Rinse FM at 30: an oral history of the notorious London radio station

“When we started Rinse, it was me that was responsible for the boring tech shit, figuring all of the shit out that we didn’t know,” he says. “A couple of people decided that they were going to start calling me ‘genius’ and it just stuck. The only bit I’ve done is managed to spell it incorrectly.” He even goes as far as admitting that his interest in technology is the reason he started Rinse. 

“I really like the music, but when we got into radio, it was the techy side, the quality of the transmitter, the building the aerial, how can we get our distance to go out further than everyone else… it was that stuff that I was really into. Since probably the age of two or three, my mum would tell me stories of coming in the living room and I’ve managed to find a screwdriver and take the TV to pieces.” It still comes in useful. “Every week someone comes from radio downstairs and I have to go down and fix it. I could take the entire radio station to pieces and put it back together.”

A lifetime after starting the station, Geeneus has turned Rinse into one of the most important musical institutions in the UK, ushering the underground from jungle to garage to grime to dubstep, funky and beyond. He remains Rinse’s only constant, the last man standing from a constantly changing crew that has waxed and waned over the past three decades. His dedication has turned him into UK music royalty, a pioneer with an uncompromising reputation and a generation of admirers. “Pirate radio… I owe my life to that,” said Skepta in a recent interview with YouTube’s Nardwuar. “Shout out everybody who got on a roof and put up an aerial for the radio stations to transmit, because they definitely gave a voice to youth of the UK in those days.”

Geeneus and his original Rinse crew spent the 90s hopping between tower blocks, first playing jungle, then garage across the east London airwaves while dodging the authorities. “We played a lot of cat and mouse with them over the years,” Geeneus remembers. “It was quite fun.” 

Rinse had rivalries with every other pirate station in the area, and competing crews would often rip down the transmitters of their adversaries. But the stations had common enemies in Ofcom, then known as the DTI, whose job it was to regulate anyone broadcasting radio without a licence. “I remember we had the transmitter on a building called Ingram House, in Bow, and it went off, and a load of us were like, we’re not going to have it. We went to run in and DTI come out, and a few of them was quite big. We was like, fuck, it’s not just someone trying to nick our shit like usual.”

The Rinse response was to make their stuff harder to take down. “We spent the next ten years perfecting it,” Geeneus adds. “We was known for there being no way you could take a Rinse transmitter.” Fearless and small, Geeneus was in charge of getting the transmitter into hard-to-reach places. “It was always my task to enter where no one else would have the bottle to go. We started off in the lift shafts. I would have a transmitter on my back in a backpack and climb up the lift shafts while the lifts are moving, jump out of the way, get back around, go up above the lift and then lock it in there.”  

“I could take the entire radio station to pieces and put it back together” – Geeneus

When the DTI got wise to that, Rinse moved onto unoccupied flats. Geeneus would abseil down a building into an empty apartment, hook up the transmitter in the toilet and wire it through the air vents to the aerial on the roof. When that stopped working, Geeneus would shimmy down from the roof into an air vent and drill a hole in a wall where he could lodge the transmitter. “I would have to wedge my feet against the wall on either side and it would be a clean drop down the building.”

Things got tough when Slimzee was arrested and handed an ASBO (sometimes said to be the first one ever issued), meaning he would face a prison sentence if he ever went above the third floor of a building. Geeneus responded with a scheme of his own: “I went to the Apple store and I bought something like 10 iPod Minis, loaded them up with loads of sets and put them on different blocks around London.” Then every time the DTI traced the source of Rinse’s broadcast, they’d find nothing but an iPod. In those days DJs had to pay subs to Geeneus and co for the right to play on Rinse. “I thought I was rich then,” Geeneus says, with a smile. “That was the first feeling of like, we’ve got money.”

In the late 90s, Rinse set itself apart from other UK garage stations by spotlighting the MCs who would rap over the DJ’s selections. This proved the catalyst for grime, born in the very flats Rinse was broadcasting from. But as grime took off, bravado soon took over. In 2004, with grime reaching the peak of its popularity, Rinse studios were becoming so full of rival MCs that Geeneus decided to take the station off air. The MCs went elsewhere, with teenage prodigies Dizzee Rascal and Crazy Titch clashing famously at the studio of De Ja Vu FM six weeks later. When Rinse returned after six months of silence, MCs were banned. This provided the foundation on which the dubstep scene was built. 

Rinse was a proving ground for numerous dubstep DJs, but its stage was FWD>, a weekly party at London club Plastic People launched by Sarah Lockhart. The twin powers of Rinse and FWD> were united when Geeneus hired Lockhart as station manager in 2004. As Rinse’s games with the authorities raged on, one of Lockhart’s top jobs was making the station legit. 

While she got to work, Geeneus turned his attention to Rinse the record label. He released a number of grime, dubstep and funky records throughout the 2000s, then around 2007 he heard about a singer from south London who was really into raving, now known as Katy B. Back then, she was still a teenager.

“She had a song, prior to us working together, under a different name,” Geeneus remembers. “I was really interested in working with singers and I ventured out to find her.” Geeneus sent her a tune he’d made that he thought she might sing on. “She thought the tune was shit,” he says. “I was like, fair enough. I asked if she wanted to come to the studio.” He arranged to pick her up at Bethnal Green station, then take her to the studio of underground legend DJ Zinc. “She thought I was a prick. She got in the car and I guess I didn’t speak to her all the way to the studio. I just don’t really speak to strangers.” Katy says it’s because he was late. “I remember being annoyed because when you’re young, you don’t venture out of your area,” she says. “So going to east London for me back in the day, it was like a big deal. He was late to pick me up and I was annoyed.” Any tension between them soon melted away. 

