Cherry Red RadioCherry Red Radio

Iain McNay started Cherry Red in 1978 and never sold it, which in the British record business makes it something close to a geological formation. The label built its reputation on post-punk and indie in its first decade, then turned into the country's most prolific reissue house, running dozens of imprints at once — Esoteric for prog, Grapefruit for psychedelia, Doctor Bird for Jamaican sides, el and RPM and Strawberry and a couple of dozen more, all of it still run out of a studio building in west London.

The station is that catalogue on air, which means prog, punk, indie and rock pulled from a vault most labels would have licensed away decades ago. It runs in long unbroken blocks rather than short shows, so a stretch of it behaves less like a playlist than like someone working along a shelf, and the records are the kind that took a reissue campaign to rescue in the first place.