Inside the Scottish community radio station shaking the world

“I’m a bit of an unreconstructed metal freak,” I venture, “AC/DC, Black Sabbath ...” Graham, the happiest and most energetic man in Glasgow, tells me not to worry: “we like all that stuff too.”

During the songs they both maintain a high-energy conversation that features “Yaaas” quite a lot. It’s also pin-sharp, informative and brilliant, brilliant fun. These boys shimmy. Leah, who’s learning the ropes about presenting and deejaying is rolling her eyes. She’s training for her own show and the boys are full of encouragement.

Pinned up on the wall behind them there’s a reminder of all the events and activities that must be promoted. It lists a cost of living campaign with a website for help with services and benefits. 

There’s Positive Destinations, a drop-in surgery that Sunny Govan provides every week to help people polish their CVs or build confidence for interviews. There’s the Winter Warmer nights; the radio skills courses and The Rivvy Tots, a parent and toddler playgroup.

“Are you coming to our Christmas Party next week?” Matthew asks me.

“Am I invited?”

“You are now.”

“I’m there.”

“Yaaas!”

I don’t know what else I’ve got on that day, but they’re all taking a back seat. Right now, the Sunny G Christmas Party is the best ticket in town. I might have caught this wrong, but I think the boys have invited the rest of Glasgow too.

Sunny Govan is Scotland’s top community radio station and I’ve been wanting to write about it for ages. And then Covid happened and it seemed the station was in danger of closing as the advertising dried up and the revenues were imperilled.

This couldn’t happen. Sunny Govan is much, much more than a radio station: it’s become the social and cultural hub of this proud, old Glasgow district. It reflects the aspirations and concerns of the people who live here and shares their pain. It provides hope, warmth, light and shelter in a community coping with an otherwise crippling nexus of social challenges.

The community rallied round though, and responded to a lifeline crowd-funder. 

The volunteer presenters and deejays all insist that the station is merely a by-product of its essential calling: to provide social outreach services to those who need them in the Govan area.

The station’s initial broadcasts were on FM in the summer of 1998. But the Ofgem licence limited it to only four weeks a year. Its initial driving force was Heather McMillan, who was studying community development and felt that a radio station would transmit messages of community empowerment much more quickly and directly.

This was at a time when Govan, once famous for the world-class ship-building craftsmanship and design, was now known by the antics of an alcoholic, string-vested layabout called Rab C Nesbitt. Changing perceptions of cultural stereotypes is still stitched into the fabric of Sunny Govan’s DNA.

Those initial broadcasts electrified the Govan community and word spread of a radio station that spoke intelligently and passionately in the authentic voices of its listeners, rather than the contrived argot of Scotland’s broadcasting giants.

Responding to public demand, Sunny G took to the airwaves once more three years later and began to become a permanent fixture on the internet.

A BT award for Community engagement followed and then, in 2007, its long-awaited, full-time FM licence.

But this is a top radio station that knows its business and goes about it in a highly professional manner. It produces dozens of slick, professional shows each week with an eclectic mix of local and world music interspersed with high-calibre discussions about arts and politics.

I told my friend, an avid arts aficionado, that I was visiting Sunny Govan. “Ask them about that show they did the other week about Breugel [the Dutch and Flemish renaissance painter]. You wouldn’t get anything like that on Radio Scotland.”

Ah yes; BBC Scotland. At the other end of Govan Road, just across the river sits the cavernous concrete behemoth headquarters of our national broadcaster. 

Sunny Govan is everything this place is not: authentic, fresh and challenging.

The Sunny Govan station director is Steg G, one of the UK’s most influential hip-hop artists and producers. When I tell my daughter I was chatting to him she rebuked me for not getting his autograph. Another friend tells me to ask Steg why he only does the Monday morning slot.

The words ‘legend’, ‘dude’ and ‘prince’ are all forthcoming when I tell people I spent half an hour with him. The man himself says “a bit of this and that” when I ask about his career prior to helping launch Sunny Govan. You’re quickly made aware that he only wants to talk about Sunny G and its social outreach.

“Obtaining that full-time FM licence was huge,” he says. “It meant that listeners from Motherwell to Greenock could access us. Suddenly, it felt like a huge hungry monster that had to be fed with content, content, content.

“But we had massive feedback from the community. First of all this taught us that everything we said on air had ramifications. We were entirely accountable to our audience, Govanites. But it also showed us that people really cared and recognised what this is: providing local music; local voices; the issues that were affecting them.

“We were providing music and topics they were unlikely to hear elsewhere: promoting recovery programmes; talking about men’s anxiety; women discussing social issues affecting women. We have programmes on Glasgow’s history; on Govan’s history.

“We seek to reflect the community; not to impose our ideas of what the community should sound like or look like. We’re also here to encourage people to get involved. I want them to think: “Aye, they sound like me and my neighbours and my family.” This is a big thing for us. We call ourselves the Sunny G family.

“We’re all in it together. And they get what we’re here for and why. Which is to reflect Glasgow’s culture and Glasgow’s culture is dynamic and changing. Govan as a community is changing. Historically, it’s always changed. We need to reflect that.

“Covid was huge for us, but not just in terms of keeping the station afloat. We were forced to re-consider why we were here. It highlighted the need for this more than ever: the social aspect; the employability drop-in service and all the rest of it. Our approach has to be: what do these people need from us? We come from this community and the community knows us. We have a trusting relationship with them.”

In the room adjoining the broadcasting suite, Steg’s colleague, Javed Sattar is hosting a meeting about Sunny Govan’s employability drop-ins.

My brief greeting turns into a five-person discussion about racial diversity and the absence of working-class voices in Scotland’s mainstream media outlets. No-one’s holding back, which could be Sunny Govan’s mission statement heading.

After Graham and Matthew have finished their show, it’s Gordon Anderson. He plays This is Not a Love Song by Public Image Ltd, in honour of their guitarist, Keith Levene who died recently. It’s followed by one of T-Rex’s less well-known songs and the story behind the band’s name. Their producer, Tony Viconti, was tiring of constantly having to write Tyrannosaurus Rex and began abbreviating it to T-Rex. Marc Bolan loved it. I didn’t know that.

Later, there’s the Inspiration Hour, featuring music and snaps of a talk by Dr Brooks Gibbs, the American Social Psychologist about dealing with bullying in the workplace.

Not very long ago the world’s largest ships were cut loose on the slipways that ran behind this street. These ocean-going liners represented the peak of Glasgow working-class industry and ingenuity. A generation later, the launch of this small radio station has restored something of that pride to these street. The people who live here now walk a little taller; a little more confidently.

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