Why you should make Resonance FM the background noise to your life

In Enfield I tune in to Turkish pirates. In Hackney, KoolFM. In Uxbridge, house. In Southall, Punjabi radio. In South, Citylockradio’s dancehall. But at home, Resonance FM has been the background noise of my adult life. From the age of 14 I’d turn it on and Traditional Music Hour would have a man singing about turnips in Norwich, Little Atoms would be hosting Jonathan Meades on a rant, someone unnamed would be playing an ambulance siren backwards for an hour.

This article is taken from the landmark takeover of Big Issue by graffiti writer 10Foot. It can be bought from street vendors across the UK or online through the Big Issue Shop.

Resonance became most important to me when I was in prison though; everything about prison is designed to blinker the liberty of your mind, body and soul, to close down your horizons – everything about Resonance is designed to open them up. On 104.4FM you never know what lies over the brow of the hour, except that it’ll be void of sofa adverts and (bad) news.

• Graffiti writer 10Foot assembles Banksy, Kneecap and more for radical Big Issue takeover
• Banksy explains why he uses tag of ‘UK’s most imprisoned graffiti writer’ Tox in his work
• Kneecap’s DJ Próvaí shares powerful poem to mark St Patrick’s Day

The people you hear presenting shows on other radio stations often seem as if they’ve been 4D–printed variously by Global Media & Entertainment or the BBC. Unlike those places, you don’t need a combination of sharpened elbows and inanity to get ideas on air at Resonance – my experience of the station is that you are left alone, your ideas are allowed to grow.

It’s free speech in the genuine sense, not in the way that word has been cynically re-adapted. It’s everything David Graeber preached, broadcast in live action. That’s how you end up with something like Gate Kicks, a talk show on Resonance by and for people with learning difficulties; every episode is gold, better than anything I’ve ever heard on all the cursed, paid up, patronising, mainstream stations put together.

It’s hard not to sound misty-eyed but Resonance is what Albion could and should be. They’ll have folk music from these islands, African politics by African journalists rather than Oxbridgers, verging on conspiratorial climate science academics, the absolutely excellent Deptford Action Group for the Elderly pensioners’ programme and then … someone playing an ambulance siren backwards for an hour. And occasionally there’s stuff I hate, but that’s the world isn’t it? So long as the radio fairly represents the world we live in, you should never turn it off. And if you need some silence, don’t worry, Resonance will most likely broadcast that too.

10Foot

Ideas that resonate

ByMilo Thesiger-Meacham, artistic director of Resonance FM and Extra.

Uncertain times call for media or methods of communication, transmission and relay that feel as constant and true as the oxygen in the air we breathe. So, when Resonance FM lost its studio at the very start of the pandemic, we refused to sit still and instead embarked on a new project in an enormous and sprawling derelict chapel on Borough Road in South London.

There, using every microphone we had – placed and hung and hidden in every room and doorway and staircase of the building – I set about turning the whole structure into a live-broadcast space, with each microphone feeding back to a central mixing desk on the upper floor, where one could sit and mix live on-air the studio’s entire architecture as people came and went, playing, performing, speaking or simply coming to watch a big, weird experiment unfold.

From that point on, something quite interesting happened: working mainly on large durational broadcasts, dozens of composers, sound artists, writers, choirs, orchestras and dancers, who’d all been listening from home, would then travel and walk, literally, into the same broadcast at scheduled times throughout the day and find themselves immediately part of a mysterious event, for which they’d previously been the blind audience.

The broadcast itself became a kind of architectural space with microphones added and taken away live on air by engineers running ahead of artists, down spiral staircases, or into bathrooms to establish live feeds from areas of the building they couldn’t see. All this became intertwined with the acousmatic nature of travelling and living in the city, of overhearing on public transport a video playing on someone’s device, with content you interpret solely from its sound.

The studio, the broadcasters and the engineers became one and the same, like the moment a camera on the stage of a daytime TV show might pan round to follow a presenter on-set, revealing, just for a second, behind all the sofas and smiles, a vast studio of equipment and staff carrying clipboards.