“I don’t think I’d ever been in a studio that professional before,” Katy says. “I was like, oh my god. This studio is so sick. I remember telling all my friends at school, the drum and bass boys, that I did a studio session with DJ Zinc. They were all very impressed.”

“She went in the booth and sung and I was just like, completely shocked,” says Geeneus. “Not to say I underestimated her, but I never experienced nothing like it. She would write a song in like 10 minutes, go in the booth and sing it straight in one go, and you’d be like, fuck.”

Together they made 2011’s On A Mission, Katy’s debut album and a showcase of all the production talent in Rinse’s orbit. The album credits are a who’s-who of UK club at the time, including Zinc, Skream, Benga, Artwork, Ms Dynamite and Geeneus himself. The lead single and title track — built around a Benga track called “Man On A Mission” – became a club hit of anthemic proportions, reaching number five on the singles chart and inspiring an Arctic Monkeys cover on the Live Lounge. Katy’s 2014 follow-up album Little Red went to number one. 

By this time Rinse FM had undergone a seismic change. On 17 June 2010, Geeneus interrupted Rinse DJ Scratcha’s breakfast show to announce that the station had been granted a radio licence and would now be allowed to broadcast within the law (you can hear that very transmission here). Lockhart was instrumental in preparing the 100-page document that Rinse submitted for Ofcom’s approval. “That was like my degree – and I passed,” she told the Guardian in 2010.

Watch that Scratcha video and you’ll hear the DJ say he felt nervous when Geeneus and Sarah turned up for his show that morning. “I’m like okay, something’s going on … maybe I’m getting the sack,” he says, explaining that he’d heard about few DJs losing their spots at the station down the years. 

“We say ‘destroy and rebuild’,” Geeneus explains. “It’s a term we’ve had for a long time.” It’s true. You can see the term mentioned in Rinse-related articles throughout the past 30 years. “Some people see it as a negative, but I think everything needs a refresh at some stages. I see a lot of companies end up going into a bad place because they don’t stop and reconsider what their point is.” In 2018, Geeneus himself took a rare year out from running the station to travel and think about where he wanted Rinse to go next. “I came back a year later, started again. We done a destroy and rebuild across the whole entire thing.” 

He shrunk the Rinse team down to just four members, with Lockhart and many others losing their jobs. That Scratcha interview is one of 18 videos posted to Rinse’s YouTube channel in 2012, each featuring a different chapter of the station’s story from the perspective of a different character — originally including Lockhart. Her video has now been removed, leaving a gap between the chapters for 2004 and 2006. Lockhart has not responded to my requests for comment. 

”We done a destroy and rebuild across the whole entire thing” – Geeneus 

In 2023, Slimzee announced he was stepping down from his DJ slot on Rinse. A few months later the station announced more than a hundred new residencies. In the same year, Rinse acquired two new stations: the influential jungle station Kool FM and Bristol’s recently shuttered Swu FM. Across those, Rinse’s original station and Rinse’s French arm (launched in 2014), Geeneus says he now has 700 DJs on his payroll. He says the acquisitions were driven by passion — and definitely not by financial sense. “Since we went legal, we’ve never made a penny from radio,” he says. “I have accountants and lawyers telling me constantly to switch it off and get rid of the radio stations. When I told them I was buying two more, they just think I’ve lost my mind.”

Among Rinse’s new generation is sim0ne, a former contestant on Britain’s Next Top Model who has appeared in music videos for the 1975 and was recently named BBC1’s Future Star of 2024. As a DJ she plays an unrelenting mix of trance, techno, hard house and whatever else she likes. With a handful of her own productions already out, she’s among the hottest talents in UK clubland right now. 

“Rinse actually approached me,” sim0ne says. “Which I think is a testament to G’s eye for new talent. He’s very forward-thinking with the way the scene works, and he’s seen it all.” She says Geeneus has given her career advice as she’s started making her own music. “I see him as a bit of a bigger brother that I’d never had. When I started my artist project and there was music industry contracts and stuff I didn’t understand, he’s the person I went to for advice. He’s always ready to make time for me to make sure I understood things.” I deign to ask sim0ne if she knows about Rinse’s ruthless reputation for hiring and firing, but she can’t comment. She hasn’t even heard of destroy and rebuild. 

Geeneus now employs his mum, his brother and his sister under the Rinse umbrella. He has a dog, but no kids and won’t reveal whether he has a partner. “Personal stuff is… personal,” he smiles. He has no plans for Rinse to slow down. “Actually, my view is that time is running out, so I should try and squeeze in more and more.” I get the sense that Geeneus is careful about what he reveals to journalists, exercising as much control as he can over his station’s narrative, as he has done over much of UK music culture in the past 30 years. Over the next 30, Rinse will rage on with him at the helm and he will surely ascend into the upper echelons of music moguldom. Is he rich now? 

“I don’t know about rich,” he says. “I think I’ve changed my view on what rich is. When I was young, I remember being clear, like I’d really like a nice car one day, and a nice watch. When I got that stuff, I’m like, fuck, I aimed a bit low. So then I set my goals higher, I’d make more money, and from a business point of view, I think I’ve gone up to a lot of money and down to zero probably six times.” But it seems the journey has at least helped him understand what matters. “What I realise now is it’s not about an end goal. It’s not about what you accumulate. Everyone needs to live comfortably, but for me, feeling rich is that I get to wake up and come to work and, if I don’t want to, I don’t have to, but I never feel like I don’t want to. Because I love it.”