About LTBR.FM · London Tower Block RadioSome years you remember for the news. Some for the music.

A sound system was never just speakers. It was a crew, a name, a reputation and a wall of hand-built boxes - plywood cabinets painted black, scoop bass bins you could feel in your ribs, a valve amp somebody's uncle had rebuilt twice. The selector chose the records, the MC talked over them, and the operator rode the controls like an engineer on a ship.

The tradition came over from Jamaica with the Windrush generation and took root in London's church halls, youth clubs, community centres and front rooms. Through the 1970s and 80s the city's sounds became institutions: Jah Shaka in South-East London, playing exclusive dub plates that nobody else had; Sir Coxsone Outernational, which had been running since the sixties; Saxon Studio International in Lewisham, whose fast-chat MCs changed how British reggae sounded; Fatman Hi-Fi in Tottenham.

A dub plate was a one-off acetate cut for one sound only - a song nobody else could play, sometimes with the sound's own name sung into it. A clash was two sounds in one room, playing against each other until the crowd decided. Cassette tapes of the best dances were copied, recopied and posted around the world.

For a teenager in 1981 who couldn't get into a West End club and wouldn't have wanted to, the sound system was the club, the radio and the newspaper at once. It's where you heard the new tune first. Our station's dub nights and sound-system acts - Fordham Park, Trellick Sound, Woolwich Ferry Hi-Fi, Stonebridge Hi-Power - are written in that tradition.

Lovers rock is London's own reggae: sweet, slow, romantic songs sung mostly by young women over heavy bass, born in South London in the mid-1970s. It took its name from Dennis Harris's Lover's Rock label in Brockley, and its sound from producers like Dennis Bovell and John Kpiaye. Louisa Mark recorded 'Caught You in a Lie' at fourteen; Brown Sugar sang 'I'm in Love with a Dreadlocks'; Janet Kay's 'Silly Games' reached No. 2 in 1979; Carroll Thompson's 'Hopelessly in Love' soundtracked a thousand first dances.

Where roots reggae sang about struggle and Babylon, lovers rock sang about the boy at the bus stop and the girl who didn't ring back. That was the point. In years when the news gave young Black Londoners very little tenderness, lovers rock made some.

Its home was the blues party - or blues dance, or shebeen: a party in a private house, usually a terraced front room with the furniture pushed back, a red bulb in the light fitting, a sound in the corner, drinks sold from the kitchen and a door charge at the front. West End clubs often turned young Black people away; the blues never did. They ran from late till light, and the slow records were the ones everyone waited for.

Steve McQueen's film 'Lovers Rock' (2020, part of his Small Axe series) captures one night at a fictional early-80s blues party better than any description can. Our lovers rock acts - Cherry Wilson, Effra, Delroy Marsh, Sister Loretta, Stockwell Rose - sing from those front rooms.

In the 1980s the BBC and London's licensed commercial stations played almost none of the music Black London actually danced to. So London built its own radio. Pirate stations - unlicensed, homemade, run by DJs and engineers in their spare time - filled the FM dial with reggae, lovers rock, soul, funk and later house.

The Dread Broadcasting Corporation broadcast reggae and soul to West London from a mast in a back garden. Radio Invicta had been playing soul since 1970; JFM, Horizon and Solar followed; LWR launched on New Year's Day 1983; Kiss FM went on air in October 1985 and later became a licensed station.

The higher your aerial, the further your signal travelled - so the pirates went up. A transmitter could be carried up a tower block's stairwell, the aerial lashed to the lift housing on the roof, the studio a bedroom somewhere below. From the top of a twenty-storey block a small transmitter could cover a whole side of London. When the Telecommunications Act 1984 gave officials the power to raid and seize, stations learned to broadcast from one place and transmit from another.

London Tower Block Radio is named for those rooftops. We don't need to hide an aerial any more - the signal comes down a wire to your phone, your laptop or our Receiver app - but the idea is the same: a station that plays what the people in the block actually want to hear, run with conviction rather than committee.

Notting Hill Carnival grew out of the West Indian community in North Kensington in the 1960s, and in the mid-1970s it gained the thing that made it London's own: static sound systems, stacked on the pavements of Ladbroke Grove, All Saints Road and Westbourne Park Road. For one weekend every August the streets under the Westway belonged to the people who lived there, and you could walk from one sound to the next all day.

The rest of the year, London's Caribbean life happened in the open: in Brixton Market and on Electric Avenue, on Ridley Road in Dalston, on Rye Lane in Peckham, in the record shops - Dub Vendor in Clapham Junction, the counters at the back of barbers' shops - where you heard the new pre-release before anyone else. Saturday meant the market, the record shop and the youth club, in that order.

And everywhere, the bus. The 36, the 159, the 18, the night bus home with a Walkman on the top deck. If the 1980s London of our songs has a single place, it's a red double-decker crossing the river at dawn.

For the families who came from the Caribbean after the war, the front room was the best room in the house: kept for visitors and Sundays, with the good china in the glass cabinet, family photographs on the mantelpiece, a picture of home on the wall and, in pride of place, the radiogram - a radio and record player built into a polished wooden cabinet, often bought on hire purchase and paid off for years.

That radiogram played the records that held a family to two places at once: ska and calypso, gospel on Sunday morning, Jim Reeves for Grandad, and later the reggae and lovers rock the children brought home. The second generation grew up between the radiogram and the sound system, and British reggae is what happened when they met.

It's the room our station imagines it's broadcasting into. Rice and peas on the stove, the kettle on, the meter fed, and the radio up loud enough to drown out whatever the news was saying.