to hear a replicant, ersatz version on shortwave.

It is though the unique take on shortwave broadcasting so personified by Subterranean Sounds that encapsulated a free thinking and nonconformist antithesis to the already homogenised legit radio of the time, which has subsequently taken boring genericism to new depths. It is not to what we yearn for now but will no longer come to pass that should occupy our thoughts, but how fortunate those of us who listened to UK free radio stations in the 1990's actually were.