Jamie Dyer is a Podcaster, Writer, YouTuber, and Radio Presenter from Sussex, UK. He is the host of many podcasts including The Quo-Cast, Dyer’s Daily and Renford ReWatched. He also makes the Jamie Tries… series on YouTube.
Here, Jamie tells the story of how he got to now!
2008: Home DJing, Tulip Radio and Endeavour FM
It was sitting in my Dad’s car on a Saturday afternoon that I was introduced to the concept of a mixtape. He was of the generation that made such things and turned it into an art form by adding extra sound effects and references in between the tracks. The precision of timing each element so that no minor gaps were detected, was a skill in itself. When I first got a CD player that had a tape deck in it, I set about experimenting with it myself. My dad hooked the unit up to a video recorder, and I had a lot of fun trying things out.
At the age of 13, I saved up to buy a double CD deck and used to record mini radio shows onto cassettes for my amusement. Occasionally I would pass them on to my distant grandmother as a way for her to hear my voice, and it became something which the two of us shared. I remember doing “specials” on Steps, Chas and Dave, and Status Quo among others. I wasn’t very confident with a microphone but knew that presenting was something I was interested in.
When I was 14, I organized a charity event for my school to record a version of the classic Band-Aid song “Do They Know It’s Christmas”. I stood at the front of the assembly and guided everyone through the song. This was then sold at a small price and all profits were donated to the Band Aid Trust. While recording the song, a teaching assistant had a connection at a local RSL station called Tulip FM; The presenter Dave Mustoe lent us a microphone to use in the project. A few months later, he invited me onto his show to talk about the project. It was my first time in a radio studio, and my debut on air. I was incredibly nervous but I enjoyed the experience.
In 2006, I bought my first electric guitar. I spent many hours simply bashing the strings to make a sound, trying to do my best Rick Parfitt impression. It was later that I joined a new thing called YouTube, and posted many videos of myself playing. While this was happening, I stumbled upon a new TV channel on Sky called Bedroom TV, which featured people miming along to their favourite songs. In the summer of 2007, I recorded a video of myself miming Rolling Home by Status Quo and sent it off. Within weeks, it was played out several times a day and I got my 5 minutes of fame. I was approached by people at college who had seen it, it was my first taste of audience appreciation.
In August of 2008, I was offered the opportunity to host an unsigned bands show on 87.7 Stump Radio in Boston, Lincolnshire. It was a two-hour show broadcast each week at 10 pm and lasted for three weeks during the station’s RSL broadcast. In addition to local music and a few personal choices, I interviewed bands including Metropolosis and The Reactor Party. When the station returned as Endeavour FM in December of that year, I was paired with Daniel Doyle to present The Doyle and Dyer Show. We tried to inject Comedy with sketches, banter, and Chris Moyles-style Zoo format in between the music. Upon the conclusion of the Christmas broadcast, the station’s rebrand to Endeavour Online saw me host The Spice Rack for a few months.
2009-2015
In the summer of 2009, I moved back to my home county of West Sussex, I started at the University of Chichester. I applied later than everyone else due to a major family bereavement and missed out on my first choice of Music Technology. I was offered Media Production and Media Studies due to my previous experience, and I just accepted it despite feeling done with the subject. I had also been offered an interview at Northbrook College to study Music Production, but I turned it down before I knew Chichester didn’t have a place on the course I wanted. Due to a lack of other options at the time, I persevered, worked hard and learned a lot from the experience. I graduated in 2012.
It was 2010 when I started to search for opportunities in Radio, in the hope of carrying on what I started at Endeavour. There weren’t any community radio stations in my area, so it looked bleak for a time. I attempted to contact the local commercial station but I was knocked back. Then I found internet radio, and everything changed. I assembled a very basic studio setup in my bedroom and broadcast regularly. Over the next three years, I would present many shows on Real Hit Radio, Teen FM, 1Radio and more. In 2011, I presented a 24-hour radio show in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, raising over £350. In 2012, I presented three half-hour slots on Havant’s Angel Radio.
After graduating from university, there was a period when things looked uncertain. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and found it difficult to find work. I continued to present regular radio shows, but these were fast becoming superfluous. I still enjoyed the process and was learning all the time, but it seemed a world away from what the system was telling me to do. I considered studying for a master’s degree in Radio Production at a university in Wales, but I couldn’t afford the risk. Over a year after graduating from Chichester, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Years of wondering were finally answered, and it set me on the road of self-discovery.
