In the 1980s, Jeff Cooper started-up and ran LBC Music Radio, an Italian 'border blaster' station overlooking the Swiss city of Lugano: the picture above is of the transmitting mast. Later, he created the radio shows 'XS' and '2XS', and then launched this station back in 2002, with the help of several other experienced broadcasters and committed music fans. Jeff has been involved in promoting New Music and non-mainstream albums for decades on many radio stations - he may well be the longest-running continuous broadcaster of New Music in the country. Here, we all believe in the music we play, which we reckon is a better reflection of the past 70 Years Of Rock & Roll than you will hear elsewhere. Meet the whole 2XS team here.
We're a 'rock & roll' rather than a 'rock' station and guitar-based music accounts for around 85% of what we play. The remainder comes from heritage genres which rock & roll has absorbed. So you'll hear some country-rock, but not country & western; you'll hear some soul and r&b from the 60s and 70s, but not today's 'urban' versions; you'll hear ska, bluebeat and reggae but not dancehall; you'll hear pioneer rappers and poets like Grandmaster Flash, Linton Kwesi-Johnson and Gil Scott-Heron, but no gangsta.
By 2002, British radio had virtually abandoned all non-chart and unsigned music, so we launched 2XS Radio (it was 'radio2XS' back then but the BBC threatened to sue us because "we might be confused with BBC Radio 2" - don't laugh!).
Despite their idiocy, we had already become the only on-line station to record our own full live sessions ('The Barn Sessions', killed by 'lockdown' but hopefully to return at some point) and to promise that, if we like what you do, you don't get confined to a niche show: you get aired throughout our programming, right alongside the big names. It's been a struggle to keep going, mainly because of the intransigence and backward-thinking of the two principal 'protection organisations' (rackets, would be a better description), PPL and PRS. They operate an absurd regime for online stations, charging many multiples of what over-the-air stations would pay for a similar audience.
The debate about whether someone who spent a couple of hours in a studio decades ago should still get paid for that effort is a good one for a pub night - no creators of the nation's wealth in other sectors of work get such a generous deal. More importantly, neither of those organisations makes any effort to use the easily-obtainable information about our music output to direct our payments towards the artists we play: it all goes into a pot to be paid to artists like Taylor Swift, Sam Smith, Ed Sheeran, Drake, YoungBoy, Never Broke Again and Lil Baby - none of whom we have ever played.
Anyway, we've been going ever since, running on our love for the music and the contributions of our listeners, so - thank you. Although we don't have to, we do display an Ofcom-style 'Public File' as a gesture of goodwill. It's here.
Grateful thanks also go to the team who have contibuted finance, technical expertise, unpaid work, and encourgement over the past twenty+ years. Without you, it would never have got off the ground:
Guy Morris
Collette Saxton
Mark Meadowcroft
Terry Butterworth (much missed since his death in 2021)
Steve Bone
Steven Cooper
Trisha Roberts
Caroline Woodruff
John Peters
There's also the necessary legal stuff here, should you be interested.
