The Piccadilly Radio archive collection lives at Manchester Central Library on over 1,800 tapes. The collection is a crucial part of the city’s history capturing the news, music and culture in Greater Manchester from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Now these tapes will be digitised, catalogued and made available to all at the library in 2025 thanks to a £99k grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with match funding from the Manchester Libraries Trust and Piccadilly Radio former staff.
The project will also work with partners including the Manchester District Music Archive, the Manchester Hip Hop Archive and a local community radio station to make sure that the station’s legacy is heard by new audiences online and re-used in creative ways that help to build the city’s digital skillset.
You can find out more about the project in the press release.
What’s on the tapes?
There really is something for everyone. The station was a pioneer in independent radio drama, sports and talk. There are also hundreds of interviews with local music and showbiz stars as well as ordinary Mancunians.
At 5am on the 2nd of April in 1974 a legend was born when the first epic 45-second-long Piccadilly Radio jingle hit the airwaves. All went fairly smoothly through the first news bulletin until Roger Day mis-cued the first song so that the first second of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations sounded positively squidgy:
First five minutes of Piccadilly Radio, 2 April 1974
Piccadilly Radio was Greater Manchester’s first commercial radio station and it inspired listeners all over the North West with its mix of news, music, interviews, sports, drama and current affairs. Manchester Central Library’s climate-controlled archive vaults hold over 1,800 Piccadilly Radio master tapes, on obsolete and hard-to-maintain reel-to-reel format.
Why is it urgent?
The tapes are now fifty years old and many are degrading fast with ‘sticky shed syndrome’. This can make them unplayable and means that they have to be ‘baked’ dry and treated with alcohol before being played one last time while being transferred to digital storage. Here’s a before and after baking comparison of a jingle.
Jingle before baking (PICC/226)
Jingle after baking (PICC/226)
How can I listen to more?
You can listen to over 100 full-length Piccadilly Radio shows at Manchester Central Library’s Sound + Vision pods. The full catalogue can be searched online (use reference PICC) – all of these tapes will be digitised by the project by the end of 2025.
You can listen to lots of short clips on Soundcloud thanks to copyright holder Bauer Media.