In 2014, it was the dying embers of what had been before. I continued to present radio shows. I had been on quite a few stations by this time and found the pool of offers begin to dry up. New stations did offer things but it never felt like a progression as similar issues would arise with each one.
In the summer of that year, I had the idea to start my own online radio station. It would be local, and encompass a lot of hyper-local talk. I set up Facebook and Twitter pages for SouthWaves Radio, and quickly saw my brand followers rise. I was invited to attend a food festival in Chichester and interviewed several stalls there that day. The result was an eight-minute audio piece about the event, which ended up on Mixcloud. I considered launching a live online feed that would be three hours of talk per night. This wouldn’t have required music licenses and was relatively cheap to finance. I backed out of this idea and instead launched a Crowdfunding campaign.
Later that year, I decided to jump on the bandwagon of emerging podcasters. I presented The Week Before, an interview show with the twist. It consisted of three rounds of questions to a guest with a specific passion; Round one was about getting to know the guest; Round two was known as “Tell Me About”, where they were given 15-30 seconds to inform me on a subject to do with their passion; Round three was the self-explanatory “What’s On Your Mind?”. I recorded six episodes of the podcast, then took a break for a while.
2015-2018
My crowdfunding campaign was successful, and I launched SouthWaves Radio in March of 2015; Complete with the required music licenses. The first track I played on the new station was Ready to Go by Republica. That night I presented a launch show featuring a co-presenter and a phone-in with a local dog expert. Over the next year, I experimented with different types of radio, mostly trying to branch out into more speech content. I opened the door for other presenters by offering a personal voice-tracking service, where they would record their voice and I would put it together with the music they selected. We had some predominantly music shows on the schedule produced elsewhere too. Our Selsey studio also produced many programs, some of which I helped with.
In addition to this, I offered small speech-led slots known as 15-minute wonders. As the station matured, I began to phase out the music slots. I wanted a station that was completely unlike the local commercial offering. Something that championed talk about local issues, as well as a focus on the arts. I made documentaries in theatres, visited local events, and wrote audio plays. Heavily inspired by American Old Time Radio, I devised a way of formulating a show that broke things down into individual parts. One which allowed space for news, charities, and business, leaving the presenter with much less time to worry about. This meant I could produce talk shows quickly and efficiently. Couple that with a twice-daily broadcast schedule, which made things easier.
In early 2017, I co-hosted a couple of Chichester FC football matches with University of Chichester lecturer Ian Worden. I felt proud of this accomplishment as it was truly fulfilling a local public service. There were plans to do the rest of the season but I suffered a personal setback. By this time, I had pushed myself to the limit. Late nights and some early mornings caught up with me. It felt like I was working pretty much non-stop for two years. Having to act as a presenter, scheduler, technical manager, correspondent, and website designer among other things became too much. I also became frustrated with having to explain the station, and why we didn’t play much music. I started to change it back out of sabotage by the end, and so I decided to close it.
I felt at a loss after closing SouthWaves Radio. My days had been full of activity, now were reduced to nothing. I think I was suffering from some kind of mental health emergency but I wasn’t sure what. I produced a few speech podcasts but knew they were far from the quality I was capable of. The local commercial station showed interest in my talents after seeing what I did with SouthWaves Radio, but it was too late by then. Later in 2017, I accepted treatment for depression. After this, I started a much smaller project; 1Focus Radio. It was a speech station in line with my original concept. I was also inspired by a US station I was listening to called 100.7 The Point.
After a few weeks of realizing 1Focus Radio wasn’t doing anything, I changed the name to SouthWaves Radio and the difference was startling. I was suddenly able to book and conduct interviews in mass quantities. My activity caught the attention of a media company, who hired me to run the station under their umbrella. This lasted less than a month due to a change in direction in the company, and so I was let go. I took the name with me and rebranded to SouthWaves Audio. Abandoning radio, I took the interviews I had been doing and made them into podcasts. On the side, I presented a syndicated version of The Pop Show which ran until early 2019.
2019-2024
In 2019, I started to write reviews regularly for Old Time Review. The social media and website had been set up a year earlier, but I wasn’t sure of the direction.