DANCE 89.5DANCE 89.5

KNHC began in a building behind Nathan Hale High School in Seattle with an antenna made of copper magnet wire wound round a broomstick, reaching less than a mile. The teacher who ran it wrote the textbook himself, no such book being in print, and put glue on the grooves of records he did not want played. The first FM broadcast went out on 25 January 1971, ten watts from the roof of an elementary school. In 1983 the students pushed it into New Wave, and it has been dance radio ever since.

Seattle Public Schools still holds the licence, and more than a hundred students a semester still take live shifts, around forty of them credited as hosts. Daytime is unapologetically mainstream, the big-room and dance-pop end of the format played without a trace of irony, while the specialty hours reach the edges a commercial station never touches, from happy hardcore to italo disco.