Farewell Kingdom FM: a cheesy, original voice for Fife with a strong bond with listeners

Shake up the schedules and you spark a reaction. Rebrand and ditch its local identity and you cut much deeper.

The news that Kingdom FM is consigning its Fife identity to the bin won’t come as a great surprise to anyone who has watched countless local stations swallowed up by bigger companies. Radio, like too much of the media - including newspapers - has been centralised, and shared content spread across wider and wider patches.

But local radio - much like local print - has a defining characteristic, and it’s in its DNA. Local in sound, feel, content, and people.

I know plenty of folk, good radio people, who can trace their KingdomFM links to it very first days on air, and their reaction said it all; a mix of sadness and anger.

Subsuming the station into the Original 106 brand means an end to a very clear ‘Fife’ name above the studio door, and that sits very uneasily with those with strong links to the station.

KingdomFM came out of a meeting at the Beveridge Park Hotel in Kirkcaldy, and you forget how fresh and new it sounded in those first days on air.

Who remembers the very first jingle which name checked all Fife towns, the A92 and contained the immortal line ‘Kirkcaldy is my kinda town’? Glorious stuff!

Sure it was cheesy but it chimed with its audiences in a way the station’s ‘We’re For Fife’s promotional song to promote the Kingdom’s tourism sector did not. The backlash was instant, and, 14 years on, you’ll have to dig ultra deep online to even find the file these days. Try looking on Reddit - it’s there! It’d be fun if, for sheer devilment, that was the last song Kingdom played before they switched to Original106.

KingdomFM has done well to hold its strong local identity for so long. I’d have loved it to champion Fife’s music scene much more - my colleague Kevin Quinn battled for ages to get a show doing that and, from memory, was handed a graveyard slot on a Monday night. The station missed a real opportunity to be different back then - today it wouldn’t even reach the desk of the programme controller.

That originality - true originality rather than a bland corporate name like Orignal106 - belongs to a past era. I grew up with Radio Forth when it too was new and just as captivating.

We had the brilliant energy of young guys like Jay Crawford, the weekend banter of Bill Barclay, the great music of guys like Tom Bell and Steve Jack to name but two.

And there was Chris John, the man who introduced a teenage me to a host of heavy rock bands via his late night show in which he’d play a ten-minute long track in its entirety, or simply talk for what seemed ages. The sad reality is someone like Chris wouldn’t get a slot on any commercial station today, and neither would Forth’s groundbreaking and heartbreaking Open Line; a show where the desperate, the lonely and the troubled phoned in and broke their hearts to Hazel, Ron and Andy into the wee sma’ hours. Some had had a wee drink and wanted a blether, but others were on the very precipice. We’d sit in absolute silence as the trio tried to save someone’s life. The memories of those calls still echo 50 years on – that was radio at its most personal and powerful.

Local voices given a chance to be heard. That barely happens now. Farewell Kingdom FM.