Street Sounds Radio launched on DAB in Essex at noon on August 31, 2020, but the name on the dial had already been shaping British club music for nearly four decades. The station is run by Morgan Khan, the same man who built Street Sounds into the defining compilation label of the early 1980s, and its 24/7 mix of soul, funk, jazz-funk, electro and rare groove is less a new venture than a continuation of a project he started in 1982.
An Affordable Answer to Expensive Imports
Street Sounds began as a fix for a distribution problem. Khan has explained that the concept grew out of an earlier release, Street Noise, an EP of import tracks he compiled because "the albums would just have the one version that everyone had" while the imports themselves were slow and expensive to find. His answer was a series of affordable compilation albums packed with full-length versions of black club music, and the first Street Sounds volume arrived in late 1982 promising, in the label's own words, "one hour packs of the latest dance tracks."
The Series That Rewired a Scene
What followed was one of the more unlikely success stories in British music retail. Between 1982 and 1986, Street Sounds put out well over 100 twelve-inch releases spanning electro, street soul, hip hop, hi-NRG, jazz-funk, rare groove and boogie, and Khan is widely credited with helping introduce electro and early hip hop to a UK audience through the label's dedicated Electro series. He has since described the speed of that shift himself: within three or four months of the first Electro album landing in 1983, with no courier networks and no digital distribution to speak of, the sound had already taken hold in British clubs.
A Brand That Went Quiet, Then Came Back on DAB
The original label went into liquidation in 1988 after losses from Khan's Street Scene club magazine, and for years Street Sounds existed mainly as a nostalgia act, reissuing its own back catalogue for collectors. Its return as a radio station in 2020 changed that. Station consultant Elliott Spiteri called the launch a station that would bring "a much-needed shake-up to DAB listening across Essex," and Khan took the role of managing director and head of daytime music, effectively putting the compiler back in charge of the mix, just delivered live instead of pressed to vinyl.
Same Mission, Different Format
Street Sounds Radio's own description of its history calls it "44 years in the making," tracing the on-air identity straight back through the label's heritage rather than treating the station as a fresh brand borrowing an old name. The presenters, including John Leech and a rotating daytime lineup, are there to do what the compilation sleeves used to do on their own: contextualize the music for an audience that already knows it well. It is a rare case of a label's original curator following his catalogue from record shop shelves onto a live signal, decades after he first decided the import racks weren't good enough.