NTS Radio 1NTS Radio 1

NTS began in April 2011 when Femi Adeyemi, newly made redundant, spent around five thousand pounds turning his Nuts To Soup music blog into a live station. It broadcast from a shack in Gillett Square in Dalston, a former jazz record shop, drawing on pirate radio, US college stations like WFMU, and the crowd around the London club Plastic People. The company was incorporated in 2013, its first paid staff drawn from volunteers who had never left, and it still runs from that same square.

NTS 1 is the flagship of the two channels, programmed by artists and DJs across more than 80 countries with no advertising and no format dictating what hosts play. A single hour can move from hip-hop to highlife, jungle to j-pop, across residencies and one-off specials, and the archive of past shows now runs to hundreds of thousands of hours, all free to stream.