How it started
Pirate roots
Kiss FM first broadcast 7 October 1985 as a pirate radio station, initially to South London then across the whole city, on 94FM. Kiss FM was founded by Gordon "Mac" McNamee, George Power (of London Greek Radio), and Tosca Jackson, with its engineer Pyers Easton. Transmitting seven-days from the start, it would be regularly taken off-air by the authorities and so became a weekend operation shortly afterwards.
The station developed a cult and committed following across Greater London, with figures in the press at the time stating that the station commanded some 500,000 listeners while operating as an unlicensed pirate station, and an Evening Standard readers' poll in 1987 put Kiss second, behind Capital Radio. Gordon Mac approached a successful London club promoter, Guy Wingate, to discuss ways of improving the Kiss FM profile. As a result, Wingate launched the very successful Kiss nights at the Wag Club (which included the first ever UK acid house party – an idea put forward by Colin Faver and Danny Rampling, both DJs on the station). These nights increased the station's credibility with its target audience and Wingate joined the Kiss team, followed shortly thereafter by Lindsay Wesker. Kiss would also run its own night at Dingwalls and adopted the slogan Radical Radio.
Mac and ten of the DJs on the station including Norman Jay, Jonathan More, Colin Faver, Trevor Nelson, and Tim Westwood would become "shareholders" in a company called Goodfoot Promotions, with Mac heading up the station as its majority holder. By 1988, Kiss was at its strongest with a DJ line-up which had become the cream of London's clubland, and in that December, Mac and the other shareholders would announce that they would decide to close down in order to apply for a legal licence. This was in response to the UK Government and Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) announcement that twenty new "incremental radio" licences would be advertised, including one for London. Stations were told that they would have to voluntarily closedown when applying, and so on New Year's Eve 1988, the final broadcast went out with an outside broadcast at Dingwalls.
Kiss would submit a strong application with widespread support from listeners, clubs, record labels and music magazines, however on 12 July 1989, the IBA instead awarded the licence to Jazz FM.
Legal licence
From Wikipedia’s article on Kiss Network, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2