Resonance occupied this space between 2020 and 2023 and, avoiding the tide of developers sweeping through Southwark, we’ve now built a new studio nearby on Risborough Street. Many so-called alternative stations seem profoundly old-fashioned and uninspired in their approach to radio as a medium. By showcasing only DJ sets, and with some even receiving investment from global media corporations, a disservice is done to the very idea of broadcasting as an open-ended experiment.

Undoing this perception of radio as simply a vessel for pre-recorded music, and instead presenting exciting alternatives, seems a mammoth task, one as difficult as shifting the public image of contemporary art away from market-led mediocrity and towards the underworld of vibrant and accessible creativity which is bubbling away in improvised spaces, venues and galleries across the UK, continental Europe and beyond.

But in its own way Resonance will continue to do this. And those who stumble upon the station, or, if only for a few moments, become a part of its fabric, will undoubtedly, as so many have told us, find their ideas of radio and art changed forever.

Resonance in 2025

By Peter Lanceley, CEO Resonance FM.

For the past 12 months, a group of dedicated specialist volunteers have been recycling our salvaged analogue studio in our new HQ – by Southwark Tube – that we acquired on a long lease in early 2024. Our new Studio 1 has been operational since September, and more than 400 live broadcasts, and even a few podcast recordings, have taken place there.

But as the operation shifts increasingly in-person, our office space now urgently needs a Studio 2. Not only does this addition double our capacity to deliver live broadcasts, it also opens up the possibility of a dedicated live schedule for our longer-form radio art station Resonance Extra, which despite having its own unique and devoted audience on a par in terms of size with Resonance FM, has still not yet had its own space in any permanent sense since its initiation in 2015. 

Our fundraising drive in February 2025 raised – at the time of writing – upwards of £30,000 from the public through donations, an auction, and a series of six fundraising art and music events organised by curators including IKLECTIK, Atomiser, James Oldham and Kinn – parts of our Network of the Year (AudioUK, 2022, 2023 and 2024). Thanks to the efforts of everyone in that network, we’re in a stronger position now to keep incrementally building what we have here into an open-access community media production house for London’s arts and culture. 

Our aims for 2025

• Build a modest second studio to double our live capacity and support Resonance Extra

• Support our volunteers to keep driving improvements to our studio and website

• Extending our community radio licence and antenna lease to safeguard FM until 2036 

Why I like Resonance FM

By NND (Patricia Vincent).

I’d never considered broadcasting until, through (the now defunct) Migrants’ Resource Centre’s collaboration with Resonance FM, I enrolled in a radio training course for migrants, at the end of which I was invited to pitch a programme and so The Workplace was born.

My programme fulfils on various levels: me, personally, listeners, information-wise, as they obtain insights from our work-related discussions and my guests, professionally, as we explore the themes of health and wellbeing at work, women’s advancement in the workplace, leadership and ethics – including the environment, art and artists and the future of work.

Having featured all seven female presidents of The Law Society of England and Wales, contributors to the Science Gallery London’s AI exhibition and this year’s MOBO Awards winner for Album of the Year, as the most basic snapshot of the content array, it’s obvious that Resonance FM’s cultural, social and value impact is much broader, deeper and greater than mere metrics can quantify. 

But don’t take my word for it. Instead, understand this: it’s not for nothing that for three years running, Resonance FM has been voted AudioUK Network of the Year.

Say it LOUD

By Cassie Fox

LOUD WOMEN’s mission is to amplify the voices of female and non-binary musicians in the grassroots scene, and our show on Resonance gives us a brilliant new platform to do just that. LOUD WOMEN is a community-driven not-for-profit Community Interest Company so Resonance felt like the perfect home for us to start a weekly show. We have bands and artists in playing live every week – like HotWax, Bridget, Helen McCookerybook, Sassyhiya, PUShY PUShY PUShY – and each week we play brand new music from DIY artists. We’ve also had students from BIMM and The BRIT School coming along to learn the ropes of broadcasting, and photographers coming along to capture the action. 

We squeeze a lot of music and experience and art out of that brilliant little studio each week!

Find out more about Resonance FM and support their work.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.