Recommended Radio Station in Johannesburg

Okay, You may or may not know, but traffic in Johannesburg (that's the biggest city in South Africa in case you don't know) has become something of a nightmare. Without much in the way of alternative safe public transport systems, this leaves you sitting in your car for fairly long periods of time. Not a problem if you have some decent rock music to listen to during the ordeal. But sometimes things go wrong i.e. your CD player is empty, you have listened to Radioheads 'In Rainbows' twice already during this trip or some type of malfunction takes place. This should not be a big problem, as there is always the radio. Having travelled to a lot of the big cities in the world, I have found that you can always tune into something rocking on the radio.

Not here in Johannesburg! Or at least not until recently......

It was not always like this. A decade ago 5FM played some good rock music. Even earlier than that they played some excellent rock music. We had the likes of Chris Prior, Rafe Lavine and Barney Simon laying down some brilliant sessions. Rafe did the Heavy Rock late at night. A classmate of mine reported that he had to do pushups all night to try and keep awake waiting for Rafes show to start (it did not show - he was the skinniest guy I knew). Well those days are gone. 5FM now is strictly Pop and Hip hop, I suppose their target market likes it... Then we have 94.7 or Highveld radio, they seem to specialise in Wimp-rock. And that's about it for Rock music.

There are of course some good stations, but just not delivering the rock I need. Classic FM delivers a quality classical music format. Kaya FM delivers solidly in the Soul and RnB categories (http://www.kayafm.co.za/frontpage.php) . But that is generally not what I want.

Well ...... now we have UJFM. This is the local 'College radio' station. The DJs are kids from the University and the music is mainly Rock. Their accents tend to be great, the punchline for the station is 'Your Noise of Choice' but when they say it it comes out ' Your Norz of Chorz'. Even better, there are not many advertisements. In an hour you could hear anything from Slipknot, to Snow Patrol. In fact it was the first place that I heard the excellent Wolfmother single 'Woman'. On top of this they have a solid representation of local music too.

All is not rosy, as their signal is not that strong, and I tend to lose it for the part of my trip to and from work that passes through a dip, but such is the lack of quality rock on any other station, I sometimes prefer to listen to something like the Queens of the Stone Age's 'Little Sister' through an exreme static hiss rather than change that dial. Check out more about the station at this website: http://www.ujfm.co.za/