Frequency: 88.5FM
Coverage: Lyttelton local
Location: Shadbolt House, 30 Norwich Quay, Lyttelton
Format: Community access radio
Founded: February 2008
Active: 2008–2012
History
Lyttelton has always punched above its weight. A harbour town of barely three thousand people perched on the steep inner slopes of a ten-million-year-old volcanic crater, it developed a cultural density that belied its size. By the mid-2000s, the old port had become home to an improbable concentration of musicians, artists, circus performers, and community organisers — a tight-knit creative ecosystem held together by shared spaces, cooperative ventures, and a fierce local pride. It was into this environment that Volcano Radio was born.
The station was the creation of Carmel Courtney, a multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter who had trained through the National Jazz Youth Orchestra and the Christchurch Jazz School and performed at festivals as far afield as the North Sea Jazz Festival, WOMAD in Reading, the London Jazz Festival, and the Nuremberg Jazz Festival. Courtney had deep roots in Lyttelton’s arts community. In 2007 she set about establishing a community radio station for the harbour town — one that would be entirely volunteer-run, carry no advertising, and exist purely to serve and reflect the local community. She found a home for it in Shadbolt House, the former Lyttelton Harbour Board building on Norwich Quay that had been purchased by Independent Fisheries Limited in 1995 and renamed after the company’s founder, Howard Shadbolt. The distinctive seven-storey modernist structure — designed by Hollis and Leonard and completed in 1961 — was the only high-rise in Lyttelton and a landmark visible across the harbour.
Volcano Radio 88.5FM launched in February 2008 from Level 4 of Shadbolt House. From the outset it was a genuinely community-run operation: 100 per cent commercial-free, staffed entirely by volunteers, and programming around eighty shows covering an extraordinary range of interests and audiences. The lineup included Project Lyttelton, tied to the local sustainability and community initiative of the same name; the Monday Report; Lyttelease, a children’s programme; and Vienna Volcano, a classical music show that brought an unlikely but welcome formal elegance to the harbour airwaves. The station described itself simply as “local and live” — and that ethos was its defining characteristic. It was Lyttelton talking to itself, in all its diversity.
One of the most distinctive programmes on the schedule was The Molten Metal Show, a weekly heavy metal and hard rock programme broadcast on Thursday nights at midnight. In a station built around community service and eclecticism, the show’s unapologetically loud presence said something important about Volcano Radio’s genuinely open-door approach to programming — there was room here for classical, children’s radio, community affairs, and midnight metal, sometimes in the same broadcast day. The Molten Metal Show would go on to outlast the station itself, eventually finding homes on Radio Addington 107.5 in Christchurch, 107.5 Rocks in Dunedin, Ifinity FM in Invercargill, and Dagsy FM in Wanganui.
Volcano Radio quickly embedded itself in Lyttelton’s cultural life beyond the airwaves. The station participated in community fundraising alongside the Lyttelton Sea Scouts, the Community Garden, the Lyttelton Harbour TimeBank, and other local organisations. It broadcast live-to-air performances featuring local musicians, including the emerging folk and roots scene that was quietly making Lyttelton one of the most fertile musical environments in New Zealand. The station had a natural connection to the Port Noise festival, which grew into an annual multi-venue celebration of the harbour town’s music and arts community, bringing together singular voices from across Aotearoa and beyond for a night of performance spread across Lyttelton’s bars, warehouses, and outdoor spaces.
The Canterbury earthquakes changed everything. The first major event, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake on 4 September 2010, struck with its epicentre near Darfield, west of Christchurch. Lyttelton sustained significant damage. In the hours after the quake, Volcano Radio was among the first voices back on the air — local reports note that the station was able to return to broadcast within hours, offering local messages and music to a shaken community at a moment when normal communications had been disrupted. Community radio, which might have seemed like a luxury before the earthquake, proved its essential value almost immediately.
Then came 22 February 2011. The magnitude 6.3 aftershock struck at 12:51 pm, its epicentre only ten kilometres from Lyttelton at a shallow depth of five kilometres. The damage to the harbour town was catastrophic. Much of Lyttelton’s Victorian and Edwardian architectural heritage was lost. Six buildings on London Street were demolished by June 2011, along with four more on Norwich Quay. Shadbolt House, though it had survived the initial quake, was assessed and found to be uneconomic to repair. The station broadcast from a temporary remote location while its premises were checked by structural engineers, but the prognosis for the building was terminal.
Shadbolt House was demolished in October 2012. Having dominated Lyttelton’s waterfront for five decades, its absence significantly altered the town’s skyline. With it went Volcano Radio’s ability to broadcast. The station closed the same month. Courtney, characteristically, moved straight into her next project: Toot Toot Sounds, a music education programme she founded in 2012 to work with children in Lyttelton’s primary schools. She later became head of the Music Department at the Lyttelton Arts Factory when its performing arts programme launched in 2016.
Volcano Radio’s archive lives on via its SoundCloud page, which preserves material from the station’s broadcasts for anyone who wants to revisit what community radio in a small New Zealand harbour town sounded like in the years before and during one of the country’s worst natural disasters. The station’s spiritual successor, Rotten Radio 107.7FM, emerged in 2013 and continues the tradition of low-power, community-focused broadcasting from Ohinehou Lyttelton — described by the Lyttelton Museum as carrying on “the harbour’s fine radio broadcasting tradition.” The Molten Metal Show, meanwhile, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in July 2024, still going strong long after the station that gave it its start had fallen silent.