About Radio Free Marseille |
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Radio Free Marseille founder Richard Pearson, began his media career in the 1970’s at the mothership of broadcasting, BBC network radio, based at Broadcasting House, London W1 1AA. Starting out as a researcher/on air features presenter, he interviewed a diverse range of people from Mohammad Ali to Peter Gabriel, before moving on to BBC network tv, where he worked with hundreds of well-known artistes, covering all musical genres, including Jazz, Classical, Soul, New Wave, World, Folk and Opera. “I’d always wanted to start my own radio station” said Richard, “because I found the majority of stations, formulaic, staid and predictable, in comparison to how they were when I was an avid listener in the 1960’s, but the costs involved in setting-up and running a station back then, were completely prohibitive, so any such ideas went onto the back-burner, under the pressure of a very heavy workload.” Fast forward to 2015 and two events brought his waylaid ambition, back into focus: “Firstly, I took over the running of a small community station, Radio Scarborough which had just six volunteers and no coherent plan! I was at RS for seven years, helping gain an FM licence for the station and increasing the number of volunteers at the station to almost fifty.” “Secondly, I visited Marseille for the first time and fell in love with the city. It was so vibrant; full of great music, great art, great food, great scenery and a great football team, in Oympique de Marseille. I will never forget attending my first game at Stade Velodrome; the atmosphere was electric and like nothing I’d experienced before. I decided there and then that if I was able to achieve my dream of starting a radio station, I would base it in Marseille.” Having gained an FM licence for Radio Scarborough in 2022, Richard stood down from its day to day running and commenced work on Project Radio Marseille. The aim was to create a radio station to serve the English speaking community in Marseille and the rest of the South of France. “There is an excellent station already broadcasting there, in Riviera Radio, but it's very much a mainstream station that plays very little to suit my personal taste, or that of my colleages at RFM.” Given our mature, but still rebellious dispositions, we felt it would be fitting to base such a station in Marseille, that most mature and rebellious of French cities. For 2000 years of its 2500 year existence, Marseille was independent of France and the vast bulk of its residents still feel that to be the case, spiritually speaking. Given all that, we decided that Radio Free Marseille would be an apt name for the new station. We have also become a curator for Groover, an organisation that works to guide artistes, at the beginning of their careers and due to the large number of great foreign language tracks we’ve received for review from Groover, we are launching another weekly, one hour show, playing the best of those submissions. We have no desire to be intentionally obtuse, but RFM prides itself on playing music you’re unlikely to hear on other stations, excepting dedicated, niche stations and we will do our best to stay-advertisement free. Like most people though, we have bills to pay, so if you would like to sponsor Radio Free Marseille and help us to deliver a service that uses money to make great radio, rather than one that uses radio to make great amounts of money, please get in touch. RFM isn’t a bog-standard radio station and ultimately will be far more of an arts foundation on radio, with the intention of recording original music for broadcast and eventual commercial release on it's own label, amongst other things.
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