Everything in life has an origin. And the musical radio formula in Spain was Radio Minuto, a small Barcelona station with a short life (only eight years, from 1982 to 1990) that imported the format from the United States and marked a before and after. Four decades later, the book ‘Radio Minuto: La historia’ (Círculo Rojo publishing house) claims and recalls the success “of an innovative, innovative and fresh station that would still be valid today”, in the words of its author, Agustín Rodríguez.
“The formula based on music and news 24 hours a day meant the arrival of a radio style that did not exist in Catalonia and Spain; That was the great revolution of Radio Minuto”, affirms Rodríguez. The station was created in Barcelona in 1982 by Marcelino Rodríguez de Castro from the frequency occupied by FM and Olé of Radio Miramar and which was mainly dedicated to flamenco. In 1985 it was already the absolute leader with more than half a million listeners in Barcelona alone. The success of the formula spread throughout Spain with 18 more stations.
“In Radio Minute the star is not so-and-so, but the formula itself. On Radio Minuto there are no personalisms, what there is is a 24-hour programming, planned with modern criteria for modern people, for listeners who want to be informed up to the minute and hear good music”, Rodríguez de Castro wrote in the letter of introduction from the station A declaration of intentions.
“The peculiarity was to combine the tune, the time, the temperature, the information, a song and the publicity in blocks of five minutes and repeat the formula 24 hours a day,” says Agustín Rodríguez. In addition to innovation and novelty, the station also had another factor in its favour: having the latest musical news “thanks to agreements signed with North American record companies that allowed Radio Minuto to be heard, before any other station, to Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Diana Ross, Elton John, Phil Collins and also Spanish artists such as Miguel Bosé, José Luis Perales or Julio Iglesias”.
Radio Minuto de Barcelona assembled a very young team. “For many it was his first job,” says Rodríguez, one of those who precisely began his professional career at that station. “There was great harmony with the audience made up of a generation of listeners that had just come out of the dictatorship and most of whom still lived through adolescence under the Franco dictatorship.”
The book collects the testimony of more than 30 professionals who passed through there such as Toni Clapés, Toni Peret, Quique Tejada, Jose Manuel Lázaro, Carlos Losada, Francesc Xavier Monfort, Ricky Romero, Santi Cardús and Óscar Barberán, among many others. There were also female voices like Esther Eiros, Pepa Álvarez and Esther Pardo. “Practically everyone continues in the profession in one way or another, linked to journalism or corporate communication.”
“Everyone remembers it as a hooligan radio, in which we often laughed on the air when we presented a song or explained a piece of news”, details the author of the book. “Each one of them had their own style, there was no absolute orthodoxy in the presentation of the records or in the style of the announcers; nowadays they are all pretty much the same”, he opines.
In the news section, Radio Minuto had a group of journalists who, among other achievements, managed to speak with Salvador Dalí by phone from his room when he was admitted to the Clínica del Pilar or with the President of the Generalitat himself, Jordi Pujol, through who woke up more than once to ask for an assessment on a current political issue.
The station was pioneering in many ways. It included service information such as the weather or the traffic in the city, “which at that time nobody gave out”. They connected with Radio Taxi, “who paid to go out”, and they told if Aragó street was full or if there were queues on Tibidabo avenue. On Sunday afternoons they also connected with the Nou Camp and the already demolished Sarrià stadium to find out the minute of play and the results of the Barça and Espanyol matches.
The station also promoted the ‘Minuto de Oro’ awards, which had eight editions, with a gala dinner included at the Princesa Sofía hotel and more than 500 guests. Among the winners were Paquirri (“Isabel Pantoja came to pick it up”); Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev when they signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (“Reagan even sent us a video”); La Cubana, for its first theatrical shows; Xavier Cugat, Francisco Umbral or the GEOS who freed Mélodie Nakachian after being kidnapped.
But Radio Minuto had a short life. Cadena Ser, which was focused on Los 40 Principales, bought the format in 1990. The frequency, however, remained in the hands of Marcelino Rodríguez de Castro, who founded Radio Tiempo, and who followed the same formula. But after changing tunes, type of music and announcers “the power that this radio formula had and especially that brand blurred.” A premature goodbye but whose legacy remained.
