Nottingham Trent-based student radio station Fly FM is celebrating its 15th birthday with a series of special shows presented by people who’ve gon on to work in the industry.
All this week alumni including Absolute Radio’s Mark Crossley and David Cameron Walker, who’s the voice of Radio 1, are doing one-hour shows on the station and there’s also a birthday party planned for Wednesday.
Fly is also reliving the best music from the last fifteen years and has produced special imaging for the week.
Current Station Manager, Matthew Geer, said: “It’s very exciting to welcome back all these old presenters who have gone on to such great things in the industry. For all our current presenters, it’s very inspiring for them, and they’ve had the opportunity to learn some great things from them too.”
The station originally started back in 1996, as Kick FM. Ben Morrison, then president of the student union, came up with the idea to setup a radio station. After twelve months of planning, involving four hundred volunteers, Kick FM was born. The plan was to run for four weeks using a RSL and the station was available on 97.5FM in the Nottingham area. The station back then consisted of separate parts across different campuses – the studios were at Byron House on the City Campus whereas the Newsroom was based at Clifton.
In 2000, Kick FM was rebranded and Fly FM was born but just as a twice-yearly RSL. In 2001, the station won its first ever Student Radio Awards. Adam Leventhal, currently of Sky Sports News, won both the ‘Best Show’ and ‘Best Specialist Music Programme’ prizes.
Fly launched in its current online format in 2007 and has now won 11 SRAs in total – including gold this year for Pete Allison in the ‘Best Male Presenter’ category.