I was fortunate enough to have been at the right age to experience the pinnacle of the British soul scene or more specifically the South East of England soul scene.

From Kaya and Niki's excellent article on the chronology of the Essex and East London soul scene I would place my entrance at The Caister Years (1979 - 1985). Although I have a few records that pre-date this period the majority of my collection consists of records released between 1979 and 1981. Club nights out were usually spent at the Zero 6 in Southend or Dukes in Chelmsford. We had our own little posse called The Level Sixty-Niners and we wore the customary soulboy and soulgirl attire.

The record collection was built from listening to radio programmes like Robbie Vincent on BBC Radio London and Greg Edwards on Capital Radio. There are two notable exceptions though, you may appreciate how listening to a particular tune can take you back to a place in time; for me, Street Player by Chicago reminds me of the Zero 6 and Bon Bon Vie by TS Monk takes me back to a Tuesday night at the Epping Forest Country Club where a couple of guys would hire the venue for the night and play some great music. These two records were bought after hearing them at the venues.

There is one other radio station to mention and it is the inspiration for this website - Stomp FM was a pirate radio station broadcasting to Essex and East London on 105.4 FM. By the time Stomp came to air I was married and the frantic record buying had come to an end. I was just an avid listener and a big fan. I even had the t-shirt. I can remember listening to Stomp as I drove to work in my Ford Escort RS Turbo (oh, come on - what did you expect from an Essex boy?).

The record or CD buying as it was, started again in the nineties and by then I'd moved into R&B. Towards the end of the nineties I started playing sax and that led me on to increase my CD collection with recordings from the Jazz and Smooth Jazz genres (heavily biased towards sax players of course).

So, why Stomp FM? This is the result of something I started to think about and investigate about a year ago. I've got a whole bunch of vinyl records that have sat on the shelf, loved but unplayed for the past 20 years or so. I appreciate some have been re-released on CD but there's probably a whole lot more that will never be heard again. But, as the whole of our entertainment world moves towards the internet this could be the perfect medium for giving these old recordings one more airing.

When I started to look into this last year the means were there. I'd found myself a website that would stream the music and another company who would manage the royalty payments but it was overly complicated. Following a recent discussion with a friend (Natasha) she put me onto an online radio station called Smooth Jazz America. I googled it, found it and found that it was hosted by Live365.com. What's more, I found that Live365 offered a broadcast service where, for a monthly charge, they would stream the broadcast and manage all of the royalty payments. Simple.

I needed a name for the station and with such fond memories of Stomp FM it was the ideal choice. The domain name stompfm.com was available to purchase. Stompfm.co.uk on the other hand was registered but the registration had expired. I waited for the 60 day grace period to pass, the registration hadn't been renewed so I purchased this domain as well.

Once I had the domain names and confirmed that a Stomp FM station wasn't already broadcasting on Live365 I signed up for an intro account that provides enough storage space for about seven hours of music, uploaded a couple of playlists and programmed a couple of test broadcasts. Once that was done I knocked up this quick website to accompany the broadcasts.

So, here we are, ready to go....

Kind regards,

Jerry