Plymouth Sound

Nowadays, with endless television and radio stations, it's hard to imagine the excitement when Plymouth got its own radio station. At the time, the main stations were all broadcast by the BBC.
Almost 40 years ago, Plymouth Sound was launched and it soon had a huge following. The station was based in a former organ factory at Earl's Acre off Alma Road in Pennycomequick and was launched on 19th May 1975. The first song broadcast was Cat Stevens' Morning Has Broken.
Andrew Knight, who was aged nine at the time, won a competition to be the first voice heard on the new station. With prompting from station controller, David Bassett, Andrew went live on air at 6am on the morning of Monday 19th May.

Popular presenters at the time included Ian Calvert, Louise Churchill, Carmella McKenzie, Brian Measures, Peter Greig and David Bassett. There were many more in later years.

I was thirteen and at school at the time when the station opened. It's hard to believe now but there was a big thing about how to find the station and how to tune into it (much the same as there was when Channel 4 was launched). There was a show at the Guildhall to find out more about the station and to meet some of the people behind it.

Me and a school friend went along in the hope there would be some free records (we didn't get any). Like everyone else, we came away with souvenirs such as free car stickers and mugs. It seemed a big thing at the time.
Everyone at school listened to the station and by far the most popular presenter was Ian Calvert whose evening show was broadcast just at the time when we were all doing our homework. In between records, Ian talked about his girlfriend, his dogs, his horses and anything else that was going on at the time. I remember him being the first DJ to play David Soul's single when it first came out and also remember he'd sent a tape to Radio One of his show. There were nightly phone-in competitions and the prize was inevitably 6 singles. I'd recognise some of the kids from my class entering the competitions (I won a few) and once we'd collected our prize singles from the station, we'd take them to school and try and swap them. They were always by artists you had never heard of and were, mostly, terrible but the fun was just in winning them.

David Bassett broadcast a talk show at 10am every morning and would have conversations about topical subjects or just anything anyone wanted to talk about. Some of the people who phoned in were unintentionally hilarious which made the show even more entertaining. In the summer holidays, most of the kids at school listened to it and many of them also took part.
Brian Measures hosted an easy listening show in the evening which attracted a large audience. I won a Frank Sinatra LP on his show and my mum went to collect it. While she was waiting at the reception, she said that there was a bloke beside her who didn't stop nattering on and telling jokes. She thought that he was just there to collect a prize but it turned out to be Frank Carson!
Adverts needing an American sounding voice-over were done by my old guitar teacher, Pete Martin (he was actually Canadian). I wonder what happened to him?

The DJs were very popular at the time and I remember Ian Calvert bringing a football team to our school in the 1970s to play the teachers. Our teachers were hopeless (even the sports ones) so they inevitably lost!
The station was a big thing in the 1970s and 1980s and was eventually re-branded Heart Plymouth in 2009 before being amalgamated into Heart Devon in 2010. For me, the best time to listen to it was in the 1970s when it all seemed so new and there were few other radio stations about. As the station grew older, there was suddenly a huge choice of other stations to listen to. By then, I'd moved on to the crackly fading broadcasts of Radio Luxembourg!
Like Westward Television, there seems something very nostalgic about the early days of Plymouth Sound. Today, we're overloaded with stations, many of which are listened to on the internet. Somehow, it just doesn't seem to be the same and a lot of the appeal of the smaller radio stations, where we felt that we knew all the presenters, seems to have been lost over the years.