Radio ScorpioRadio Scorpio

Its first broadcast went out on 18 August 1979, which puts it among the earliest of Belgium's free radios, and the name is a set of initials as much as the scorpion on the logo: Socio-Culturele Organisatie voor Regionale Pluralistische Informatie-Overdracht. Some hundred and forty members keep it going, students and Leuven residents in roughly equal measure, with seventy-odd of them on the controls, and it has never sold a second of airtime — advertising, in its phrase, pollutes the ether.

Daytime is non-stop alternative music, early evening turns to news and culture, and later in the evening the specialist shows take over — Bitches Brew and Jazztown for jazz, Roots & Chalice for reggae and dub, Left Lane Noise for the noise rock, Dirty Dancefloors for techno, Todo Brasil for everything south of it. Its own genre index runs past twenty headings.