Also known as: Radio Bosom, bFM
Frequency: 95.0FM
Coverage: Auckland city-wide
Location: University of Auckland, Auckland
Format: Student radio / Alternative / Independent
Founded: 1969 (pirate); 1990 (licensed as 95bFM)
Active: 1969–present
Website: 95bfm.com
History
The story of 95bFM begins not with a broadcasting licence but with a boat. During capping week in 1969, a group of University of Auckland students hauled a borrowed transmitter aboard a vessel, ran it out into the Waitematā Harbour, and broadcast illegally under the name Radio Bosom — a deliberate provocation at a time when only the government was permitted to put signal to air. The boat ran aground somewhere in the harbour, but the signal kept going, playing through speakers rigged around the Auckland University student union building. The Postmaster-General was unamused and demanded the name be changed. The students refused. Radio Bosom it remained.
In 1972 the spirit of Radio Bosom resurfaced as Radio U, another pirate effort, until Post Office inspectors traced a hidden transmitter to a maintenance tunnel beneath the university campus and seized it. Two years later, in February 1974, the station was granted the first non-commercial private radio licence in New Zealand — a three-week window on 950KHz. The licence conditions limited music to ten minutes per hour. The students ignored this restriction entirely. Even after the transmitter was switched off at the end of the permitted period, music continued to boom from speakers in the university quad, raising the ire of neighbours and delighting students in roughly equal measure.
Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, the station — by then known more simply as Radio B — underwent what insiders later called a near-total changing of the guard. Punk had arrived in New Zealand, and bFM was paying attention. The station had been directly responsible for helping Victoria University’s Radio Active get to air in Wellington, with an Auckland crew travelling south to set up Active’s first transmitter. In February 1985, bFM launched its FM transmitter atop the Sheraton hotel — the frequency then sat at 91.8FM — secured through a creative budget manoeuvre by station manager Debbi Gibbs, who had borrowed $100,000 to make it happen. It was one of the first FM licences in New Zealand not awarded through commercial auction, protected instead under a Schedule 7 educational purposes clause that remains in place today.
By 1989, the station had secured a permanent FM warrant and moved operations to 95.0MHz. Auckland University Students Association formed Campus Radio BFM Limited that same year, and in early 1990 the brand name 95bFM was formally adopted. The iconic ‘b’ logo — often misread as a musical note — was designed by Johnnie Pain of Hallelujah Picassos and commissioned by station manager Liz Tan, who became the youngest person to hold that role at age 21 in September 1990.
What followed in the 1990s was a period that defined bFM’s cultural reputation for a generation. The station was, for years, the only Auckland broadcaster willing to champion Flying Nun Records and the wider underground New Zealand scene. While commercial stations chased international chart music, bFM’s programmers were pulling local records from the pile and putting them to air. The station was first in Auckland to play Sister Underground, whose 1994 track ‘In the Neighbourhood’ became one of the defining songs of New Zealand hip-hop’s emergence. It was first to play OMC, whose ‘How Bizarre’ crossed over from bFM into global commercial success. It was first to broadcast Che Fu and Savage on Auckland radio, both of whom would go on to major careers in New Zealand music.
Musician-presenters became a feature of the station’s identity. Mikey Havoc — who had been in Push Push before forming Fontanelle — joined as a DJ in the early 1990s and became the breakfast host in 1996, winning Best New Broadcaster at the 1997 New Zealand Radio Awards and developing what programme director Bill Kerton described as “an enormous cult following.” Kerton later reflected: “Unknowingly, we were all in the right place at the right time during a massive and enduring flowering of indie culture.” Jeremy Wells, later of Newsboy fame, joined Havoc on the breakfast show. Peter Urlich, who had fronted Peking Man to chart success in the 1980s, co-hosted a Saturday morning house music show from 1995. His partnership with DJ Bevan Keys — under the name Nice’n’Urlich — became a phenomenon that ran for a decade, selling out club nights across the country and shifting more than 60,000 compilation albums in New Zealand alone.
The bCard membership scheme at its peak enrolled 60,000 subscribers — described by those who held one as something like a Masonic handshake for Auckland’s alternative culture. By the mid-1990s, bFM’s first audience survey showed it reaching 4.4% of Auckland’s radio market, around 44,000 listeners. The breakfast show attracted weekly calls from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. The station’s in-house creative team repeatedly won industry awards for their advertising work. Russell Brown’s long-running programme Hard News, which began in 1991, was among the earliest internet radio publications in New Zealand, distributed via mailing lists and Usenet before the web made such things routine.
In 1998, bFM launched its own music awards — the 95bFM Music Awards — held at the Mandalay venue in Newmarket. The following year, the event was expanded into a national student radio initiative, renamed the bNet NZ Music Awards, and opened up to nominations from Radio 1 in Dunedin, RDU in Christchurch, Radio Active in Wellington, and the other stations in the network. The awards filled categories then ignored by mainstream ceremonies: Best DJ, Best Independent Album, Best Website. They ran until 2007, when they were wound up — by which point the mainstream industry had absorbed many of the things the bNets had been recognising for a decade.
In September 2005, 95bFM made national and international headlines when news director Noelle McCarthy conducted a live breakfast interview with National Party leader Don Brash in which Brash confirmed he had known in advance that the Exclusive Brethren were planning a campaign of anti-Labour and anti-Green pamphlets ahead of that year’s general election. “I knew they were going to issue some pamphlets attacking the Government,” Brash told McCarthy on air. “And I said ‘that’s tremendous — I’m delighted about that because the Government is lousy and should be changed.'” The admission caught the parliamentary press gallery off guard and became one of the most consequential interview moments in New Zealand political broadcasting, resonating through the election campaign and well beyond it. It was an unlikely scoop for a student station — and a reminder of why bFM’s journalism had always been taken seriously beyond its campus origins.
Financial precarity has been a recurring feature of bFM’s story. The station has survived on a mixture of NZ On Air funding, advertising, philanthropic support, and a listener membership programme. It has reached the brink of closure more than once. A 2018 leadership transition saw general manager Hugh Sundae — a former caller who had risen through the station’s ranks — hand over to 25-year-old Caitlin McIlhagga, who described the station as having come through “financial turmoil.” Despite this, bFM has maintained an estimated audience of around 100,000 listeners across greater Auckland, transmitted from the Sky Tower and streamed online since 1998.
95bFM remains, in the words of those who have worked there, New Zealand’s longest-standing independent radio station and its oldest corporate-free broadcaster. The loose coalition of university-oriented stations it inspired is still commonly referred to as ‘the bNets.’ Notable alumni have gone on to careers across New Zealand media: Marcus Lush, Noelle McCarthy, Wallace Chapman, Russell Brown, Mikey Havoc, Jeremy Wells, Rhys Darby, David Farrier, and many others passed through its studios and carried something of the station’s sensibility into the broader culture. The ‘b’ still stands for bosom.
“Unknowingly, we were all in the right place at the right time during a massive and enduring flowering of indie culture.”
Bill Kerton, Programme Director, 95bFM