Celebrating Radio Six International's Sixtieth Anniversary

This week,?Tony Currie's?Radio Six International?celebrates its sixtieth birthday. It has seen many different iterations; from closed circuit and very low-powered broadcasts, through becoming Europe’s first commercial cable radio network and bidding for one of the radio licences for Central Scotland, to an internet-first station with syndication on AM, FM, and DAB stations around the world as well as regular shortwave broadcasts from Lismore in Scotland.

Throughout, it has remained focused on enjoying broadcasting, with everyone contributing to the station for the love of music, not money.

I started contributing to Radio Six International in 2014 with the UK radio broadcast of Junior Eurovision. Since then, we’ve done rather a lot of Eurovision and Junior Eurovision, but there’s been a wide swath of shows covering European pop, SXSW Music, the Edinburgh Fringe, and a few ‘through the night’ General Election results.

As part of the sixtieth, I've recorded an anniversary special of Europe’s Heartbeat, talking about the Eurovision Song Contest from 1963, and some of the music in the charts at that time to set the scene. You can listen to that as part of the programming this Tuesday (I'm on air at 0500 GMT); and there’s rather a lot of it with all the current presenters pitching in special shows.

Here’s?where to listen?to the anniversary shows, but also listen throughout the year as well:

The broadcast will begin at midnight GMT and continue until the following midnight GMT. As well as our usual?streaming?and smart speaker availability (‘Play Radio Six International’), the entire 24 hours will be available on 9,670kHz shortwave across northern Europe, including the UK and Ireland; and on our New Zealand affiliate World FM who will clear their schedules for the day and rebroadcast all our programmes on 88.2MHz and 107.6MHz. Also, two hours in the evening (19:00 - 21:00 GMT) will be broadcast on medium wave from a transmitter near Milan, Italy on 1,323kHz (229m).

Happy Birthday, Radio Six International, and thanks to everyone who listens.

And if you want to know more, Richard Niles interviewed Tony for his Radio Richard YouTube channel in 2021;?you can watch it here.

Originally posted on my blog, June 5th 2023.