The Correction: What Radio Taught Me

I gave thirty years to radio.

Pirate stations in London basements. BBC 1Xtra at launch. And then Nairobi. Building something from the ground up that people genuinely loved.

Radio was the first thing I ever loved. Before the company. Before DJing. Before anything else I went on to build. As a kid I knew what I wanted to do, and for thirty years I got to do it. Not many people get that.

For most of those years, I was good. People told me so. The room moved when I walked in. The phone rang. The work led to more work. I didn’t have to ask whether I belonged in radio because the radio kept telling me I did.

Then the station changed hands.

And it stopped telling me.

The specifics don’t matter for what I’m writing about. What matters is that for the first time in thirty years, the thing that had always worked — being useful, being good, being the one who knew how — stopped landing. The room stayed still. I didn’t have a say.

I walked in every morning with something sitting in my chest. It wasn’t quite anxiety. It was a sentence. My utility isn’t needed here. What next.

That sentence had never occurred to me before. I had never needed it to.

For the first time in three decades I asked myself a question I had no business asking. Was I any good at radio.

That’s not a question about radio. That’s a question about what happens when the thing you love most stops loving you back.

The listeners were still there. That’s the part that confused me. The audience hadn’t moved. What had moved was the room above them — the people whose job it was to decide what I was worth to the business. And I found out something I hadn’t known about myself. The audience’s love wasn’t enough. I needed the institutional version. The kind that confirms you still belong in the building. When that stopped arriving, the work I had done for thirty years didn’t feel like it counted.

I had other things. The company. DJing. Writing. None of them would have done this to me. Losing any of them, I would have grieved and moved on. Radio was different. Radio was the first room I ever stood in and felt like myself.

That’s what made it brutal. Not that it ended. That the thing I cared about most was the thing that withdrew first.

I left when I could. I travelled. Vietnam. Thailand. Hong Kong. Rwanda. Jamaica. London. Amsterdam.

That part wasn’t the pattern in a new costume. That was the first time I had done something for me. No frequency. No audience. No room to move. Just a man going to places because he wanted to.

I’m still working out what comes after thirty years of being good at the thing you love.

Radio is still my first love.

I just don’t do it anymore.

And I haven’t found out yet whether that’s something I’m grieving or something I’m becoming.

I get in to the details on Monday

The Correction. More to come.